Sana Jaffrey is a scholar of political violence and state-building in Asia. She has over 15 years of experience in conducting original quantitative and qualitative research, with a particular interest in Indonesian politics.  

Jaffrey’s research has been published in several academic journals, including Comparative Politics, Studies in Comparative International Development and Journal of East Asian Studies. She also regularly contributes policy commentary through Foreign Affairs, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and New Mandala. 

Jaffrey also has experience in the policy world. She is currently a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. During her appointment at the World Bank (2008-2013), she led the implementation of the National Violence Monitoring System (NVMS) data project in Indonesia, the largest publicly available violence dataset compiled for any single country. Before joining the ANU, Jaffrey served as the director of Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC) in Jakarta (2021-2022), where she led a team of researchers to publish reports on violent conflict and extremism in Southeast Asia.