Fellowships: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Keith Darden, Political Science: Creation of New Forms of Regional Order in the Former Soviet Union. The proposed project seeks to explain the changes in regional relations between the former republics of the Soviet Union from 1991 to the present, particularly the ongoing transfer of authority to supranational regional institutions of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Using extensive interviewing and ethnographic methods, the project will attempt to test a constructivist argument that the changes in the region, and particularly the shift towards collective institutions, are due to a conceptual change among state leaders: a shift from republican nationalisms to the conception of the Post-Soviet space as a single organic whole. To do this, the proposed research will examine developments in three areas (the armed forces, oil and natural gas, and macro-economic policy) and seek to explain the variation in regional order over three periods (1991-93, 1993-95, and 1996-present). The constructivist approach will be tested on its ability to account for the timing of the changes, and to establish a causal link between the changing ideas and changing interests of the states through process tracing.
Max Friedman, History: Unusual Suspects: The Expulsion of German "Alien Enemies" from Latin America by the United States during World War II. Why did the US pressure fifteen Latin American regimes into deporting 4,000 ethnic Germans to internment camps in Texas during World War II? These farmers, businessmen, second-generation Spanish-speakers, some Nazi Party members, and over 60 Jews uprooted from their homes spent the war behind barbed wire; half were "repatriated," willingly or not, to wartime Germany. This little-known episode sharply illustrates a major "soft security" issue in our own time: the proliferation of transnational communities of migrants who maintain, or are believed to maintain, strong ties of allegiance to their homeland. Using archival records and interviews to establish the bureaucratic history of the policy, the complex nature of the deportees, and the German diaspora in Latin America, Mr. Friedman critiques a growing body of scholarship on "postnational" communities vs. national security. A number of grants has allowed him to conduct extensive research and interviews in Guatemala, Germany and the United States. Next year he will take his investigation to Ecuador and Costa Rica, and return to Washington to complete his work in US government records.
Anne-Maria Herbert, Boalt Hall School of Law: Normative Development through International Organization: The League of Nations and the Evolution of Human Rights Law, 1919-1945. The dissertation is a comparative study of the League of Nations' social and humanitarian work in three areas, all forerunners of the modern human rights movement: 1) international refugee law, 2) international law prohibiting trafficking in women and children and 3) the campaign to establish basic international health standards. The purpose of the dissertation is two-fold: to examine how norms developed in these areas through the activities of international and nongovernmental organizations; and, to analyze how these norms influenced behavior at the national and international levels. It will investigate the causal role of international organizations, as well as highlight the impediments to implementing new norms.
David Hughes, Anthropology: War, Refugees and Environmental Conflict on the Zimbabwe-Mozambique Border. How do civilian communities reshape broad-scale armed conflict to suit their own purposes? Mr. Hughes' dissertation addresses this question in the context of an environmental struggle in Zimbabwe induced by Mozambique's recently concluded war. Now underway in the Rusitu Valley, his ethnographic fieldwork is documenting the ways in which certain Zimbabwean men have become "wealthy" by using three different categories of Mozambican migrants. Headmen have gained territory to rule by settling refugee families inside a national park (revealed in aerial photographs and interviews); elder men have enlarged their families by marrying Mozambican second and third wives (shown in a genealogical survey and interviews); and entrepreneurial farmers have entered the cash crop market with the help of underpaid Mozambican labor migrants (demonstrated by banana production statistics and interviews).
Dalia Dassa Kaye, Political Science: Beyond Hegemony: The Arab-Israeli Multilateral Peace Process. The 1991 Madrid Peace Conference established a radically new approach to Mideast peacemaking, creating a multilateral negotiating track based on regional issues. Why did regional parties commit themselves to this type of cooperative framework? What is its impact? Drawing on theories of international cooperation and institutions, Ms. Kaye extracts several hypotheses to explain this phenomenon, including power, functional interests and ideas. She finds that linking power (as exerted through leadership) and ideational variables is particularly important in the process' origins. In the development of the working groups, the perception of how the multilateral interaction impacts interests is most critical, particularly the perception of equity. She adds variation by using the multilateral working groups as distinct cases of multilateral cooperation. In the course of two extended research trips to the region and while researching in Washington, D.C., Ms. Kaye has conducted document analysis and numerous open-ended interviews with American, Israeli, and Arab officials involved in this process. She is currently finishing her research collection and beginning to write dissertation chapters.
Kathleen McAfee, Geography: The Global Environment Facility and the Challenge of Green Developmentalism. Major new multilateral environmental institutions for biodiversity conservation established in the 1990s are the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and the biodiversity portfolio of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the CBD's funding arm. Both have been rent by conflicts, mainly "North-South" disputes between the OECD and the G77/China blocs of nations, and between the latter and the World Bank. These rifts have been widened through the intervention of civil society, in the form of peasant indigenous peoples' movements which are disputing the authority of both states and multilateral bodies over local communities. Through archival research, semi-structured interviews, and field studies, Ms. McAfee will: demonstrate how disputes in the GEF and CDB have burst through the discursive and institutional boundaries separating environmental issues from broader political-economic and cultural conflicts; argue that advocates of moderate multilateral environmental regulation are attempting to reinforce those boundaries by means of an approach Ms. McAfee calls "green developmentalism"; and elucidate how these conflicts affect, and are affected by, biodiversity conservation efforts at the local level, by examining "North-South" tensions and green developmentalism in three GEF biodiversity projects.
Margrethe Winslow, Energy and Resources Groups: Economic Growth, Equity and Environmental Quality. The objective of Ms. Winslow's dissertation work is twofold: to scrutinize the relationship between income and environmental quality, and to explore the relationship between equity and environmental quality. Ms. Winslow will conduct her research using two methods: multi-country correlational analysis, and case studies of air pollution regulation in Mexico City and Santiago, Chile. In the multi-country portion she has examined existing statistical analysis of economic growth and environmental quality to see if these results hold up to alternative statistical techniques, and has elaborated upon this work to include measures of political freedom and civil liberties. She is also developing a model of how different characteristics of various aspects of environmental quality relate to democracy and economic growth. This spring Ms. Winslow will travel to Mexico and Chile to conduct interviews and surveys regarding air pollution regulation.
Rhonda Evans, Sociology: What Price Free Trade?: Labor, Environment and the Politics of NAFTA. Environmental and labor organizations throughout North America demanded accountability for social justice issues in NAFTA. Environmentalists were more successful, however, at achieving their policy aims than were labor activists. Ms. Evans' dissertation examines why environmental groups were able to gain greater concessions under NAFTA. She also explores what this disparity suggests for social welfare concerns about trade regimes.
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