Graduate Student Placement
The following are
graduate students for whom I served as dissertation committee chair.
2012
Kendra Koivu, “Organized Crime and the State: State-Building,
Illicit Markets, and Governance Structures”
Most
people assume that states and organized crime groups (OCGs) commonly exist in
opposition to one another; i.e., that strong states and repress OCGs, and that
weak sates are overrun by them. Kendra finds instead that some strong states
have strong OCGs (such as contemporary Japan) and that some weak states coexist
with weak OCGs (such as interwar Finland). Kendra develops a transactional
model to explain these and other surprising outcomes. Kendra’s model specifies
a range of relationships, from collusion to collision between states and OCGs
that arise out of state agents’ efforts to solve problems related to market
regulation. Kendra discovers that it is not unusual for some state officials to
attempt to recruit OCGs to carry out tasks commonly associated with states, particularly
where this involves efforts to restrict competition and bolster market
penetration beyond a state’s borders.
More generally, Kendra explores how a variety of strategies for state management
of violent actors contributes to state-building efforts, and shapes the
long-term relationship between state power and coercion.
Assistant
Professor, University of New Mexico from 2012
Erin Kimball,
“Peacekeeping for Approval: The Rise of African-Led Interventions”
Erin’s
dissertation tackles a basic question: What accounts for cooperation among a
disparate group of African countries to undertake armed peacekeeping
operations? One would think that widely varied capabilities, long-term fears of
military involvement in domestic politics, and regional norms against overt
infringement on the sovereignty of other African states would discourage such cooperation. Erin tests a range of explanations for this
cooperation such as the influence of new norms that encourage intervention to
prevent atrocities, shifts in regional geo-strategic balances, and hegemonic
management of cooperation under the label of US-led security strategies in
Africa. Erin finds instead that domestic political considerations drive
decisions about whether or not to participate in peacekeeping operations.
Decisions to cooperate tend to emerge out of efforts on the part of leaders to
extract more resources from powerful external patrons that they can then use to
manage members of their own coalitions. Peacekeeping also serves as an
instrument to recruit foreigners to help limit the domestic political roles of
armed forces. Erin finds that these relationships underlying mobilization for
warfare reinforce patron-client logics of domestic politics rather than
increasing the bureaucratic capacities and efficacy of governments that
participate in peacekeeping. She uses the case of Ethiopia’s intervention in
African conflicts as a counterfactual to illustrate this divergence in the
logics of decisions to use force and the divergent outcomes in these decisions’
effects.
Assistant
Professor, St Augustine University (Johannesburg) from 2012. Erin turned down a
job in the US to pursue this opportunity at a relatively new private university
in South Africa.
Christopher
Day, “The Fates of Rebels: The Politics of Insurgency Survival and Demise”
Before
joining our program Chris Day earned his MA in International Affairs from SAIS.
Chris also worked for about nine years with humanitarian aid organizations.
This work took him to conflict zones and put him in positions in which he had
to negotiate with armed actors on the ground in places that included Nigeria’s
delta region, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Uganda and Kashmir. Chris’s dissertation builds on observations
from those experiences and on extensive fielded research in Sierra Leone,
Uganda and South Sudan to address the question: What happens to the great
majority of rebel groups that fail to consolidate and seize state power, and
what do their fates reveal about the nature of past and contemporary rebel
warfare? Chris explains how
patron-client networks dominate the conduct of warfare in some countries. In
many instances, rebellion becomes an instrument of negotiation within an
intra-elite coalition. Political actors in neighboring states discover that they
can use patronage of rebel groups to pursue their own agendas, illustrating
further the intersections of established political networks and violent action.
Associate
Professor, College of Charleston (from 2012)
2010
Natacha Lemasle, “Political Strategies of Local Actors
in the Shadow of International Projects of Post-conflict Reconstruction”
Natacha Lemasle
earned her degree in the joint Northwestern University – Sciences Po PhD
program, with Prof. Samy Cohen at Sciences Po serving
as a co-chair of her dissertation committee. She is concerned with how local
actors in Sierra Leone and Liberia engage with the international “post-conflict
reconstruction and democratization industry.”
