Graduate Student Placement
Here are graduate
students for whom I served as principal advisor and dissertation committee
chair.
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 very 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)
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)
University of Leiden – Assistant Professor (from 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,
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,
Yale
University – Assistant Professor (since 2007)
Birol Baskan,
“Religious Institutions and the Diverging Processes of State-
Building
in
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
Qatar
University – Assistant Professor (since 2007)
Roshen Hendrickson
CUNY –
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”