Fellowships: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Anne Clunan, Political Science: Images of Cooperation: Explaining State Choices of Multilateralism and Bilateralism.
In this dissertation Ms. Clunan argues that the contemporary process of Russian identity formation is defining the parameters within which the debates over Russian national interests and foreign policy are conducted. Adopting a constructivist approach, she analyzes how the partially path-dependent process of post - Soviet Russian national identity formation shapes Russian foreign policy towards multilateral organizations. She argues that understanding Russian foreign policy towards multilateral organizations requires considering broad elite and societal debates about Russia's international role and status, the historical memories that motivate policy, and the countries or ideas that serve as the country's alter-ego. She examines Russian attitudes towards Western multilateral institutions including NATO, the European Union, and the World Trade Organization; the Economic Cooperation Organization, which includes the former Soviet Central Asian republics, Turkey, and Iran; East Asian multilateral cooperation, particularly in APEC and ASEAN; and the Commonwealth of Independent States and its sub-regional groupings, such as GUAM and the Central Asian Economic Union. She draws on public debates conducted in the press and academic journals, official statements, survey data, and elite interviews collected during the past twelve months in Russia. She will spend the fellowship year distilling this data and writing her dissertation.
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Fabio Ghironi, Economics: Essays on the Making of Economic Policies in Interdependent Economies.
The purpose of this dissertation is to study issues related to the making of economic policies in interdependent economies. A microfounded general equilibrium model of macroeconomic interdependence among different countries/regions is built and developed along several directions throughout the dissertation. The determinants of interdependence are explored both theoretically and empirically. Attention is paid to the importance of monopolistic distortions in affecting the dynamics of open economies following monetary and fiscal shocks as well as changes in productivity. The role of the current account balance in the transmission of such shocks is analyzed. The model is suitable for analyzing monetary and fiscal policy interactions between countries/regions under different assumptions about the exchange-rate regime that connects currencies to one another. Both positive and normative questions can be addressed rigorously. The formal apparatus is applied to policy questions that are of relevance in the ongoing debates on Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in Europe and its impact on the international monetary system. The longer-run research agenda includes an analysis of how institutional structures affect the making of economic policies and of how to facilitate international economic cooperation by setting up appropriate supranational institutions.
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Karen Greene, Medical Anthropology: Child Rights in Cambodia: Negotiating the Local in Transnational Context.
Since the intense introdution of internationally funded child welfare programs in Cambodia in 1993, social interventions guided by a child-rights approach, implemented to manage accelerating problems of dangerous and endangered children on Cambodian streets, consistently result in explosive disagreements. As a culturally diverse group of Cambodian and non-Cambodian NGO workers negotiate a version of child rights and related child training appropriate for Cambodia, they also imagine new relationships not only between parents and children, but among families, aid organizations, and a Cambodian government. Ms. greene's preliminary research reveals the negotiation process tends to pathologize Cambodian families and "tradition," misrepresenting actual parent - child relations. She proposes that identifying young people as an at-risk category distinct from adults/families radically restructures adult - child relations. In the current historically and transnationally produced political context, it redefines the autonomy of "child" and links child to nation in a new way. Her project will combine analysis of formal and official discourses with an ethnography based both on participant observation of the translation, communication, and implementation of child rights concepts, and on the generation of family practices around the raising of young people in the places in which these programs function. She hopes to help fill a gap in the anthropological literature on adult - child relations in Cambodia and to contribute to theoretical discussions on the degree to which supralogical regimes of power and knowlege organize bodies and constrain or influence agency in day-to-day life.
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Gregory Louden, Political Science: Electoral Strategies, Party Systems, and Foreign Policy.
Mr. Louden will study the institutional origins of foreign policy by examining the effects of domestic electoral systems on foreign policy in Japan, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These institutions, by shaping the political system in general and the incentives of decision makers in any particular election, have a pervasive effect on the conduct of international relations. Mr. Louden will first formally model the effects of different types of party systems, in particular comparing systems of two parties with those of three or more. Next, he will study through time-series data electoral institutional influence on countries' aggression proneness and policies in high technology trade. Finally, he will use case studies of the agricultural and armaments trade to examine more fully the causal link between institutions and policy outcomes.
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Elliot Posner, Political Science: The International Convergence to the NASDQ Standard.
Mr. Posner's project seeks to understand the responses by public and private actors to local problems associated with a more globalized world. Government officials and private actors across the world have sought to solve local problems -- such as unemployment, the lack of a technological base, and slow economic growth -- by attempting to reproduce locally the U.S. network of venture capitalists, cutting-edge companies, financial experts, and a risk-taking middle class willing to purchase equities. One concrete effort toward this end has been the creation of equity markets that cater to high-tech entrepreneurial companies. It appears that the new equity markets eventually converge toward the institutional form of the NASDAQ Stock Market, the very successful U.S. equity market for high-tech entrepreneurial companies created in the 1970s. But the initial institutional forms of the new equity markets rarely mirror the NASDAQ form and instead tend to reflect traditional, nationally based financial systems. These observations are not consistent with the expectations of the most common arguments in the globalization debates. These arguments expect either the coexistence of a multitude of different capitalist forms corresponding to national trajectories (i.e. divergence) or the tendency of capitalist forms to converge. Mr. Posner's observations suggest the former set of arguments mistake midpoints in a process for outcomes, whereas the latter miss the crucial mechanisms by which convergence takes place. His hypothesis combines insights from two subfields in political science, comparative politics and international relations. It expects the timing in the political process to determine whether actors receive signals from the domestic or international environments: In the beginning of the political processes which lead to the creation of new equity markets, domestic actors are not as attuned to the international economy as they are to domestic problems manifested from a more globalized world. Through the process, actors develop notions of what they want and how they will pursue it. Only then do actors become keenly aware of international pressures, which include international legitimacy forces as readily as the more commonly argued international competitive forces. To test this hypothesis, he will conduct three sets of structured case comparisons. These include cases from Europe, the U.S. and Asia.
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Robert Rauchhaus, Political Science: Third-Party Intervention and Inter-State Conflict Resolution.
This dissertation examines the effects of third-party intervention on inter-state conflict resolution. The conventional wisdom is that third-party intervention makes at least one of the parties in a dispute worse off and thereby makes settlement more likely. Mr. Rauchhaus challenges this conventional wisdom and develops a series of formal deductive models that treat the demands of the disputants as endogenous variables. This formulation reveals several important countervailing forces and selection effects. Whether third-party intervention helps, hurts, or makes no difference depends on how it affects the disputants' demands. Mr. Rauchhaus uses a large-n statistical analysis and two case studies -- the Arab - Israeli conflicts and the war in Yugoslavia -- to test the hypothesis generated by his models and by competing hypotheses. While the dissertation is intended to examine third-party intervention in its generic form, he pays special attention to United Nations peacekeeping.
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