Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

John L. Simpson Memorial Research Fellows, 2009-2010

Jordan Branch, Political Science: Cartography and Sovereignty in the Early Modern International System. The modern international system, the foundation of the discipline of international relations, was the contingent outcome of a transformation from medieval heteronomous organization among widely varying actors to modern anarchy among sovereign territorial states. While this systemic transition has been approached in a number of ways in political science and sociology, an important driver of systemic change has thus far been ignored. This dissertation examines the profound effect that the cartographic revolution had on the nature of sovereign authority in the international system, and thus on the development of modern states and the state system. The growth of map production and use in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had direct effects on ideas about legitimate types of authority over space, which form the basis of an international system. In particular, mapping constrained the acceptable forms of authority down to one: exclusive sovereignty over territory, represented in the political cartography of clearly delineated territorial states. This change involved more than ideas, however, as political actors used the new cartographic tools and norms to implement territorial political authority on the ground. Through a careful examination of the historical development of modern cartography and its links to political ideas, behavior, and outcomes, this dissertation will contribute to the constructivist approach to systemic change in international politics. Thus, the study will yield implications for our understanding of today’s globalizing international system, including the possibility that new technologies may re-open the prospect of non-territorial sovereignty in the future.

Jennifer Devine, Department of Geography: Destination Guatemala: Tourism, Territory, and Identity Post Peace Accords

In 1996, the Guatemalan state, the military, and the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity signed peace accords ending a 36-year civil war characterized by acts of genocide. From the ashes of conflict, Mayan cultural tourism has unexpectedly become a privileged site of post-war economic development and nation-building. My research asks: how do state officials, Mayan communities, and ex-guerrillas use tourism development as a political strategy to redefine contentious post-war identities and stake new collective claims to territory? State-led tourism marketing strategies and the Tourism Police's mandate and daily operations will illuminate how the state uses post-war tourism development to redefine multicultural national identity, restructure security provision, and increase provincial police presence throughout the country. Through a comparative, ethnographic research design, I will further explore how a Mayan community and an ex-guerrilla cooperative have appropriated and contested the state's strategy to make competing land and identity claims through developing grassroots models of community and solidarity tourism respectively. My project critically examines an emerging politics of identity and territoriality in Guatemalan tourism, speaking directly to scholarly and practitioner interests in tourism, neo-liberal economic development, and multiculturalism in developing countries around the world.

Nicole Eaton, Department of History: Totalitarianism and Everyday Life in Königsberg-Kaliningrad, 1938-1950

The German city of Königsberg was destroyed by bombing during the Second World War and was reincarnated in 1946 as the Russian city of Kaliningrad. The new Soviet city was to be the spot on which socialism would replace fascism, a “friendship of the peoples” would triumph over racism, and freedom would defeat all forms of oppression. This dissertation examines the transformation of the German city of Königsberg into the Soviet Russian city of Kaliningrad from 1938-1950: it focuses on two millenarian regimes as they attempted to transform one city, its government, and its citizens. It presents a micro-history of one place with two sets of inhabitants governed by competing regimes, and narrates the new settlement of the region and the violent forced expulsion of the original German population. It also analyzes the strategies and tactics that Germans and Russians used to manage their lives before, during, and after the destruction of the war that brought them together; material culture and the uses of space in the borderlands of totalizing regimes; and the national identities and subjectivities of the city’s populations in transition. It looks at daily relations between Königsbergers and Kaliningraders to illuminate the changing ways in which they understood what it meant to be a German, a Russian, a Nazi, or a Soviet. The story of how Königsberg became Kaliningrad is a history of everyday life in extraordinary times as two states, two ideologies, and two nations transformed a city and its inhabitants.

