is the Richard S. Perles Professor of Government and a Faculty Affiliate of the Global Research Institute at William & Mary. Her research focuses on the impact of aid for peacebuilding, local governance, and civic engagement in South Eastern Europe.

Pickering is a co-editor with Patrice McMahon and Dorota Pietrzyk-Reeves of the forthcoming Activism in Hard Times in Central and Eastern Europe: People Power (Routledge, 2024) and a co-editor with Zsuzsa Csergő and Daina Eglitis of Central and East European Politics: Changes and Challenges, 5th Edition, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). She is also the author of Peacebuilding in the Balkans (Cornell University Press, 2007). 

Pickering’s current collaborative research focuses on the motivations for, evolution of, and impact of civic activism in Central and Eastern Europe. A recent article on civic engagement based on this research in Bosnia “Civic Engagement and its Disparate Goals in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” East European Politics and Societies, was published in June 10, 2022, and is part of a special issue of East European Politics and Societies, “Civil Society 30 Years After.”  Another recent co-authored article “Individualized text messages about public services fail to sway voters” was published in the Journal of Experimental Political Science in 2021. 

Since 2007, she has mentored the international community engagement project the American-Bosnian-Collaboration (ABC) Project, in which William & Mary students partner with students at the University of Sarajevo to co-teach and conduct research on their free summer non-formal educational initiative to promote inter-cultural competence among Bosnian youth.  “Promoting peace and intercultural understanding through sustained partnership: The American-Bosnian Collaboration Project” co-authored with the ABC Project’s local partner, Dr. Larisa Kasumagić-Kafedžić, and ABC Project alum Ethan Brown (’21) will be published by Springer in Kasumagić-Kafedžić and Clarke-Habibi eds., Peace Pedagogies in Bosnia and Herzegovina: theory and practice in formal education. 

Pickering’s research has received support from Evidence in Politics and Governance, the US Institute of Peace, the Social Science Research Council, IREX, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and Fulbright-Hays.  

Pickering also worked as a human rights officer for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1996) and as an analyst on Eastern Europe at the US Department of State (1990-1994).

She received a Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Michigan and a B.A. in International Relations at Stanford University.

Paula M. Pickering's CV