Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

John L. Simpson Memorial Research Fellows, 2006-2007

Sener Akturk, Political Science: Continuity and Change in the Institutions of Ethnicity in Austria, Germany, Soviet Union/Russia, and Turkey. Following World War I, the new political elites in Austria, Germany, Soviet Union, and Turkey redefined the relationship between ethnicity and political community in their respective states. Conceptualizing the relationship between ethnicity and political community as a "regime of ethnicity", this project investigates why the particular regimes of ethnicity established in the early 1920s persisted for eight decades, until some minor changes occurred in the late 1990s. Akturk delineates the institutional architecture of mono-ethnic, multi-ethnic, and non-ethnic regimes, and then he critically evaluates competing causal explanations premised on changes in demography, education, urbanization, composition of the political elite, political regime type, scholarly discourse on ethnicity, the top political leadership, globally hegemonic discourse on ethnicity, and dominant religious tradition, among other structural, institutional, and political factors. Germany, Soviet Union/Russia, Turkey, and Austria are identified as having mono-ethnic, multi-ethnic, non-ethnic, and hybrid regimes, respectively. The challenges to the status quo from the 1920s until the 1990s are examined in particular. Why have attempts at "merging" ethnicities/nationalities into an amorphous Soviet nation in a Bolshevik "melting pot" failed to become the official state policy in the Soviet Union? Why were immigrant guest-workers categorically denied German citizenship for four decades? Why ethnic categories were denied recognition in Turkey until the 21st century?

Naazneen Barma, Political Science: Shared Sovereignty: Building Democracy and Reconstructing State Capacity in Post-Conflict Nation-States. International interventions in post-conflict reconstruction face a dilemma: they must mediate between an idealistic commitment to high international standards concerning democracy and governance versus the pragmatic need to tailor rebuilt state structures to specific local contexts. This dissertation seeks to understand the dynamics of contemporary instances of externally-supported state-building through the theoretical and analytical frameworks of international relations and comparative politics. Barma examines the variance in the institutional solutions and governance outcomes of the state-building exercises implemented in Cambodia, East Timor, and Afghanistan by the United Nations transitional authorities (UNTAs) there in collaboration with their domestic counterparts. She explicitly emphasizes the contested nature of the state-building process by focusing on the agency of political elites in determining the institutional outcomes of reconstruction efforts and their subsequent consolidation over time. In short, she explores the application of the international template and technocratic processes of post-conflict reconstruction in the necessarily hyper-political domestic context of any state-building process. For countries to successfully put violent civil conflict behind them, the transitional period is a critical juncture in the journey to stability. This dissertation examines how international and national factors interact in externally-supported post-conflict reconstruction efforts to design precisely those state and political institutions that can ensure successful transition, lasting peace, and stable and effective governance outcomes. Barma's research methodology relies on: the UN's own records and evaluative work; the literature on peace-building and country case studies; and over one hundred elite interviews of government officials and UN, World Bank, and other donor administrators, carried out through field work.

Taylor Boas, Political Science: Neoliberalism and the Transformation of Presidential Election Campaigns in Latin America. This dissertation seeks to explain cross-national and temporal variation in the strategies and techniques that politicians have employed during presidential election campaigns in Chile, Peru, and Brazil, in the context of a changing political-economic environment. In the two decades since these countries underwent transitions to democracy, neoliberalism has emerged as the hegemonic economic paradigm in the region, yet there is also a growing consensus among both left and right that this model has failed to deliver promised reductions in poverty and inequality. Against this common background, there is quite significant variation in both the forms of linkage through which presidential candidates in each country appeal to the electorate, as well as the social and political cleavages (if any) that they emphasize in these appeals. Moreover, Peru and Brazil have witnessed substantial changes in these variables since the re-inauguration of democratic politics, whereas change over time has been less notable in Chile. Mr. Boas’s research seeks to characterize and explain this variation through a study of all democratic presidential election campaigns in Chile, Peru, and Brazil since their transitions from authoritarian rule, including the campaigns taking place during the period of fieldwork in 2005 and 2006. Data sources include interviews with approximately 60 key political actors in each country; direct observation of campaign events both in the major metropolitan area and in other regions; and content analysis of all political advertising on broadcast television during each campaign.