Tari Ellis, Department of Political Science

Changing conditions in the international economy are forcing states across the globe to rethink their economic development strategies. New competitive opportunities and constraints arising from the growing fragmentation of production chains and the geographical reorganization of service provision have induced leaders in a diverse group of small countries to aim at consolidating roles as hubs of international trade, business, finance, and tourism. While the East Asian “Tigers” have historically faced vastly different economic challenges than Middle Eastern oil-exporting states, rulers in polities such as Dubai and Singapore are currently focusing on bolstering a common group of international service sectors. As they alter the dominant mode of production in these contexts, these projects involve transforming existing labor forces. Yet transitions of this kind demand conflicting adjustments: (1) pursuing fiscal austerity to reassure foreign investors and combat rent-seeking and (2) maintaining or expanding social welfare to build human capital and preserve political stability. My project will compare two pairs of similar city-states, Dubai & Bahrain, and Singapore & Hong Kong, to investigate a counter-intuitive pattern of responses this dilemma. Specifically, it will investigate why leaders in Bahrain and Hong Kong have taken steps towards fundamentally restructuring national social compacts, whereas rulers in Dubai and Singapore have not. I plan to investigate this question by conducting interview-based and archival research on location in each of my cases during the course of the 2009-10 academic year.

Barry Eidlin, Department of Sociology: Class Conflict, Policy Development and the State

Why, after tracking each other closely from the 1800s through the mid-1960s, did Canadian and U.S. unionization rates diverge so dramatically in the following decades? Indeed, Canadian unionization rates are now more than twice as high as in the U.S. The problem is even more puzzling when we consider that Canadian and U.S. workers share many of the same unions, and work for many of the same employers, which operate in very similar economic environments. Prior research on the U.S./Canada unionization divergence has either too narrowly focused on proximate causes without seeking to understand their historical and institutional context, or too broadly identified essential differences in political cultures without specifying mechanisms linking cultural differences with institutional configurations and policy outcomes. This project addresses these problems by examining the historical conditions surrounding labor policy formation and development in both countries, with a special emphasis on variations in the relative permeability of state institutions. The central research hypothesis is that more permeable state institutions in the U.S. allowed labor to have their policy goals incorporated into state policy more easily than their Canadian counterparts, but at the expense of creating a labor policy that was more politically contested and less institutionally stable over time. In contrast, the greater impermeability of Canadian state institutions forced unions to fight for labor policy reform from the outside. While this made it more difficult initially for Canadian unions to achieve their policy goals, once labor’s political pressure brought protective labor legislation within the purview of state action, the same institutional impermeability had the effect of shielding Canadian labor’s gains, creating a policy regime that was less politically contested and more institutionally stable. Given established links between union strength and outcomes such as welfare policies, political landscapes, and socio-economic inequality, this research into the causes of diverging union strength can deepen our understanding of forces driving a much broader set of social indicators. At a more theoretical/scientific level, this study uses the empirical case of U.S./Canadian unionization divergence to offer important insights into still poorly understood processes of institutional formation and development. Additionally, thanks to labor unions’ unique position as organizations that operate both within and outside state institutions, this study allows us to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the complex interplay between state institutions, social mobilization, and government action. Finally, at a methodological level, this study highlights the importance of incorporating temporal analysis as a critical means understanding cross-national institutional differences.

Dan Fahey, Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management: Rethinking the Resource Curse: The Case of Armed Conflict in the Ituri District, Democratic Republic of the Congo

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is often heralded as a prime example of the resource curse in action. For more than a decade, areas of the Congo rich in valuable resources have experienced more or less continuous armed conflict and insecurity, including the Ituri District in northeastern Congo. In my dissertation, I describe and analyze the links between three natural resources (gold, timber, land) and armed conflict in Ituri between 1998 and 2007. I combine perspectives from political economy and political ecology to argue that the hegemonic aspirations of Uganda's President Museveni and the economic interests of Ugandan businessmen in Ituris resources and markets were the main reasons for the onset of war in Ituri. That is, in contrast to the notion common among resource curse proponents that rebel groups start civil wars to capture resource revenue, in Ituri the international dimension was dominant in conflict onset. I further argue that after the war started, the Ugandan army and various local armed groups competed for control of resources and territory within a polywar of international and internal conflicts linked to multi-scalar political economies. My dissertation is based in part on field research conducted in the Congo and Uganda between 2007 and 2009.

Meredith Kolar, Germanic Linguistics: Man-Speak, Woman-Speak: A Thousand Years of Gendered Germanic Universals?

