Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

John L. Simpson Memorial Research Fellows, 2000-2001

Julian Bourg, History: Forbidden to Forbid: The French Revolution des Moeurs, 1968-1981. Between the turbulent student/worker strikes of May-June 1968 and the election of François Mitterrand as President in 1981, France experienced a sea change in norms and values. This révolution des moeurs had two sides. First, especially with regard to sexuality, France underwent the most far-reaching evolution in social mores since the Second World War, perhaps of the twentieth century. The other side was the growing interest in moral and ethical quesitons; by the late 1970s, former interest in violent revolution had given way to new sensibilities about human rights and humanitarian itnervention. Mr. Bourg examines a number of case studies: anarchist and Maoist groups, prisoner rights, the women and gay liberation movements, the debate on totalitarianism and the New Philosophers, the public debate on pedophilia, and the rebirth of French liberalism. His study will help place the decline of Marxism and the development of certain French ideas, so influential in the United States, within their historical context.

John Cioffi, Political Science: Public Law and Private Power: Globalization and the Comparative Political Econmy of Corporate Governace in the United States and Germany. As governments have withdrawn from extensive direct management of the economy, debates over the structure and governance of the economy increasingly have become struggles over the governance of the corporate firm. Mr. Cioffi's dissertation analyzes the regulatory politics and comparative political economy of corporate governance -- the structural allocation and exercise of power and authority within the corporate firm -- to determine how national governance regimes are changing. He focuese on the American and German corporate governance regimes because they remain the most influential models of neoliberal and neo-corporatist corporate governance and political economic organization in the world today. Mr. Cioffi develops a political economic model of corporate governance as a tripartite juridical structure, comprised of company law, financial market regulation, and labor law. This sturcture defines the power relations and, to a significant extent, the distributional outcomes among managers, shareholders, and employees. This approach combines the perspectives of comparative law and comparative political econoy to exploit the strengths of each and to reveal the increasing importance o flaw and regulation in political economic organization. Mr. Cioffi's findings provide only limited empirical support for the institutional convergence thesis often associated with globalization theories. His analysis suggests that law is an increasingly important component of the political economy and that legal structures constrain and channel forces of political economic change to form new nationally distinct "hybrid" corporate governance regimes combinding neoliberal and neo-corporatist elements.

Elizabeth Grinspoon, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management: Socialist Land Auctions: Changing Property Rights and Emerging Patterns of Forest Resource Use in China's Transitional Economy. This dissertation offers a comparative and historical analysis of forest management in neighboring hamlets lying along a major tributatry to the Yangtze River. The focus of Ms. Grinspoon's research is policies promoting the transfer of property rights to wastelands. These policies provide economic incentives for entrepreneurs to purchase village-owned wasteland at auction. Her hamlet case studies use auctions as a conceptual lens to reveal the ways in which market mechanisms are affecting forest land use, land tenure, and local government institutions in rural southwestern China. Ms. Grinspoon's two-year stay in the village conducing field research gave her the opportunity to study the complex processes by which forestry bureaucrats, government officials, and private entrepreneurs negotiate the transfer of forest property rights. Her study of these negotiations reveals how local officials, who play the role of gatekeepers to natural resources, turn mountainsides into commodities.

Young Nancy Kim, Anthropology: Korean Division and the Life Narratives of Wolbukja Families. This dissertation explores the history and cultural politics surrounding the issue of North - South Korean separated families. Since the Korean War, several million people have been separated from their family members across the North - South Korean border, most without the means to contact or learn the whereabouts of their dispersed kin for over fifty years. This study examines the changing subjectivities of such family members after the historic inter-Korean summit in June 2000, which suddenly gave rise to an atmosphere of détente on the Korean peninsula. The study focuses on a group which had been excluded from the Korean separated-families discourse: "wolbukja families," those related to someone who went north of the dividing 38th parallel after the country's Liberation in 1945 or during the Korean War (1950-1953). After the war, under the anti-Communist ideology of the South Korean government, wolbukja families became the target of harassment, suspicion, and persecution, and in the ensuing decades, they suffered economic discrimination and severe social stigmatization. Over the last several years, Koreans have undertaken the democratization of their society while coming to terms with the traumas of their modern history under past colonial and authoritarian regimes. Yet, the wolbukja families remained hidden and largely silenced in South Korea until this recent period of inter-Korean reconciliation. The dissertation will draw upon oral histories of wolbukja families, 14 months of ethnographic research in South Korea, and analyses of political, historical, journalistic and literary representations. It will trace how these family members were resituated from a space of silence to one of articulation as subjects representing a national mood of rapprochement and speaking to the nation's past history of irrevocable losses.

