Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

John L. Simpson Memorial Research Fellows, 1999-2000

Regina Abrami, Political Science: Morality Plays: The Institutional Origins of Markets and Market Patterns in "Market Socialist" Vietnam and China. Using the cases of Vietnamese and Chinese transition to "socialism" and "market socialism", this dissertation considers the role of an overlooked, but crucial institutional aspect of national market development - the moral politics of governance over economic exchange. It does so by examining how ideas of economy dating from the pre-reform period shape different forms of urban market formation and regulatory development today. The aim is to explain why different players come to the forefront of marketized economies and how institutions shape the organizational strategies of state builders at the different and conflicting levels of market development, market organization and national market-building. It does so by charting how the political struggle to build socialist national markets and subsequently "market socialism" is waged primarily against peddlers, not the far more easily identified former regime's capitalist class or contemporary beneficiaries of increasing corruption. In their mobility and speculation in and over the economy, peddlers have stood throughout as a nettlesome reminder of systemic shortcomings. This phenomenon is examined concretely through comparative historical and ethnographic study of market creation in Chengdu, China and Hanoi, Vietnam. It has brought a host of "bad classes" to the forefront of Chengdu's marketplaces, at the same time that the "good class" of poor peasants who played a major role in Vietnam's large second economy are pushed out of the urban marketplace by central state regulatory reform. The dissertation will show that the specific histories are shaped by differing ideas of community which, in turn, shape network potential, the form of grassroots responses in the past and, in many ways, the terms of local and national market-building tactics today.

Anne Marie Baylouny, Political Science: Kin or Class: Organizing the Economy in Jordan and Syria. This study is a comparison of the business organizations in Jordan and Syria which arose or increased in influence since initial market liberalization in the late 1980s and 1990s. A comparison of the two countries reveals counterintuitive findings. In Jordan, organizing along kinship lines, encompassing multiple economic sectors, has become dominant. Informal family ties in Jordan have been strengthened, reinvented, and turned into formal, registered cooperative associations during the past decade. Syria has not witnessed such a trend, despite sharing the cultural tradition of family economic organizations. Indeed, to the surprise of those characterizing Syria as a sectarian-run economy, families remain informal, voluntary groups, while merchants and manufacturers' associations have become the key groups. Why, as markets were liberalized, did kin organizations overtake the Jordanian organizational field, making trade and business associations irrelevant? Ms. Baylouny's hypothesis is that the divergent outcomes are due to the prior economic orientation of the countries, i.e. Jordan's service-sector versus Syria's domestic production-based economy. Jordan's economic profile favoring service employment entailed incentives for collective organizing along multi-class lines, using idioms of solidarity such as community and lineage, whereas Syria's manufacturing-based economy spurred economically-defined formal organizations. In shedding light on the incentives behind these organizations, Ms. Baylouny draws heavily upon recent insights from economic anthropology.

Benjamin Goldfrank, Political Science: Decentralization and "Deepening" Democracy in Latin America. Almost uniformly, political analysts of and actors in the recently democratized countries of Latin America deplore the quality of the new democracies, pointing to one or another deficiency, including ineffective legislatures, inefficient public bureaucracies, corrupt judiciaries, and, perhaps most strikingly given their mobilization during transitions, apathetic citizens. Leaders across the political spectrum have continually advocated civic renewal. In order to move beyond lamenting the region s democratic deficiencies, Mr. Goldfrank's proposal is to study the few cases where local-level governments have created participatory institutions and an active citizenry has sustained them. The central research question is: what were the effects of these new participatory processes on the efficiency, accountability and effectiveness of local government and on the organization, democratic values, and integration of citizens? Mr. Goldfrank will concentrate on the municipal administrations in three Latin American cities: those of the Workers Party in Porto Alegre, Brazil; the Broad Front in Montevideo, Uruguay; and the Radical Cause in Libertador, the major municipality of Caracas, Venezuela. In each of these cases, the municipal administration advanced a program of decentralizing city services and of increasing citizen input into how local government operates. Most importantly, these governments opened up new channels for citizens to deliberate over and decide upon local municipal budget allocations, whereas during previous administrations, budget decisions took place in secrecy and citizens needs were rarely met.