While translating the 10th century Old English story, the Life of Saint Agatha, written by the monk, Ælfric, I discovered a common thread of male-biased gender discourse connecting Old English and modern English. A similar phenomenon appears in comparison of older German texts with modern German. This phenomenon suggests that although the texts or forms of English and German have altered dramatically over the last thousand years, the discourse about gender has changed much less. The perceived roles of women, regardless of religious connections, remain a marked part of the conventions of Western social discourse. Employing a four-way comparison of the language of historical texts and interviews with native speakers of the modern languages, my dissertation tackles questions of gender and gendered language use and its evolution in two different linguistic cultures, English and German. Using the concept of a PUD, or “Patriarchal Universe of Discourse”—the culturally legitimated practices of a language’s standardized usage under patriarchal auspices—and incorporating new evidence from the cognitive sciences, I will linguistically deconstruct the grammar of each language to identify usages that signal a patriarchal bias about women. The cross-linguistic, temporally broad approach to this topic is imperative at the present. In today’s globalized society, where women are politically and economically as visible as men, modern discourses about gender across cultures are often amplified. Such discussions cause cultural misunderstandings and inhibit peaceful global relations, especially given the undeniable presence and intensified dialogues about diverse theological convictions. I seek to answer questions of vital importance for interlingual communications globally. Namely, how different are two languages, such as German and English, in their approaches to gender, and how has each developed this discourse uniquely over time? In comparison with existing research, the several intersecting foci in my study—which juxtaposes linguistic and cognitive scientific methods with theological texts, feminist ideology, historical discourse, and contemporary fieldwork—offer a heretofore unstudied and fertile research medley. My dissertation endeavors to open a new frame of discussion about gender and feminism that may serve as a model for further research on more distantly related or unrelated languages and world regions.

Jody LaPorte, Department of Political Science: Instituting Autocracy: Protest and Response in Post-Soviet Eurasia

This project investigates state response to protest in non-democratic regimes. Although many theories of authoritarianism predict that non-democratic rulers will limit the expression of public dissent, there is in fact considerable variation in the amount of protest tolerated across post-Soviet authoritarian regimes. I develop a theory of protest toleration in non-democratic regimes, arguing that the strategic toleration of protests can provide governments with information on citizens’ true policy preferences. This information is critically important in non-democratic contexts, given that voting and other common forms of political participation are often used to legitimate the regime rather than communicate citizens’ true opinions. The use of protests to gather this information can thus contribute to the creation of political stability. I draw from the literature on international and domestic influences on authoritarian rule to hypothesize several factors that shape the relative costs and benefits of tolerating versus limiting protest within a given country. These hypotheses are tested using an original dataset of protest events and archival and interview research conducted in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Belarus.

Fareen Parvez, Department of Sociology: The Politics of Islam in France and India: An Ethnography of State-Muslim Relations and Subaltern Civil Societies

This dissertation uses ethnographic methods to examine Islamic revival movements among minority Muslims in Lyon, France, and Hyderabad, India. Both cases are marked by increased Islamic piety and tension with the secular state. Everyday religious life and institutions are constituted as politically threatening, even though poor Muslims increasingly have neither the means nor will to make claims of the state. Although poor Muslim communities are withdrawing from the state, the dissertation argues that the political potentiality of their Islamic civil societies is shaped by complex internal dynamics and specifically, class relations. It argues specifically that there is a rapid development of poor Islamic civil societies in Hyderabad that the Muslim middle-class in turn builds upon and leads toward political claims-making. In Lyon, there has been a gradual retreat of civil societies in working-class Muslim neighborhoods and a political isolation that is solidified by the intense class division within the Muslim population. The importance of the contrast between these
two cases lies not merely in demonstrating the diverse faces of Islamic movements, contrary to prevalent explanations that fail to make distinctions between different types of Islamic revivals, but also in determining the potential of poor minority social movements to make claims of the state either in the religious or economic realms. In presenting these divergent trajectories of Muslim civil societies, the dissertation also shows how and why the state politicizes everyday Islamic life, thus arbitrarily creating categories like political Islam regardless of the degree to which mosques and Islamic associations constitute civil societies or engage the state.

