Sandra Håkansson earned her PhD in Political Science from Uppsala University in 2023, with a thesis titled “Politicians Under Threat: Gender Aspects of Violence against Political Representatives.” Prior to being awarded a Pro Futura Scientia Fellowship, she was Assistant Professor at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University. She has been a member of the Peace Research Institute Oslo’s research school on peace and conflict, and a visiting researcher at the University of Edinburgh.

During the first few years of her postdoctoral research, Håkansson has been involved in several research projects about gender, political representation, and political violence. Her work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Behavior, and Politics & Gender, among others. She is currently leading a VR-funded research project about how violent actors influence political representation in Colombia.

Håkansson’s Pro Futura Scientia project, Drivers and Consequences of Political Violence in Democracies, is situated at the intersection of political violence, gender, and democracy. It investigates how an illegitimate tactic such as violence comes to be normalized in democratic political contexts, and why violence affects the political participation of women and ethnic minorities worse than that of other groups.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2026-27.