Members 2007-2008

Benjamin Brower
Texas A & M University
History
West Building Room 114
(609) 734-8170
bbrower@ias.edu

Brower

The Mediterranean Hajj under French Rule, 1798 - 1962

This project examines Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places (Hajj) during the colonial period. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, French officials introduced new rules regulating travel of Muslim pilgrims from the Mediterranean countries that fell under their control, countries such as Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Lebanon, and Syria. These rules reflected standard colonial goals, typified by the triad of order, authority, and economy, but they also expressed tensions within French society about the social place of religion and the formation of the secular (laïcité), a new category that altered relations between religion and politics. Underemphasized by historians of secularism is the fact that key elements of laïcité emerged out of colonial practices in the Muslim Mediterranean. These colonies became a source of negative inspiration marking the boundary between the "tolerant" values of metropolitan France and an "archaic" religiosity represented by France's Muslim subjects. At the same time, Muslims under French rule considered religion and the global realities of the modern age, a period when most of the world's Muslims found themselves under non-Muslim rule. Like their French counterparts, Muslim reformers were concerned about the social place of religion, how to express cultural authority in the idioms of modernity (hadatha), and how to rearticulate social identities and political projects in the wake of colonialism that were both effective and passed the test of cultural authenticity (asala).

Mary Dudziak
University of Southern California
Law
West Building Room 118
(609) 951-4442
mdudziak@ias.edu

How War Made America: A Twentieth Century History

This project will reexamine the history of twentieth century America as a war story. War is usually thought of as episodic, an interruption to normal life. However, for most of twentieth century U.S. history, war was not an exception to normal time. Instead, war and preparation for war persistently shaped the nature of American democracy, the powers of government, the rights of citizens, and the nation's place in the world. Law is often thought of as a source of limits to government war power, but in twentieth century America, law helped entrench war-related state-building. Rather than a wall against excesses of power, law has been a vehicle through which the impact of war is embedded in American democracy over time. In the conventional understanding, the rule of law is thought to be under pressure during exceptional moments of war. This project will argue instead that war, security and militarization have been persistent features of American life. The great debates since September 11 have concerned the nature of rights and government power in the face of a new threat, but the more enduring questions are what the nation had become before the twin towers fell, and the way war had seeped into its center. What has war made of American democracy, and how has the nature of democracy been forged in war? War must be thought of not as a periodic challenge to American law and governance, but as the context for its twentieth century formation. This project will pursue these questions through a twelve chapter narrative history, under contract with Oxford University Press.

Leonard C. Feldman
University of Oregon
Political Science
West Building Room 329
(609) 734-8033
lfeldman@ias.edu

Governed by Necessity

"Necessity knows no law." But how do we know necessity? My book project examines early modern and late modern political thought concerning the concept of necessity. For some, those crises that compel us to act outside of the law have an obvious factual character. For others, necessity is a ruse of power--a hollow justification for an assertion of sovereign exceptionalism. My project takes issue with both positions. Drawing on phenomenological and discursive approaches to social meaning, I critically examine the social construction of necessity and investigate necessity as a project of governance. I examine theoretical debates about necessity, and trace these debates through several issue areas: poverty, humanitarian assistance, and torture. This project is a work of applied political theory that aims to offer a rigorous account of the particular contexts within which necessity claims emerge, the set of relations, institutions and identities that render a necessity claim intelligible, and the kinds of political practices necessity enables. Finally, this project develops democratic theory in relation to emergency powers by developing a framework for thinking through democratic publics' judgment of necessity claims.

Jonathan Hyslop
University of the Witwatersrand
History
West Building Room 339
(609) 734-8270
jhyslop@ias.edu

The Rule of Law and Imperial Citizenship in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century South Africa

The project will examine the political uses of the notion Rule of Law in South Africa between the 1870s and 1914. In particular it asks (a) How did contestations over the Rule of Law play themselves out in politics, popular culture, and literary production, and (b) To what extent did such contestations operate in an Empire-wide context rather than a regional one (looking particularly at interactions with political developments in India, Australia and the British metropolis). The study will be carried out through a set of biographically-focused case studies, and will be informed by a concern with the potentialities and limitations of such a methodology. It will address the contradictory and ambiguous character of the concept of the Rule of Law as it impacted on a highly racialised society. Particular focii of attention will be: tensions between settler and metropolitan authorities; the ambivalent relationship between African elites and British power; the dynamics of the white segregationist labour movement; and the triangular relationship between the leaders of the Indian immigrant communities in South Africa, nationalism in India, and the imperial center. Special attention will be given to how the South African War (1899-1902) and other armed conflicts affected conceptions of law and citizenship. Throughout, the formative impact of this period on politico-legal discourses in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa will be considered.