Jason Purcell, Department of Political Science: Small Power Politics

Ample empirical and anecdotal evidence suggests that, over the past 60 years, small states have been able to: (i) accrue impressive amounts of institutional power (votes and vetoes in international institutions); and (ii) leverage that power in order to build and foster an “everybody gets one” system for the division of key parts of the global commons (e.g., geosynchronous orbits, the electromagnetic spectrum, internet addresses, Exclusive Economic Zones, etc.). Indeed, it appears as though, relative to their material power/assets, small states have been far more successful than larger states at amassing institutional power and shares of the global commons. So the puzzle becomes: with little material power to leverage, how have small states been able to expand their institutional power – and their shares of key aspects of the global commons, largely as a function of that power – “under the nose(s)” of larger states? In order to solve this puzzle, my dissertation provides a rigorous definition of a “small state”; establishes, empirically, that over the past 60 years the “everybody gets one” system has resulted in the growth of small states’ institutional power and shares of the global commons; and then adjudicates among rival hypotheses that might explain this seeming “triumph of small power politics”.

Jamie Rowen, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, Berkeley Law: Transitional Justice as a Transnational Social Movement

Transitional justice programs tend to advocate for truth commissions to protest impunity and to prevent future human rights violations. This project examines transitional justice as a transnational social movement. The central research question is how a transnational social movement sets its agenda initially and how that agenda evolves over time. The study focuses on the internal dynamics among movement participants, the external political forces that shape movement strategies, and the processes by which truth commission goals are formulated. The first phase of involves a broad based survey of 850 self identified movement participants, followed by in depth qualitative interviews with key informants. Studying self-identified movement activists will provide insight into how the movement defines its goals and chooses its strategies as well as into tensions among movement activists. The second phase of the study will consist of an ethnographic study of current truth commission efforts regarding torture policies under the Bush administration. I will conduct participant observation fieldwork with several organizations that are promoting truth commissions to redress state sponsored violence. I will also conduct qualitative interviews with key informants and archival research on media reports to analyze how the movement agendas are set and evolve over time in this domestic context. The findings will increase our understanding of how a social movement emerges and reveal competing goals and strategies to redress human rights abuses.

Arpita Roy, Department of Anthropology: The Large Hadron Collider and the Dialectics of Science and Society

In October 2009, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, Switzerland, will start its experimental run of proton-proton collisions, as a probe into the structure of matter and forces of nature. This ambitious event is the focus of discussion in physics, philosophy and popular press. Anthropologically it directs attention to an interesting moment in the life of a laboratory when inquiry, innovation and instrumentation meet. There is a peculiar logic in the heart of science that profoundly distinguishes it from other areas of human endeavor. Modern science must constantly exceed its own limits. It is in the character of science for accomplishments to be antiquated. In this quest for novelty, science betrays that its goal is not that of finality, but of development and growth per se. While there is no consensus on the prognosis of the future that will emerge, the trend itself is seen as desirable, healthy and normal. The open and contingent future is a thrilling prospect and an indication that all is well. It is here that we must pause and inquire what is science devoted to? Pure physics is presented as an intellectual endeavor. It is devoted to increasing pure knowledge, with increase in knowledge as a value by itself. But the social scientist asks about the genealogy of the desire for knowledge. We ask: why is pure knowledge valuable? Is it not social participation that gives meaning to techno-scientific activities? How are social interests reconciled with the disinterestedness of science? The Large Hadron Collider presents us with the general problem of the dialectics of science and society. The rationalities of scientific activity form the basis through which I approach the nature and extent of knowledge that modern science stakes.

Neal Richardson, Department of Political Science: The Politics of Abundance: Export Agriculture and Redistributive Conflict in South America

Spurred by surging global demand for food and biofuels, the production of agricultural commodities for export has boomed in South America in recent decades. This economic expansion has reshaped political conflicts over redistribution in Argentina and Brazil, two of the largest players in global agricultural markets. In Argentina, farmers were unable to resist an increasing export tax burden for years; then, they suddenly exploded in protest in 2008, barricading roads throughout the country and assembling mass, anti-government rallies. In contrast, new, well-funded and highly organized associations have formed in Brazil, promoting the election of large farmers into office while also building a powerful national lobby. To explain the varying patterns of organization and conflict that are emerging over agricultural commodity exporting, this dissertation addresses two fundamental questions. What determines urban-based political actors’ interests and preferred means for redistributing the growing commodity wealth? And what affects the modern rural sector’s ability to mobilize politically against these redistributive pressures? The research highlights the importance of changes in rural social structure and of macroeconomic variables, as well as electoral and federal institutions, in shaping rural-urban political conflict in contemporary Latin America.