Jennifer J. Casolo, Geography: Transforming Geographies of Exclusion: Place, Power and Difference in the Guatemalan-Honduran Borderlands. This dissertation project asserts that critical attention to the production of place, power and difference is crucial to understanding how claims of recognition and redistribution come together and are expressed at particular conjunctures. Rural producers in the Maya-Ch'orti' region of Eastern Guatemala and Western Honduras are waging resource struggles in strikingly divergent but interconnected ways. In Western Honduras, the National Indigenous Council of Maya-Ch'orti' of Honduras, (CONIMCHH) are linking indigenous rights claims with demands for land redistribution. In contrast across the border in Eastern Guatemala, the Regional Coordination of the Ch'orti'-Campesino Organizations "New Day" are subordinating indigenous identity to form alliances with non-indigenous ladinos who demand agrarian assistance from the state and NGOs, but do not place land redistribution on the agenda. Employing a relational comparison of this cross-border paradox, Ms. Casolo explores the specific processes by which class, race, gender and land are articulated on each side of the border to reproduce, rework and contest historical exclusions. How Honduran and Guatemalan rural landless and land-poor position themselves and are positioned as Ch'orti', shapes and is shaped by how they organize, articulate interests, refashion identities and strive to reconfigure local, national and transnational practices affecting agrarian life. Breaking down false conceptual dichotomies in Latin American literature that divorce agrarian and ethnic routes to justice or subordinate one to the other, this study advances three interrelated claims First, histories of dispossession and their interconnections have strengthened struggles for land redistribution in Western Honduras over time, while weakening them in Eastern Guatemala. Second, the subjectivities of Ch'orti' landless and land poor are conditioned by their ability to draw on national and transnational institutions, resources and ideas regarding indigenous identity and associated rights. Third, the multi-scaled everyday practices through which indigenous and agrarian identities and demands are conjoined reproduce and reinforce particular exclusionary structures and subjectivities while transforming others. Ultimately, this dissertation seeks to reveal the constraints binding specific resource struggles as well as the contradictions and openings that may signal possibilities for new alliances and social relations.

Brent Durbin, Political Science: Political Oversight of Intelligence Agencies in the United States and United Kingdom. An important but under-studied component of international relations is the process through which information about the world is incorporated into national decisions. Most IR theories of decision making treat information as a stable and reliable input. For example, realist theory is predicated on the assumption that states will adapt their behavior (by balancing, bandwagoning, etc.) to respond to changes in the international environment. A key component of this process is almost always missing from these formulations: how states find out about environmental changes in the first place. This dissertation considers one of the principal means through which states learn about the world: national intelligence services. How do policy-makers ensure that the intelligence products provided to them by executive agencies are timely, accurate, and appropriate to current policy needs? This question would seem to situate the project squarely in a well-developed literature on the relationship between policy-making principals and the bureaucratic agents charged with implementing their policies. Yet national intelligence activities do not conform to traditional models of principal-agent oversight. The oversight tools employed by principals in other policy areas (e.g., "police patrols," "fire alarms") may become ineffectual when activities are carried out in secret, and when extreme information asymmetries require that principals rely on the agents themselves to tell them what should be done. This project will utilize archival and secondary sources, interviews with policy-makers and intelligence professionals, and the tools of principal-agent theory to evaluate how the governments of the US and the UK have sought to overcome these problems over the past 50 years.

Ju Hui Judy Han, Geography: Protestant Missions and Capitalist Deliverance: Geography of Contemporary Korean/American Missionary Movements. While the ideological and institutional footprints of European and American-dominated Christian missions remain largely intact, the contemporary landscape of global Christianity is marked by new challenges posed by postcoloniality and the capitalist world order. The demographic growth and religious fervor of Christianity in the Global South, for instance, complicate a number of conventional dualisms: the West/the rest, Christian/non-Christian, and developed/developing nations. A case in point: South Korea has recently been catapulted into the status of the second-largest sender of Protestant missionaries in the world, with over 10,000 missionaries working on both short-term and long-term, resident assignments. This dissertation examines contemporary Korean missionary enterprises: how South Korean and Korean American missionaries collaborate in transnational and transdenominational projects, how these projects interface with neoliberal spaces structured by humanitarian and developmental regimes, and finally, how we might understand the production of a worldview in which Koreans emerge as privileged actors on the world stage. A key focus of this project is the process of missionary subject-formation: how their positions and operations are buoyed not only by religious convictions but also by firsthand experience of modernization, faith in the inevitability of capitalist market expansion, and nationalist pride in South Korea's advancement in the world economy. Through theoretical engagement with mission theology, political economy, and transnational feminist cultural studies, as well as archival and ethnographic research of mission fields and actual missionary practices, this project examines the articulation of capitalist modernity and evangelical territoriality across three pivotal missionary destinations targeted by the US-South Korean missionary axis: China-North Korea border, East Africa (Uganda, Tanzania), and Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan).