She finds that local actors often hold ideas about legitimate authority
that are at odds with global liberal notions of citizenship and individual
rights. They also may hold contrary
ideas about post-conflict justice.
Nonetheless, post-conflict international engagement often requires
acceptance and application of the imported models of politics. Her research in
Sierra Leone indicates that local actors devise strategies “from below” to
modify and on occasion undermine the plans of outsiders. Understanding this
process is critical for mapping the true configuration of post-conflict
political authority in these places and identifying potential flash-points for
future conflict.
Fragile States and Conflict Unit, World Bank (from 2010)
2009
Patrick
Johnston, “Humanitarian Intervention and the Logic of Genocide in Civil War.”
Patrick Johnston asks whether and under what conditions
state targeting of civilians is and effective strategy for defeating rebels. He
considers this question in the context of the cases of the US in the Philippine
War (1900-02), in Vietnam (the 1960s to 1973) and Sudan in Darfur (2000s).
Patrick also has constructed his own data set of significant instances of state
rebel campaigns since 1800. Combining his analysis of these cases and his
larger data set, Patrick finds that the application of force in areas where
rebels operate among non-combatants is a successful device for separating
rebels from non-combatants. Non-combatants conclude that it is in their
interests to move to safer areas under government control, or provide
information to government forces to expand such areas. Patrick’s research shows
that non-combatants do not remain static and behave according to bounded
calculations concerning which force asserts the most control at a given moment.
Governments can use this behavior to expand its areas of control in ways that
do not rely critically on “hearts and minds” campaigns to out-govern rebel
forces in contested areas.
Center for International Security
and Cooperation (CISAC) Stanford University pre-doctoral fellow (2007-09).
Harvard University Belfer
Center—Post-doc (2009-10)
Currently working for the RAND Corporation
2008
Lee Seymour,
“Pathways to Secession: Mapping the Institutional Effect of Secessionist
Violence”
Lee Seymour’s dissertation explores the “international
relations” of separatist insurgencies. He shows how some separatists
successfully utilize appeals to global norms to extract resources and
diplomatic protection from more powerful international actors. They become
adept at focusing appeals to the interests and anxieties of different
constituencies to create political opportunities for themselves. Regional
configurations of power, however, exercise considerable influence over the
utility of these strategies. These strategies, coupled with shifts in global
politics, give separatists new openings to achieve their goals in recent years.
But these “gains” are contingent upon occupying a geo-strategic position that
allows separatists to exploit these opportunities, a condition that not all
share. Seymour conducted field research for this project in Somalia
(Somaliland), Sudan (southern parts), Armenia (Nagorno-Karabakh), and in
Kosovo. Seymour won a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Fellowship (2003-06) United States Institute of Peace, Peace Scholar
Dissertation Fellowship (2006-07), and a Presidential Fellowship (2006-08) and
was a Guest Researcher at Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (Berlin).
Harvard University Belfer Center
– Post-doc (2008-09)
Assistant
Professor, University of Leiden (since 2009)
2007
Claire Metelits, “Coercion and Collusion: Change in Rebel Group
Treatment of Civilians”
(http://libarts.wsu.edu/polisci/faculty-staff/detail.asp?ID=187)
This
dissertation explores why some rebel groups undertake radical shifts in their
behavior toward civilians, seemingly without regard to the resource endowments
or external diplomatic norms that they find in their external
environments. Metelits
explains rebel group behavior in terms of degrees of control over local people
and resources. If rebels exercise something close to a monopoly of control,
they are more willing to engage in “democratic openings” to local people and
involve these people in their day to day decision-making processes. Where this
control is challenged, they are more likely to become more coercive toward
local people. Ironically, this means that rebels who face states that engage in
their own democratic openings are most likely to become more violent toward
local people. In short, global norms of democratic rule seem to gain the most
traction among rebels secure in their control and are most actively defied by
those who are most challenged. Rebel “state-building” is very much about
control and much less about attracting popular support in this analysis. Metelits conducted field research in Turkey and Iraqi
Kurdistan, Colombia, and southern Sudan and received support from the Dispute
Resolution Research Center of the Kellogg School of Business, Northwestern
University and other sources.