Anna C. Korteweg, Sociology: Needs Interpretation and the Construction of Gendered Citizenship: New Welfare State Policies in the Netherlands and the United States. The Globalization of the economy and a concomitant decline in the autonomy of the state has caused both welfare state retrenchment and welfare state restructuring. To understand how these processes are gendered, Ms. Korteweg turns to recent welfare state reforms in the Netherlands and the United States. Moving beyond comparative analyses that focus on policy intent and national level differences, Ms. Korteweg turns to the welfare office as a site in which citizens meet the state face-to-face and in which social policy ultimately takes shape. In 1996, the two countries passed welfare reform legislation that changed the goal of providing social assistance to single mothers. In the United States, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act ended an already minimal commitment to support single mothers' stay-at-home mothering. In the Netherlands, concerns with social exclusion and lack of social participation of poor citizens led to a change in the General Social Assistance Act from providing a basic income to making receipt of social assistance benefits contingent on an active search for work. Many of these general assistance recipients are single mothers. In both cases these new policies intersect with changing realities of family and work to push single mothers on welfare into the labor force. Through observations of client-caseworker interactions and interviews with clients and caseworkers, Ms. Korteweg will answer the question of how the state constructs gendered citizenships as it highlights certain rights and responsibilities over others. Specifically, this research will show how the state is implicated in the construction of gendered needs associated with women's mothering, work, and care and how these gendered needs constructions form the basis for female citizenship.

Ruth Mostern, History: Apprehending the Realm: Territoriality and Political Power in Song China (960-1276 CE). This project explores the creation, abolition, maintenance and depiction of domestic political jurisdictions (provinces, prefectures and counties) during China's transition to early modernity. During the three hundred years of the Song era, China's political landscape was quite fluid. Temporally, jurisdictional change was associated with the consolidation of the regime in the tenth century, with two reform movements during the eleventh century, and with recovery from invasion in the twelfth century. The final hundred years of Song rule were, by contrast, a time of little territorial change. Spatially, the wealthy and commercializing core of the empire maintained an administrative geography largely dating from the seventh century, even as the population grew in some places by an order of magnitude. Meanwhile, on the depopulating Yellow River floodplain, many jurisdictions were consolidated, while new countries were founded throughout the settlement frontier of the middle Yangzi. Along the military fronties of the north and south, counties and prefectures were abolished and re-established in quick succession as fiscal and strategic circumstances compelled personnel redistribution. This dissertation demonstrates, in other words, that territorial jurisdictions were not simply arbitrary compartments within which history unfolded: the creation and maintenance of a political landscape was, rather, integrally linked to state power, geopolitics, and demographic transformation. The first chapter of the dissertation analyzes the representation of territories and territorial change in the maps and gazetteers of the Song period. The second chapter illustrates patterns of time, space, and type in Song jurisdictional change. Chapter three depicts how various fiscal and military policy objectives were addressed by the creation and abolition of territories, and the limits of state power which this process reveals. Chapter four looks as how county territories were maintained and communicated by local officials' property and administrative mapping initiatives. The final chapter puts the Song experience of territorial change in historical perspective, looking back to the sixth century and forward to the twentieth.

Nancy Postero, Anthropology: Manufacturing Identities in Lowland Bolivia. In Bolivia, the neoliberal government declared Bolivia to be a "multicultural" "pluriethnic" nation, tying indigenous citizenship to the nation's economic development through a policy of multiculturalism. At the same time, local indigenous groups are mobilizing resources for their own economic and cultural development, often relying on advice, training, and financial support from international nonprofit organizations. Both local and national development strategies turn on the creation of a socially constructed category of "indigena"(Indian), which has very different meanings for the state, the indigenous groups, and nonprofit organizations. Ms. Postero's Ph.D. research examines the creation and negotiation of ethnic categories in these national, local, and global contexts by studying the Capitana Zona Cruz,22 communities of Guarani Indians who have migrated into the growing metropolis of Santa Cruz, in eastern Bolivia. They are caught between assimilating into an urban environment and reinventing themselves as a modern indigenous group to avail themselves of the economic and cultural opportunities now available.

Jonathan Zatlin, History: The Currency of Socialism: Money in the GDR and German Unification, 1980-1990. This dissertation argues that the method and pace of German unification was determined by a political and economic culture peculiar to East Germany. By exploring the function of money in the planned economy, Mr. Zatlin shows how the legacy of socialism, and not the lure of capitalism, led East Germans to embrace the West German mark and political institutions. Despite what most commentators have claimed, forty years of official anit-capitalist rhetoric and daily experience with the planned economy did not simply vanish along with the Berlin Wall. On the contrary, socialism continued to inform politics in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) even as East Germans voted in the parliamentary elections of March 1990 to surrender their monetary -- and therefore political -- sovereignty. East German desire for the West German mark was conditioned by the ruling Socialist Unity Party's (SED) tireless invocations of the Marxian labor theory of value and the everyday experience of economic shortage, which had taught East Germans to reify money and treat it as an object of limited equivalency, rather than a medium of exchange.