Renee Kuriyan, Energy and Resources Group: Outsourcing Development, Renegotiating Roles: The Political Economy of Information Technologies and Development in India. With the rapid growth of public private partnerships (PPPs) in the delivery of government services in India, a debate has emerged as to whether the government is in a process of "outsourcing development" and what the appropriate roles for the state and private sector should be. This PPP model has become tied to the dominant discourse related to the delivery of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) enabled services, such as e-governance and internet-enabled computer kiosks, to support socio-economic development. This dissertation examines the extent to which the private sector is playing a more substantial role in defining the development process in India, particularly in terms of the distribution and delivery of ICT services with public-private partnerships. What does this mean for the state in terms of repositioning its role in the development process? Ms. Kuriyan investigates how varying configurations of public-private partnerships influence the social and political challenges for state actors and entrepreneurs involved in the implementation process of ICT projects. She is conducting comparative research in the context of two states in India, Andhra Pradhesh and Kerala and their strategies for ICT and development projects. Through this research she will explore what kind of development is being delivered and what this means both ideologically and empirically for rural populations in India.

Basak Kus, Sociology: Formal Origins of Economic Informalization: State, Regulatory Governance and Economic Informality in a Comparative Perspective. It is a well known fact that some economic actors, firms as well as individuals, operate at the margins of the law. They underreport employment, avoid taxes, ignore product regulations, breach copyrights, and even do not register themselves as legal entities to begin with. The persistence of informal practices in the economy is a substantial issue not only in developing nations but also in the developed ones. According to recent reports published by the World Bank, the average size of the informal economy, as a percent of official GNI, amounts to 40% in developing countries and 18% in OECD countries. In her dissertation, Kus explores the question of economic informalization through an institutional framework which takes as its analytical frame of reference the regulatory relationship between state and economy. She is particularly interested in exploring four theoretical questions: (1) Whether and how the degree and form of economic informalization varies across-nations depending on the way states regulate their economies? In other words, are there different types of regulatory regimes that states maintain around which different degrees and forms of economic informalities take place? (2) How do states promote or discourage informalization through their growth policies? (3) Do state policies/structures lead to different degrees and patterns of informalization among the different sectors of the economy? (4) How do liberalization policies, through their effect on the state and economy relationship, affect the level of informality in the economy? Kus's analysis is composed of three parts. In the first part, using World Bank data, she analyzes the relationship between the state-level institutional variables and economic informalization across a sample of hundred-some countries. She complements this quantitative analysis with an in depth study of the Turkish case over a period of twenty years (1980-2000), in an attempt to understand the specific mechanisms and complex interactions through which changing institutional conditions and state structures affect economic informalization. She then draws comparisons between the Turkish case and several Eastern European nations including Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland.

Shahla Maghzi-Ali, Jurisprudence and Social Policy: Globalization and Diversity of Rule of Law Values: A Comparative Study of Transnational Commercial Arbitration in East Asia and Abroad. The search for common standards to assess the procedures used in international commercial arbitration has become increasingly important, due to the growth and diversity of its global users. To date most research on "international" arbitration has focused exclusively on Western models of arbitration as practiced in Europe, America, France and Germany. To extend this research internationally, Ms. Maghzi-Ali will compare survey data collected in 1992 by Christian Bühring-Uhle regarding the reasons why arbitration practitioners in America, Germany and Europe choose arbitration, the way in which amicable settlements are facilitated in arbitration, and the extent to which "alternative" procedures are employed with data collected from arbitration practitioners in East Asia. Based on survey data, follow up interviews, and case studies, she will examine two related questions: 1) Does diversity of culture and worldview, in particular, values and attitudes held in East Asia, translate into differing understandings and expectations of international arbitration procedure? If so, how do these differing expectations manifest themselves in international arbitration practice? 2) Are global economic and legal forces simultaneously exerting a harmonizing influence on arbitratorâs expectations through conventions such as the UNCITRAL Model Arbitration and Conciliation Rules? She expects to find that while participants in Chinese international arbitration proceedings exhibit a greater openness to exploring settlement options and a greater degree of support for arbitrator-initiated settlement discussions and a much higher incidence of participants observing arbitrators "splitting the difference" than in Western countries, at the same time global economic and legal forces are simultaneously exerting a harmonizing influence on key aspects of the arbitration procedure relating to pre-hearing directives, party statement of claims and defenses, oral hearings, use of experts, taking of evidence, and issuing of awards following the promulgation of conventions such as the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods and the UN Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration. This research simultaneously challenges widely held assumptions that Western arbitration practices represent universal procedural methods, as well as assumptions that diversity of culture and norms represent fundamentally clashing worldviews and perspectives relating to commercial conflict. Rather, diversity of arbitration technique is compatible with universality of overarching arbitration procedure.