Sarah Staveteig, Departments of Sociology and Demography: Genocide and Fertility: How Mass Violence Shaped Women's Reproductive Trajectories in Bosnia and Rwanda

How does genocide affect reproductive behaviors and decisions among surviving women? Initially during wartime, fertility tends to decline as households are displaced, spouses become separated, and economic scarcity induces women to postpone pregnancy. But what about afterward: how does the ultimate type of insecurity—risk of death, loss of property, political and economic collapse―change the calculus of women’s reproductive decisions? Women, while generally not combatants, may be affected by mass violence as mothers, daughters, and wives of combatants or victims or as direct victims of rape or torture themselves. Even if far removed from violence, few are immune from the secondary effects of genocide such as famine and uncertainty. Population-level fertility trends following episodes of genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda during the early 1990s have diverged: in Bosnia,fertility has continued its pre-war decline and is now among the lowest-fertility countries in the world, while in Rwanda the fertility rate initially declined after the 1994 genocide, but then rebounded over the last decade before falling again. My dissertation triangulates statistical analysis of nationally-representative datasets, secondary literature, and interviews I conducted with 117 individual women and 24 key informants over the course of nine months. A preliminary analysis of this evidence suggests that three factors were central determinants of post-genocide fertility trends in both countries: the gender dynamics of genocidal violence (particularly sex-selective killing and mass rape); pre-existing cultural norms and frameworks surrounding childbirth and marriage; and postwar economic and political recovery. In Bosnia, sex-selective killing created a large number of female widows who are reluctant to marry, and when added to a poor economic recovery and tendency to emphasize child affordability, the fertility rate has continued to decline. In Rwanda the postwar economic recovery and political reconciliation have been more substantial, and flexible cultural norms on monogamy and remarriage enabled a temporary resurgence in the birth rate.

Susanne Wengle, Department of Political Science: Power Politics: The Political Economy of Market Making in Russia’s Electricity Sector

Who has been able to shape post-Soviet markets, why and how? My dissertation examines the process of building institutions that underpin new markets through the lens of Russia’s electricity sector. Electricity is practically and symbolically a prerequisite of modern life, as everybody is connected to the electricity system by a tangible, physical network. While the project is an examination of the politics of reform in a key sector of the Russian economy, my findings have broader implications for comparative political economy.
My research has yielded two types of findings: it makes number of observations on state-market relations in Russia that run counter to dominant views, and, more generally, it contributes insights on the emergence of regulatory institutions. First, I argue that President Putin’s government is pursuing a carefully managed developmentalist agenda that is based on national and regional economic strategies, the ultimate goals of which are not a new form of autarky but a successful integration into the international economy. Infrastructural projects and energy subsidies play a key role in these strategies. Secondly, I show how cross-regional differences in the way electricity markets are regulated can be explained by looking at the ability of the country’s new economic empires – large conglomerates - to influence the government’s development strategies. Energy and industrial oligarchs influenced regional governments in the 1990s, inscribing their role in the narrative of regional development. More recently they have shaped the federal government’s strategy for integrating Russia into international markets.
Finally, my research draws attention to “new geographies” of regulation. After three decades of globalization and neo-liberal reform, territories of economic governance have become destabilized and shifted everywhere. I show that in the process of re-regulation new zones of governance have emerged. An important consequence of this finding is that the scope or the ”zones” of regulation cannot be taken for granted; they do not necessarily overlap with the political boundaries of the state and their boundaries are themselves subject to political conflict. While it is well recognized that successful regulatory institutions do not follow the “best practice” of advanced industrial countries, research on place- and sector-specific market institutions outside the industrialized West is still scarce. At its broadest, I hope that my research contributes to this lacuna, and provides a perspective on the links between economic liberalization and new forms of regulation of local, daily, taken-for-granted economic interactions.