Fellowships: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Malcolm Fairbrother, Sociology: Struggles over Social Protectionn at the Global Level by Looking at WTO.
Debates about the World Trade Organization tend to become polarized: supporters call it a forum for mutually beneficial and freely joined trade talks, while critics see an instrument of brute corporate domination. Consequently, important questions about the organization's unintended political effects have yet to be explored. How is the WTO -- as a forum for multilateral negotiations, as a quasi-judicial system for adjudicating trade disputes, as the embodiment of a complex set of multilateral agreements, and as a bureaucratic apparatus -- helping to constitute new political coalitions, cleavages, and agendas? Disagreements about the turbulent 1999 WTO Ministerial Conference often break down over empirical claims, particularly because the arguments of the diverse activists and NGOs then coalesced in Seattle have not yet been mapped out in a satisfying way: What do labour unions, environmentalists, farmers, human rights activists, feminists, and other critics advocate instead of the current WTO agenda? Why are they choosing to focus on the WTO at all? What are the motives driving the formation of these new activist networks? Finally, and more generally, what do these new transnational politics imply fo rstruggles over social protection in an age of global markets? These are the questions this project aims to address.
Rita Parhad, Political Science: International Legitimization through Multilateral Institutions.
One of the most important and least studied functions of international organizations over the last half-century has been that of international legitimization. The postwar multilateral order has provided an institutionalized setting for member states not only to construct cooperative regimes, but also to pass collective judgment on the "international legitimacy" of fellow states' behavior. The United Nations in particular has come to be regarded, and used, as a dispenser of politically significant approval, and, perhaps more frequently, disapproval of claims, policies, and actions of states. This project will examine the process of collective legitimization of state behavior through the UN Security Council and the General Assembly. Most specifically, it will attempt to answer whether the legitimization of state behavior can be understood fully on the basis of state interest, or whether extra-rational (especially normative) motivations also play a role. In so doing, it will contribute to an understanding of how multilateral institutions have subsequently shaped the development of thos generalized principles of conduct on which the multilateral order is based.
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