Krisjon Olson, Anthropology: Youth without Sanctuary: The New Ethics of Humanitarianism in Post-War Guatemala. An unexpected social phenomenon has surfaced in post-war Guatemala. The violence of the Guatemalan genocide (1960-1996) is being challenged by a vigorous youth movement that promotes reconciliation. This movement, and the humanitarian organizations that accompany it, form a critical nexus for conflict and international cooperation. Ms. Olson addresses the social and ethical implications of this new youth movement, and attendant humanitarian practices, for and by children in the wake of war. Her research documents the emergent category of childhood in a pious highland town, notorious for its fragile peace. Her dissertation traces the establishment of one nongovernmental organization for the protection, education, and social welfare of children during the Guatemalan armed conflict and its impact on the Ixil area. This influential association is part of a major philanthropic venture in The Hague to improve the well being of young people in adverse circumstances, a prevailing strategy to redress the impact of genocide. Two years of ethnographic research (August 2003-August 2005) focused on the complex relationships between children and humanitarian organizations. Ms. Olson's fieldwork examined how and why new ideas of childhood have been culturally translated to, and modified by, this unique local youth movement in the post-war period. In order to determine how humanitarianism has altered the lives of children and their families, she explores historical precursors to current notions of childhood not only within the Ixil area, but also in the international domain. The inquiry analyzes the objectives of international donors, the practices of peace workers, and the direct involvement of children in post-war reconstruction in order to better understand mechanisms of conflict resolution in areas of violence.

Dean Scrimgeour, Economics: International Perspectives on the Great Inflation. This research pioneers comparative studies of the Great Inflation, identifying its common and idiosyncratic features. It evaluates explanations of why the postwar rise and fall of inflation occurred on an international scale. That inflation rose and fell across developed economies at the same time suggests a common cause. The two major classes of explanations for the Great Inflation are bad luck in the form of oil price shocks and poor monetary policy due to faulty ideas about the economy's structure. International data show that inflation had risen substantially in developed economies before the first oil shock, suggesting that the oil shocks did not cause the Great Inflation. This research attempts to modify theories of monetary policy errors due to incorrect ideas about economics so they can account for how the Great Inflation afflicted so many countries. In addition to studying similarities in international experiences, the research identifies idiosyncratic outcomes. For example, in the United States inflation fell much more quickly than it rose, but this asymmetry was not present more generally. Mr. Scrimgeour looks for reasons why the United States differed from other countries in this way.

Elizabeth Shapiro, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management: Issues of Equity in Market-Based Conservation: Payment for Environmental Service Projects in Southern Mexico. In the last ten years, market-based conservation schemes such as certification programs, pollution credits, and conservation easements have become the panacea of choice for the globe’s environmental woes. One of the newest of these schemes, Payment for Environmental Services (PES), attempts to harness the markets in urban areas and industrialized countries for ecosystem functions such as green house gas sequestration, biodiversity conservation, scenic beauty and watershed protection. Payments are then made to rural resource managers to employ management practices that conserve these specific ecosystem functions. PES programs have been touted by international conservation funders and policy makers alike for being more economically efficient, because they are market-based, and more equitable, because they will provide financial benefits to the poor rural communities in which they are implemented. But can the poor, who by definition are marginalized from the market, truly benefit from a market-based scheme? Ms. Shapiro’s dissertation research will analyze the impact of PES projects on six communities in southern Mexico. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, analysis will focus on the way in which inequalities in both the system of value assignment and the political and economic structure of the society in which they are implemented influences the likelihood that these marginalized communities will benefit from these market-based conservation programs.

Caroline Emily Shaw, History: Recall to Life: The Contours of British Refuge, 1789-1921. For Great Britain, the refugee has been an iconic symbol of British liberalism and humanitarian concern in the face of foreign oppression. At the height of the Empire in the nineteenth century, British involvement in refugee crises throughout the globe would be fêted as proof of moral superiority. Yet, the transition from moral outrage at the plight of the refugee to assistance was anything but fait accompli. As a study of British involvement with refugees in the long nineteenth century, Shaw's dissertation sets out to provide an understanding of how Britons of all walks of life came to envision their home as a haven for the world's refugees. In an era when neither international nor national law separated the "refugee" from the "alien" or the "immigrant," it was through local interactions with potential sympathizers that, she argues, both "refugee" and host negotiated the particular claims these foreigners could make on British liberty and hospitality. It was through these negotiations -- as played out in cases as disparate as those of fugitive slaves, European revolutionaries, and Boer War internees -- that the "refugee" gained and maintained a distinct cultural status. Drawing from newspaper and governmental archives, philanthropic societies and private correspondence and diaries, this project will help to shed light on the origins of modern day refugee relief -- origins too often brushed aside by scholars who emphasize the novelty of the twentieth century by virtue of the sheer number of refugees in the wake of decolonization and total war. Rather than accepting such a break, Shaw highlights continuities between earlier local efforts and the efforts that would be increasingly defined by the involvement of new international institutions such as the Red Cross and League of Nations. However, Shaw's dissertation also argues that, often despite better intentions, Britons participated in delimiting the parameters of refuge. The political, social and cultural relations produced by refuge tested humanitarian impulses and, in certain cases, foreclosed entry and entitlement to relief. Geographic location, the passing of time, and the social and political leanings of refugees and their British neighbors effected the provision of relief and defined the contours of refuge.