Ursula Daxecker is director of the department “Political Institutions and Conflict” at the Max Planck Institute for Political and Social Science. She is also a professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam, where she is a member of the Political Economy and Transnational Governance (PETGOV) research group at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research and the Department of Political Science. She joined the Max Planck Society after holding academic positions at the University of Amsterdam (2013-) and Colorado State University (2008-2012).

Daxecker’s work is interested in the relationship between political institutions and violent and non-violent conflict, electoral competition in the Global South, and democratic backsliding. She is the author of Pirate Lands: Governance and Maritime Piracy (Oxford University Press, 2021) and guest editor of three special issues (Journal of Peace Research 2020&2025, European Journal of International Relations 2020). Her work is published in the Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Peace Research, Comparative Politics, Electoral Studies, Journal of Conflict Resolution, among others. From 2020-2026, she is the principal investigator of the project „Elections, Violence, and Parties“ funded by the European Research Council. Her research has received funding from the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO), the European Commission's Marie Curie Actions, and the U.S. Department of Defense Minerva Research Initiative.

She joined the Institute part-time from January 2026, with a full-time appointment from September 2026.