Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

John L. Simpson Memorial Research Fellows, 2003-2004

Jörg Balsiger, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management: The Politics of Nature Representation in California's Sierra Nevada and the Swiss Alps. The purpose of my research is to explore the interactions between organizational identities and frames for environmental problems, the dynamics of organizational fields, and policy outcomes in California's Sierra Nevada and the Swiss Alps. Although both mountain ecosystems have evolved in interaction with human use, organizational representations of these landscapes have varied tremendously in their admission of the human element. Drawing on theories of organizations and social movements, this research employs a comparative case study design and argues that the ways in which public, private and non-governmental actors portray such issues as fire, protected area development, or species recovery play an important role in the development of coalitions and strategies in organizational fields surrounding these issues. The nature of these fields in turn affects policy outcomes and ultimately the mountain ecosystems themselves.

Jaquelin Cochran, Energy & Resources Group: Equity in Community Development: A Case Study in Rainwater Harvesting in India. Rainwater harvesting, an ancient technology in India whose time may once again have come, provides a local alternative to increasingly scarce state-supplied water resources. Many theorists also contend that traditional rainwater harvesting systems will engender greater equity in water distribution. However, a return to traditional methods does not guarantee equity -- either in the distribution of water or the associated costs and benefits. Moreover, equity, a central concept in sustainable development, is rarely defined from the point(s) of view of the beneficiary community -- whose members are differentiated with respect to gender and socio-economic status. Ms. Cochran's research on rainwater harvesting in Rajasthan will explore the diverse criteria of equity as defined by these heterogeneous communities. The contribution of this research is threefold. First, the research will provide new insights into the labor contributions, resource use, symbolic capital, and gendered implications of rainwater harvesting in Rajasthan. Second, she will ascertain how equity is understood by diverse groups in the community. Third, her analysis will demonstrate the implications of the dominant equity frameworks -- and critiques of these frameworks -- for community-based natural resource management projects. This research also has policy relevance. Rajasthan has begun to consider rainwater harvesting as one of its official water policies, and understanding the many dimensions of equity is essential for such a project.

Dwight Dyer, Political Science: The Evolution of Competition: Candidate Selection Rules and Intraparty Politics in Mexico’s PRI. This project studies the strategic interactions of the central leadership of Mexico's former ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, with those of potential candidates to state governments, during the period of democratization of the Zedillo and Fox presidencies. It addresses three questions: why and when do party leaders decide to surrender their centralized control over nominations; when will potential candidates decide to defect to opposition parties; and what consequences do these processes have on the character of party organizations in new democracies. To answer them, Mr. Dyer has developed a theory of microfoundations of competition and apply it to environments of electoral politics and organizational change. He subjects the hypotheses to test with data from over forty state elections, and finds that the PRI has been quicker to adapt successfully, i.e. without schisms, to competition in the NAFTA-bound northern states than in the historically more industrialized center, and has been relatively more fragile and resistant to change in the south.

Christina Eguiarte, Sociology: Ethnographic Study of Transnational Networks of the Anti-Globalization Movement in Madrid, Spain. Ms. Eguiarte is studying decentralized, autonomous anti-capitalist networks in Madrid, Spain through ethnography and participant observation. By looking closely at one node in the global anti-capitalist movement, she hopes to not only contribute a concrete case study on the specific workings of the movement at the local level but to illuminate similar processes occurring elsewhere. Therefore her study has three main components: one, an examination of the relationship between decentralized autonomous networks and the institutional left , which is an illustration of what is commonly referred to as the reformist/radical split in the "anti-globalization" movement; two, the flows of communication, discourse and influence from Madrid to other nodes in the network , in order to illustrate how these flows work, where they are connected, and where they "short-circuit"; and three, an ethnographic"map" which provides a rich array of experiences and experiments that highlight some of the many creative elements that make up the heterogeneous "mass" of the movement. These projects offer insight not only into the specific manifestations of the movement in Madrid but are representative examples of similar projects elsewhere in Europe and which draw inspiration from around the world. Central to her analysis is an emphasis on the internal tensions inherent in autonomous networks and their primary strengths and weaknesses as effective political agents of change. Drawing on her previous research experience on similar networks in the UK, and a series of interviews with non-Spanish activists who are in contact with the movement in Madrid, she will also pay close attention to those factors which are strongly influenced by the particular local and national context and those which are more broadly shared throughout the movement.

