Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

Reinhard Bendix Memorial Research Fellow, 1999-2000

Regina Abrami, Political Science: Morality Plays: The Institutional Origins of Markets and Market Patterns in "Market Socialist" Vietnam and China. Using the cases of Vietnamese and Chinese transition to "socialism" and "market socialism", this dissertation considers the role of an overlooked, but crucial institutional aspect of national market development - the moral politics of governance over economic exchange. It does so by examining how ideas of economy dating from the pre-reform period shape different forms of urban market formation and regulatory development today. The aim is to explain why different players come to the forefront of marketized economies and how institutions shape the organizational strategies of state builders at the different and conflicting levels of market development, market organization and national market-building. It does so by charting how the political struggle to build socialist national markets and subsequently "market socialism" is waged primarily against peddlers, not the far more easily identified former regime's capitalist class or contemporary beneficiaries of increasing corruption. In their mobility and speculation in and over the economy, peddlers have stood throughout as a nettlesome reminder of systemic shortcomings. This phenomenon is examined concretely through comparative historical and ethnographic study of market creation in Chengdu, China and Hanoi, Vietnam. It has brought a host of "bad classes" to the forefront of Chengdu's marketplaces, at the same time that the "good class" of poor peasants who played a major role in Vietnam's large second economy are pushed out of the urban marketplace by central state regulatory reform. The dissertation will show that the specific histories are shaped by differing ideas of community which, in turn, shape network potential, the form of grassroots responses in the past and, in many ways, the terms of local and national market-building tactics today.

Jan Plamper, History: Representing the Leader: Images of Stalin, 1929-1953. From Mussolini to Mao, from Kim Il Sung to Saddam, leader cults have been a staple feature of twentieth-century authoritarian politics. In his dissertation, Mr. Plamper investigates the rhetoric and mechanisms of the Stalin Cult in the Soviet Union and one post-War Eastern European satellite state (East Germany). This cross-disciplinary dissertation examines the images themselves, their changes over time, and discursive continuities between them and the relevant other exemplars of religious symbolism and symbolic politics (Russian Orthodox iconography, the Tsar, Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler Cults). In a case study of one cultural mode, painting, it analyzes the institutions involved in deliberating and disseminating the Cult of Stalin, as well as the processes of Cult production. By encompassing both the Cult products and the modes of Cult production, this study should add a critical dimension to explaining what bound ruler and ruled in the Soviet Union.