Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

John L. Simpson Memorial Research Fellows, 1995-1996

Lissa Bell, Sociology: Women's Movement, National Politics, and Legal Reform in the United States and France, 1970 - 1990. From 1970 to 1990, organized feminism in France and the U.S. promoted and achieved a similar set of national legal reforms in such areas as abortion, rape, sexual harassment, marriage, divorce, and employment. Social movement theory, feminist theory, and conventional wisdom would have it that such reforms were largely the result of strong women's movements, and at first glance this seems reasonable. The U.S. movement has the kind of profile -- the numbers of adherents, financial resources, organizational infrastructure, and stability -- that makes politicians take notice, yet most attempts to get the U.S. Congress to pass feminist legislation have failed, with almost all major feminist reforms coming from the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, attempts by French activists to shake the parliamentary tree dislodged considerably more fruit, yet the French movement was small, poor, highly factionalized, unprofessionalized, and organizationally unstructured. Ms. Bell's dissertation analyzes and compares the two movements and the web of national political and cultural forces through which they navigate.

David Eaton, Anthropology: The Politics of AIDS in Equatorial Africa. This dissertation, based on research in Congo and Cameroon, analyses how these states and their citizens -- and the conceptions of nationality which animate them -- are engaged with transnational forces and institutions of civil society in creating and responding to epidemics of AIDS. In theorizing these politics, Mr. Eaton examines how diverse forms of the family and experiences of the body shape power and construct the interpretation of affliction, and how the sharing of knowledge is related to other production and exchange in these societies. He discusses changes in emotion and sexual culture, in medical and religious practice, and in the constitution of group boundaries and conflicts, drawing from studies in the capitals and in a forest region shared by both countries. Through this comparative ethnographic approach, he situates the lived experience and local complexity of AIDS within national and international orders of science, capital, and govermentality.

Navroz Dubash, Energy and Resources: Does the Market Promote Sustainable and Equitable Use of Water Resources? A Study of Socially Embedded Groundwater Markets in Gujarat. The recent emergence of groundwater markets throughout South Asia has led policy makers and international development assistance agencies to promote private sales of groundwater as a substantial component of irrigation policies throughout the region. However, the local workings of groundwater markets, which tend to be fragmented and imperfect, and can lead to rapid depletion of aquifers, are scarcely understood. Changes in water management policy for South Asia, then, must be subject to a prior detailed understanding of the workings of existing water markets. Mr. Dubash will examine existing groundwater markets in four regions of Gujarat, western India in order to understand the forms these markets take, the reasons that the terms of exchange vary across markets, the ways that these terms are formed and negotiated, and the implications of these finding for groundwater markets as a policy tool in water management.

William Mazzarella, Anthropology: Marginal Privilege and Imagining Europe: Finland Swedes and the Historical Invention of a European Modernity. This project addresses a question that is central to political anthropology today: How must ethnic and national community be rethought in this potentially post-national moment? Using a strategic combination of participant observation and locally based archival research, Mr. Mazzarella examines the pivotal roles of the Finland Swedes -- traditionally an elite ethno-linguistic minority -- through three critical junctures: the 1918 Finnish civil war, World War II, and the entry of Finland into the European Union. Against a global backdrop of ethnic conflict and national fragmentation, he asks to what extent those collective narratives of community and identity that enabled a successfully plural nation state can be adequate to the demands of the present: a supra-national imagined community called the European Union. The Finland Swedes were at the core of the invention and consolidation of the Finnish national state. Who and what might they be as Europeans?

Carol Ann Medlin, Political Science: By Private Means: Social Policy Reform in Chile, 1973 - 1990. This dissertation analyzes the successes and failures of neoliberal social policy reform in Chile, with special emphasis on reforms introduced during the military period. Although the reforms permeated the gamut of the country's social sectors, Ms. Medlin focuses on three -- social security, health, and education -- to permit a fine-grained analysis of variation in the application of neoliberal reform across sectors. There are three parts to her study. First, she explores the concept of neoliberalism applied to social policy and seeks to explain why the military government chose to implement a neoliberal model of reform over a social policy alternative that was both statist and populist in nature. Second, she compares the application of neoliberal reforms across sectors, seeking to explain why social security was the sector most deeply affected by the reforms, followed by education, and then health. Third, she provides an assessment of neoliberal policy reform in Chile.

Pierre Ostiguy, Political Science: The Raw and the Cooked: Political Identity, Popular Culture and "Nativism " in Argentina. A Study of Peronism and Anti-Peronism . This dissertation focuses on Peronism and Anti-Peronism, two pivotal political identities in Argentina which have been notably resistant to classification along ideological or programmatic grounds. Together with the contrasting socioeconomic characteristics of electoral preferences, Mr. Ostiguy analyzes the discourse of the cleavage, the very different practices of both sides, and their construction of the Other and depiction of the "First World." His dissertation shows how contending class cultures and images of the nation structure political conflict in that society, suggesting that the Argentine political map is best understood as a double political spectrum made up of the traditional right-left ideological spectrum and of a cross-cutting cultural cleavage, between nativism and cosmopolitanism.