Washington State University –
Assistant Professor (since 2007)
2006
Ato Kwamena Onoma, “Rethinking the Causes of Property Rights Regimes: Botswana, Kenya and
Ghana in Comparative Perspective”
(http://www.yale.edu/polisci/people/akonoma.html)
Onoma’s
dissertation asks why people who own real estate in some African countries
sometimes resist reform efforts that would give them greater legal capabilities
to defend their title to this property. One would think that all owners of real
estate would prefer such reforms, since such reforms should increase the value
of properties as collateral for loans when rights become more clearly defined
and exclusive. Instead, Onoma finds that owners of real estate in patronage-based
political systems find more value in legal uncertainty. They use their
political positions to exploit others’ uncertainties, and reap short-term gains
through their control over real estate. Onoma finds
that this kind of behavior rooted in the configurations of elite accommodations
in their higher levels of state power. He shows where legal reform of land
tenure is likely to be defied by ostensible beneficiaries and where it will be
exploited in a manner that will support the growth of predictable markets for
land and bolster credit markets. Onoma conducted about a year and a half of field research
for this project in Ghana, Botswana and Kenya and received support from the
Social Science Research Council and other sources.
Princeton University – Postdoc at Center for Globalization and Governance
Yale University – Assistant
Professor (since 2007)
Birol Baskan, “Religious
Institutions and the Diverging Processes of State-
Building in Turkey and Iran”
Birol Baskan’s dissertation explores diverging historical
evolutions of relations between state institutions and religious organizations
in Iran and Ottoman Turkey. Baskan traces the merger of religious institutions with
state institutions as state rulers attempted to expand the scope of their
authority from the 17th and 18th centuries to the 20th
century. Baskan identifies differences in the
organizational structure of Sunni and Shia religious
organizations as key factors shaping these diverging paths of evolution. In the
case of the latter in Iran, state building projects were more easily absorbed
into the decentralized structures of Shia
organizations (which were initiated as a state project in a massive conversion
of the country’s religious establishment). Ironically, what appeared to be an
easy target for state builders from an institutional perspective in one case
turned out to be the more easily managed (from the state-builder’s perspective)
while the more centrally organized one was more easily controlled. This
dissertation sheds new light on the role of religious organizations in the
state-building process, and provides a basis for a revised look at the role of
these organizations in European state building too. Fluent in Turkish and Persian, Baskan was able to conduct on-site research for this
project.
Qatar University – Assistant
Professor (2007-10)
Georgetown University, School of
Foreign Service (Qatar Campus) – Assistant Professor (since 2010)
Roshen Hendrickson
CUNY – Staten Island – Assistant
Professor
2004
Christina Nyström, “the Patrimonial Straightjacket: A Study of
Namibian Liberation and Path Dependency”
Christina
Nyström’s dissertation investigates the politics of
institution-building and foreign assistance in post-conflict Namibia. Christina
conducted field research in that country to determine the impact of efforts
among domestic and foreign actors to integrate the organizational structures
and practices of the liberation movement into day-to-day governance. Her main
finding is that what seemed to be incentives to adopt practices to strengthen
formal institutions of the state instead bolstered the personalist
networks of the liberation movement. What had been affective instruments of
recruitment and control during the struggle for independence became instruments
of clientelist politics after the struggle. This
occurred in spite of the lessons that domestic and international actors thought
that they had learned from earlier post-conflict transitions.
School
administrator and teacher in Sweden
2001
Krista Johnson,
“From Consensual Decision-making to Conventional Politics: Popular
Participation in Contemporary South Africa”
DePaul University – Assistant
Professor
Agnes Scott College – Assistant
Professor