Tomoki Fujii, Agricultural and Resource Economics: Vietnam's Accession to the World Trade Organization: How Will the Spatial Pattern of Poverty and Inequality Change? It has been argued that the accession of Vietnam to WTO is likely to bring about a net positive benefit. Yet, it is not clear whether it expands the gap between the rich and the poor, and how it changes the spatial distribution of the poor and the levels of local inequality. The change in the spatial pattern of poverty and inequality has an important policy implication as the existing targeting policies to assist the poor may become inappropriate after the trade liberalization. The purpose of this research is, therefore, to study how the spatial pattern of poverty and inequality is altered when Vietnam joins the World Trade Organization. The small-area estimation technique is combined with a computable general equilibrium model to enable the study of poverty and inequality at a spatially disaggregated level.

Jacqueline Gehring, Jurisprudence and Social Policy: Rights Without Borders: The Creation of a European Right to Racial Equality. This research focuses on the way the Civil Rights movement in Europe has used legally enforceable rights and litigation to address the widespread problems of racism and xenophobia. The dissertation has two levels of inquiry. First, it looks at various countries in Europe and how the courts, bureaucracies and civil rights activists in those countries lobby for, envision, implement, and enforce race-based rights. Second, the analysis shifts to the European Community level and examines these same questions in light of the Racial Equality Directive, a European Community law that attempts to standardize racial anti-discrimination laws throughout the EC. It is Ms. Gehring's hypothesis that the national civil rights movements, and the directive, are both the result of, and cause of, the special dynamism the concepts of race, racism, rights, courts, and litigation have taken on in the last 15 years in Europe. Furthermore, she hypothesizes that the European movements draw from and re-imagine both the experiences of the American Civil Rights movement, and the way that rights language and litigation strategies are used in the US. The results of this process will have implications not only for racial equality in Europe, but also the US.

Felix Germain, African-American Studies: Different Working Conditions: Managing the Labor of People of Sub-Saharan African and Caribbean Descent in Postwar France. This project examines the incorporation process of Black workers into the Parisian labor sector from 1960 to 1990. Mr. Germain argues that in Paris, the colorblind republican universalistic ideology silences racialized experiences in the distribution, representation, and meaning of labor. The intersection between race, citizenship, and labor structures the parameters of the study. The project questions the weight of citizenship in relation to race, and evaluates if Black French citizens are better incorpoprated into the labor sector than Blacks who are not citizens.

William Hurst, Political Science: The Unmasking of the Chinese Proletariat: The Politics of Xiagang. Since 1993, Chinese state-owned enterprises have laid off (rendered xiagang) over 20 million workers, with more job cuts expected as China pushes reform of the state sector further. Based on over 200 in-depth interviews with workers, managers, and officials conducted in the cities of Beijing, Benxi, Chongqing, Datong, Harbin, Luoyang, Shanghai, Shenyang, and Zhengzhou, Mr. Hurst offers an explanation of several aspects of what has happened to these workers cast out of the embrace of the state. He maintains that enterprise managers lay off workers largely in response ot political incentives and policy directives. There is a political logic behind lay-offs which, in many regions and sectors, takes precedence over simple economic claculations in firms' decisions to lay off workers. He shows that many, if not most, laid off workers who find re-employment are self-employed in some capacity, and describes the various paths to self-employment and other types of re-employment that are taken by various categories of workers, and demonstrates what sorts of re-employment options area vailable to laid off workers in particular localities. Many observers have attributed the relative absnece of xiagang workers' collective action ot state represssion, but there has been very little discussion of the state's strategies in suppressing or preventing workers' protests. Mr. Hurst maintains that thte state often conscientiously usees a "double-repression" strategy, rather than simple coercion of workers, to quell protests when minimal payoffs to workers do not succeed. Such a strategy involves punishing managers of work units and officials in localities where protests occur, while simultaneously repressing protesters. This gives firms strong incentives to mitigate the grievances of restive workers before they protest, at the same time that it sends a clear signal to workers that collective action will not be tolerated, and in some regionsl has been quite effective. The CCP came to pwoer and has ruled in the past by a coalition of workers, peasants, and soldiers (just as regimes in countries such as France or Britain were forged froma "liberal-labor" coalition or "capital-labor" alliance). The working class (along with the peasantry) has now been evicted from this triumvirate. This work teases out the implications of the demise of this coalition for the CCP regime, and determines what new class coalition, if any, may be emerging. Finally, it attempts to place these developments in China in comparative perspective, highlighting both their uniqueness and their similarities to what has unfolded in other post-socialist and developing countries.