Andrea Roberts, Political Science: Upstarts! The Politics of Private Business in China. Economic reforms in China over the past decade and a half have given rise to a new group in China, the private entrepreneurs. These new business owners have become the center of intense speculation about their potential impact on the future of Chinese politics as well as the political stability of China. Very little is known about these people, however, and what is unknown forms an intriguing puzzle. This dissertation seeks to understand how private business owners relate to the government, to other citizens, and to each other in a country that continues to declare itself communist. Are the private entrepreneurs best understood as capitalists fundamentally at odds with the rest of the Chinese polity? Or are they, as government propaganda insists, harmoniously integrated into society, an albeit short-term solution to problems of socialist reform? Or should they be viewed more skeptically, as the main beneficiaries of an authoritarian government bent on constructing a market economy in China?

Brad R. Roth, Jurisprudence and Social Policy: Government Illegitimacy in International Law: An Emerging Norm in Theoretical Perspective. When is a de facto authority not entitled to be considered a "government" for the purposes of international law? This project will seek to determine the extent to which a norm of popular sovereignty has displaced the protections that international law has traditionally accorded de facto authorities; the extent of that norm's relationship (if any) to liberal-democratic principles of government; and the legal implications of this development for forcible and non-forcible multilateral interventions in the internal affairs of states. The answers will promote law-governed responses to civil conflict. Such responses offer the best hope of achieving lasting resolutions while maintaining respect for national self-determination, and thus of enhancing the prospect of continuing multilateralism in peace and security matters. The task entails research of U.N. documents detailing the legal pronouncements and practices of states and international bodies, examination of the historical background to relevant legal controversies, and explication of contestants' competing conceptions in light of their foundations in political theory and comparative law.

David Stuligross, Political Science: Identity versus Territory: Sub-regional Autonomy Movements in India. When a sovereign nation-state allows local authorities some measure of autonomy, how does it decide to whom, how much control, and when such control should be granted? This research will explore why state and central governments in India have responded differently to three similarly articulated demands for sub-state autonomy. In the first case, the demands were essentially rejected by the state government; in the second, a new state seems to be a focal part of the political process; in the third, political actors at all levels have identified the "autonomous district council" (ADC) as an appropriate mechanism to redirect peasant and tribal calls for greater autonomy. In an important sense, all three cases are a part of a continuing political process which is shaped by a combination of institutional capability and political willingness. Through in-depth interviews of national, state, and local political actors, as well as analysis of economic and electoral data, Mr. Stuligross will explore how India's constitution, historical learning, and instrumental economic and political constraints have shaped both the debate and resolution of autonomy demands in India.

John M. Talbot, Sociology: Political Economy of the World Coffee Market. This dissertation will focus on the regulation of international trade in primary commodities in the context of a globalized economy and its effects on the development of commodity-exporting Third World countries. This involves a series of processing states, linked by economic transactions, which is conceptualized as a commodity chain. Mr. Talbot argues that the most important determinant of who benefits from commodity trade is the political and social structure of the commodity chain, using the world coffee market as his empirical case study. The differential impacts on coffee production has led to the formation of differing political coalitions within each coffee-producing country, pressuring the state to react to these changes in differing ways. Mr. Talbot will analyze the ways in which states responded, both in their development of policies to regulate the production and processing of coffee within their own borders and their development of negotiating positions. Next, he will examine how coffee policies are developed in consuming states. Finally, he will analyze the interaction of producing and consuming states in negotiations.

Barbara Walker, Geography: Sisterhood and Survival Strategies: The Social Construction of Women's Rural Institutions in Ghana. Through a study of women's groups in Central Region, Ghana, this project will examine how women invest in local social institutions and use constructions of a "generic woman" and women's solidarity to negotiate their access to productive resources during a time of economic crisis. The research examines changes in women's rural credit and labor cooperatives in Central Region, Ghana, due to structural adjustment policies and development discourse since the early eighties. Women's credit and labor cooperatives exist among both vegetable gardeners and fishmongers in Central Region. Since the UN Decade of the Woman (1975-85), international and local development agencies have increasingly focused in women's associations through which to implement their projects in the Central Region, yet it is rarely asked how such policy intersects with locally specific and historically constituted resource politics in communities. By imposing Western constructions of womanhood and sisterhood on Ghanaian women's cooperatives, these development projects reinforce local class cleavages and generate new inequalities and tensions between women.