Julia Lynch, Political Science: The Age of Welfare: Citizens, Clients, and Generations in Italian and Dutch Social Policy. Rapid population aging has brought the issue of intergenerational justice and the political influence of the elderly to the fore in many countries of the OECD. At the same time, pressures for fiscal restraint force policy-makers to rethink how welfare states provide for the needs of their citizens. But there has been very little scholarly attention to how welfare policies distribute resources across different age groups, or to the political consequences of a distribution that is skewed either towards the elderly or the young. In the current context of demographic change, the maturation of public pension systems, and high levels of youth poverty and unemployment in many countries, understanding why countries follow different logics of intergenerational justice, and what are the consequences of these differences, takes on special urgency. This research asks why some countries spend most of their social policy budgets on the elderly, while others do more to protect children and working-aged people. The dissertation employs both statistical and qualitative historical analysis to address this question. Statistical analysis of welfare spending patterns over time in 21 OECD countries sets out a basic causal model. Studies of the development of family allowances, unemployment benefits, and pension policies in two country cases, Italy and the Netherlands, then illustrate and refine the basic model. A concluding section of the thesis asks how differing age-orientations of social policy affect the politics of welfare reform. Quantitative analysis of household income and public opinion data in 12 OECD countries provides the basis for evaluating how patterns of welfare program use among elderly and non-elderly client groups affect opinions about welfare, while case studies of the politics surrounding welfare reform in Italy and the Netherlands illustrate the linkages between public opinion, voting behavior, and welfare reform outcomes.

Chris Meissner, Economics: A New World Order: Explaining the Evolution of the International Monetary System, 1870 to 1913. This dissertation explores the strategic interactions that gave rise to the shape of the international monetary system of the late nineteenth century. The main essay explores the emergence of the classical gold standard after 1870. Mr. Meissner emphasizes that countries adopted the monetary standard that suited their domestic economic interests. Agricultural exporters in the periphery preferred initially to stay off gold to avoid an appreciation in their currencies. Importers of raw materials and consumers of manufactured goods in developed nations preferred gold so as to take advantage of gold's ever-increasing purchasing power. By 1913 most countries had adopted the gold standard because the increases in trade with other gold standard countries (by then a large bloc) outweighed the costs of adopting. Mr. Meissner tests a range of hypotheses econometrically using a 'duration' analysis, and uses historical testimony and commentary to support my case. In the second essay, co-authored with J. Ernesto López-Córdova, he looks for evidence of the effects of international monetary arrangements on commercial integration. Preliminary results show that monetary unions and having the same metallic standard as a trading partner increased trade significantly between two countries while exchange rate volatility led to diminished trade. The third essay examines if bimetallism could have been viable in the face of the northern European demonetization of silver that began in 1871. Mr. Meissner finds that French bimetallism could not have survived this large change in demands for silver, but that nothing outside of political interests prevented the resurrection of a bimetallic equilibrium. In summary, strategic factors are crucial to understanding the international monetary environment, and the international monetary system had huge impacts on the global economy's trajectory in the late nineteenth century.

Damani Partridge, Anthropology: Whose Germany? Whose Future?: Citizenship and the Body in a Post-Unification Era. This dissertation examines the meanings of German citizenship from the perspective of exclusion. Mr. Partridge considers the process of German unification from the perspective of the so-called "immigrant" or "non-German-looking-people." In particular, he does this through a critical analysis of the body as a central site of legal, social, economic, and political contestation. Understanding citizenship in its formal legal and broader social demensions becomes critical to showing how "German" and "non-German" bodies and bodily practices get constituted as part of a complex inter-working of norms, representations, and resistance. This approach begins to provide answers to the key questions: Who's German? Whose Germany? and Whose future? As the newly unified Berlin becomes the site of the new capital and the symbol of Geramny's future, one cannot forget that it is also one of Germany's most diverse cities, with East Germans, West Germans, Russian-Germans, Turkish-Germans, Vietnames, Africans, and many others.