Elizabeth McGuire, Political Science: Children of the Revolution: Chinese Students in Soviet Russia, 1920-1970. This dissertation will tell the life stories and family histories of two generations of Chinese students educated in the Soviet Union. Their experiences reveal subtexts in the history of the Sino-Soviet relationship: how the Soviet Union's attempt to create an international socialist family in political terms generated biological families as well; how travel and international education became integral to the mythologized history and everyday practice of revolution; how traditional sources of identity such as family, birthplace, and nation merged with revolutionary values to create a multitude of conflicting socialist identities; how Russian culture and language found its way into the hearts of certain Chinese elites through socialism; how the Russified Chinese became the poster-children of Sino-Soviet friendship and the ultimate scapegoats during the Sino-Soviet split; and how both governments and the former students themselves write and rewrite the story of their lives in an attempt to shape its symbolic significance.

Anand Pandian, Anthropology: Landscapes of Reform: Cultivating Heart and Soil in South India. If colonial power in India took the development of the land as a means of civilizing the selves that inhabited it, postcolonial ethics has taken in turn the civility of these selves as an index of their land’s development. This dissertation project concerns the relationship between the cultivation of the soil and the cultivation of the heart in contemporary south India. Mr. Pandian focuses specifically on the Piramalai Kallar community of southern Tamil Nadu. The Kallars were the most significant of the castes notified under the colonial Criminal Tribes Act of 1911. Charged with highway robbery, cattle rustling and many other putatively habitual crimes, the Kallars were subjected to an extraordinary degree of repression and police supervision. In addition to such measures, the colonial state also made a series of agrarian interventions that took agriculture as a potent vehicle of social reform, from minor land grants to massive regional irrigation projects. Mr. Pandian has conducted his ethnographic research at the head of the Cumbum Valley, where a voluntary agricultural settlement was opened for the Kallars in 1917. He has closely studied both the character of these colonial experiments as well as their postcolonial reverberations. Efforts to reform Kallar conduct through interventions on the landscape provide an exemplary instance of cultivation as both an environmental technique and an idiom of subjection, both a material practice and a metaphor for selfhood: a doubled means of becoming modern.

Jeffrey Sallaz, Sociology: Gambling with Development: A Comparison of Casino Labor Regimes in Gauteng, South Africa, and California, USA. The past decade has witnessed an expansion of legal casino gambling both across the U.S. and worldwide. While previous policies of prohibition focused upon the deleterious effects of casinos for consumers, the current "globalization of gambling" has occurred through arguments that casinos would provide depressed communities valuable service labor jobs. This dissertation compares two emergent gambling industries in which the framing of casino labor was tied to the development/empowerment of "previously" oppressed indigenous peoples: Black South Africans and Native Americans. It asks, first, how exactly were service workers framed during the symbolic struggles preceding legalization. Second, how did such framings translate into particular state systems of licensing and regulating casinos? Third, how do these processes of legalization and licensing produce particular organizational regimes of managing workers and clients at the "point of production"? Data for this project will derive from content analysis of state and media discourse, interviews with industry elites and government officals, and over two years of participant observation as a croupier in casinos in Gauteng, South Africa and a Tribal casino in Northern California.

Shawn Van Ausdal, Geography: Cattle and Power: Ranchers and Peasants in the Making of Modern Colombia. Cattle ranching played a critical role in the formation of modern Colombia, yet the activity has been oddly neglected within the country's historiography. Some 80% of all arable land in Colombia is in pasture. Ranching helped integrate the country economically, and its contribution to GDP has rivaled that of coffee. It was instrumental in the process of frontier colonization and the consolidation of an unequal agrarian structure. And it has been a primary force behind a long history of deforestation and environmental change. Yet despite its importance, there is hardly any historical scholarship on the subject, and even less based upon primary documents. To help fill this void, Mr. Van Ausdal proposes to examine the historical geography of ranching in three key areas (Cordoba, Antioquia and Tolima) during its initial phase of modernization in the first half of the 20th century. This is the period during which the character of modern ranching was largely laid. And it is the era when the country finally began to coalesce as a nation, when the state started to find its feet, and when cattle ‚ following coffee's lead ‚ expanded rapidly, transforming the economy, society and landscape. More than just filling an historiographical gap, however, Mr. Van Ausdal also questions the common characterization of ranching as retrograde and repressive. Building on an incipient revisionist literature, he argues that, for all its truth, the association of ranching with latifundismo obscures much about the nature of ranching, rural power relations, and even the nature of Colombia's modernization.