Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

Reinhard Bendix Memorial Research Fellows, 2004-2005

Thad Dunning, Political Science: Extractive Industries, Social Conflict, and Institutional Change: Power and Politics in the Rentier States. The existing literature in political science suggests markedly different relationships between oil and mineral wealth and political institutions. While a number of studies, particularly of the Persian Gulf states, suggest that oil and minerals foster authoritarian stability, allowing repressive leaders to hang on to power longer than they otherwise would, resources have also been causally linked to coups and conflict in West Africa and elsewhere. And in the literature on Venezuela, some scholarship sees oil wealth as a contributing cause of the advent of democracy in 1958. In this project, Mr. Dunning attempts to integrate these three sets of hypotheses -- which link resources to authoritarian stability, coups and conflict, and the advent and durability of democracy, respectively -- into an explicitly comparative context. He investigates how the likelihood of one or another of these outcomes might increase or decrease as a function of the interaction of resources with particular social and historical contexts, including the form of ownership in the resource sector, the degree of inequality of private wealth, and other factors. This dissertation will take advantage of a range of comparative and historical evidence, as well as a diversity of methodological tools, to investigate this question.

Lisa Stevenson, Anthropology: Life in Question: Inuit Suicide and the Emergence of an Alternative Modernity in Nunavut. In Nunavut, Canada's northernmost territory, Inuit suicide has been described as both an "epidemic" and a "routine part of life." The topic has become the site of intervention for psychiatrists, social scientists, Inuit community groups, religious leaders, journalists, and by proxy, the international public. At the very least, it is possible to say that Inuit suicide has emerged as an international "problem" with its own cadre of experts and gatekeepers of knowledge, and that Inuit life has become an entity to be judiciously managed, improved and preserved. This research demonstrates that putting life into question brings to the fore divergent ways of conceiving of life, the significance of death, and what it may mean to be alive and human within modernity. In the writing phase of her dissertation, Ms. Stevenson will draw on fourteen months of ethnographic research in the capital of Nunavut, Iqaluit; the more traditional settlement of Pangnirtung; and the psychiatric institutions in Toronto which provide service to Baffin Island. The dissertation will focus on the production of knowledge about suicide, in a society (Inuit) that is struggling to define its place in a modern nation-state (Canada). The tension between different geographical sites of power and knowledge (Iqaluit-Pangnirtung-Toronto) and different modes of knowing (traditional Inuit knowledge versus scientific medical discourse) is central to her research and is, in the end, the source of much suffering on the part of Inuit.