Grigore Pop-Eleches, Poltitical Science: The Politics of IMF Programs during the Latin American Debt Crisis and the Post-Communist Transitions. This project analyzes the role and the effects of IMF programs in developing countries by focusing on two of the most important IMF "program clusters" in recent history: the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980's and the post-communist transition in the former Soviet bloc. Mr. Pop-Eleches intend to address three key questions: first, how and why did the agenda of the Fund differ during the two crises; second, what was the political process through which IMF programs were negotiated and implemented; and finally, what were the political, social and economic consequences of these programs. These questions will be explored through a combination of large-N statistical tests and a number of case studies from the two regions, which should facilitate a better understanding of both macro-effects and micro-level mechanisms of IMF programs.

Maria Stoilkova, Anthropology: Exiles at Home and Abroad: Bulgarian Intelligentsia in Emigration. The changes coming in the aftermath of the Cold War have been celebrated throughout Eastern Europe as a new era of democratic development providing unprecedented opportunities for personal, intellectual, political, and economic prosperity. Yet precisely at this moment when embracing the post-socialist nationalistic project may have seemed to be the predictable response of local intelligentsia, some half a million young an deducated Bulgarians have left their country in just a few short years, causing a devastating demographic crisis in Bulgaria. Ms. Stoilkova's project seeks to explain rationalities (economic, cultural, and political) that have produced the exodus of young professionals within the broad context of shifting relationships between post-socialist countries and transnational capitalism. Her research examines the ideological climate and alientating experiences of the educated classes in Bulgaria during the last socialist decade as a system which prepared the conditions for the quick exodus, and askes how the subsequent experiences of exiles informs an understanding of the relationship between migration, displacement, and identity in the post-socialist era. This project will contribute to the study of "late socialism" by looking at the particular interaction of socialist ideology and globalization and the effects of each on the construction of the late socialist subject.

Eddie U, Anthropology: Professional Degeneration and Political Decay: Shanghai Schoolteachers and the Socialist State 1949-1968. This dissertation explores the relationship between professions and state socialism. Mr. U contends that socialist states tended to create badly fractured professions that undercut their own political legitimacy. He builds his argument on the concepts of community and hegemony developed by Emile Durkheim and Antonio Gramsci, which suggest that a stable political rule requires the support of well-formed occupational groups and a sympathetic force of intellectuals. He contends that Marxist-Leninist regimes not only failed to exploit the knowledge, skills, and social authority of intellectuals to strengthen their rules, they created professional groups whose members often turned against one another and against the state. Mr. U's dissertation is empirically based on professional development under Chinese Communism. The bulk of his thesis examines the evolution of a specific profession -- Shanghai secondary school teachers -- after the Chinese Communist Revolution and up to the Cultural Revolution. Overall, his work is intended to contribute to the sociology of professions, comparative studies of state socialism, and theories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Sarah Wiliarty, Political Science: The Christian Democratic Union's Response to New Demands from Women. This dissertation investigates how the German CDU has addressed women's issues. In the 1950s and 1960s, the CDU espoused a traditional image of women, primarily as housewives. The major social changes of the 1960s, however, led many people, both within and outside of the CDU, to challenge the appropriateness of the housewife image. Particularly as its electoral support among women declined, the CDU faced a decision: to keep its old policies and watch its constituency dwindle or to adapt its policies, but to risk alienating more traditional supporters. Ms. Williarty's dissertation examines the developments of the CDU's position in three policy areas -- family policy, abortion policy, women's participation policy -- over a thirty-year period (1968-1998). She argues that the CDU changed its policies to accommodate women's new demands only when the party's women's association succeeded in building a sufficiently strong internatl coalition with other internal party groups.

Michelle Williams, Sociology: Democratic Communists: Party and Class in South Africa and Kerala. The twentieth century saw the rise and fall of Marxist practice as a world-historical phenomenon. At the beginning of the century the international communist movement was a growing social and political force inspired by emancipatory ideals, but by its end the movement had virtually disappeared. Today it is mostly talked about in association with totalitarian and authoritarian regimes of the past. At least two twentieth century communist parties, however, can lay claim to more hopeful and democratic histories: the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) in Kerala. Both parties represent exceptions to the historical norms of twentieth century international communism. But what were the democratic practices of these two parties, and how did democratic commitments vary over time? Focusing on particular periods as a key to understanding the source of this longevity will help to uncover the conditions that facilitated the development and maintenance of democratic practices of the CPI(M) and SACP. Through the comparative method and using local histories, Ms. Williams will examine how and why democratic practices took hold in the widely different contexts of urban, industrial South Africa and rural, agrarian Kerala.