G. John Ikenberry
Princeton University
Political Science
West Building Room 309
(609) 734-8267
jikenberry@ias.edu

Liberal Leviathan: The Future of Rule-based Order in the American Unipolar Era

This project is a book-length study of the crisis of rule-based order in the contemporary American-dominated global system. In the last century, and particularly after 1945, the United States was the world's greatest champion of international order organized around multilateral rules and institutions. Today, in an era characterized by the preeminence of American power or "unipolarity," the United States seems to be less committed to supporting and operating within a system of mutually agreed upon rules and institutions. The United States is more of a rule- breaker, rather than a rule-maker. In the view of many people around the world, America has changed: when it exercises power today, it rends rather than strengthens the fabric of international community. This project seeks to understand and explain this shift in America's orientation to global rule-based order. How deeply rooted is this shift? Is it mostly about the Bush administration and the Iraq war, and so will soon abate? Or is it a deeper phenomenon, rooted in changes in America and the global system, and so will endure? Is a unipolar distribution of power in fact compatible with a liberal, rule-based international order? What is the impact of American unipolarity on patterns of dominance and cooperation? What is the future of liberal international governance of the global system?

Michael M. Karayanni
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Law
West Building Room 113
(609) 734-8167
mkarayanni@ias.edu

Religious Communities and Multiculturalism in the Middle East

The grant of judicial autonomy to religious groups in a number of countries in the Middle East can easily be portrayed as a form of a multicultural or pluralistic attitude. However, this same autonomy could undermine the liberal rights of individual group members. This project seeks to identify the kind of factors offered by multicultural theory that can help us assess this predicament. In addition, the project will also show that the individual predicament becomes of an extreme character in deeply divided societies, especially in respect of minority religious groups. The study will focus on the Palestinian-Arab minority in Israel, and make comparative analysis with the religious accommodations in the form of judicial autonomy existing in other Middle Eastern countries.

Navin Kartik
University of California, San Diego
Economics
West Building Room 312
(609) 734-8264
nkartik@ias.edu

Informational Momentum in Dynamic Elections: Theory and Experiments

My research consists of three projects in applied game theory and experimental economics. One project will study a theoretical model of information-based momentum in elections with sequential voting, and test the theory experimentally. The second project is an experimental study of aversion to lying (a particular kind of procedural preference) and its connection with standard social preferences. The third project will try to develop a model of repeated elections where political candidates may have "character," and explore how the incentives to signal character can lead to either policy persistence or excessive variance.

R. Daniel Kelemen
Rutgers University
Political Science
West Building Room 334
(609) 734-8273
dkelemen@ias.edu

Suing for Europe: The Rise of Adversarial Legalism in the European Union

While at the Institute for Advanced Study, I will write a book manuscript based on my ongoing research on the spread of American legal and regulatory style across Europe. My research assesses the degree to which a shift toward American legal style is occurring in the European Union (EU) and explores the link between this shift in legal style and the process of European integration. I argue that European integration encourages the spread of American style adversarial legalism through two linked mechanisms. First, economic liberalization in the EU's internal market undermines more flexible, informal national approaches to regulation and creates pressure for more judicialized forms of re-regulation at the EU level. Second, the political structure of the EU encourages the adoption of inflexible, prescriptive laws and the proliferation of individual rights backed by judicial enforcement. I will assess these arguments with a combination of aggregate quantitative data and detailed case studies of four policy areas in the UK, France, Germany and the Netherlands. Finally, my project explores the normative implications of this trend for governance and democracy in the European Union.

Ellen Kennedy
University of Pennsylvania
Political Science
West Building Room 311
(609) 734-8277
ekennedy@ias.edu

Economic Emergency and the Rule of Law

The Institute theme for 2007-08 frames the rule of law under pressure in terms of war and the temptations of Realpolitik. My research focuses on the economic sources of enlarged prerogative and sovereign discretion in two cases: twentieth century Germany and in the development of international monetary constitutions after Bretton Woods. In both, the rule of law came under pressure after great wars, not only as a consequence of conflicting state ambitions, but as a result of democratic demands. Each is an arena of debate and political theories increasingly relevant to the important question of whether, and if so how, the economy can be governed through the rule of law.

Alan B. Krueger
Princeton University
Economics
West Building Room 304
(609) 734-8260
akrueger@ias.edu

The Payoff to Attending an Elite University

I plan to work on many projects. The flagship project is a study of the impact of attending an elite college on students' subsequent labor market outcomes. Specifically, I will extend my earlier work by merging College and Beyond data to Social Security Earnings histories. Then I will match students who applied to, and were admitted to, the same set of schools. Within these sets of matched students, I will estimate the value of attending an elite college. In addition, I will continue my work with Daniel Kahneman on subjective well-being and time allocation, and I will launch a project to improve measures of economic and labor market performance. Finally, I will develop methods to measure the extent of occupational licensing in the U.S. labor market and analyze the effects of occupational licensing on earnings and worker performance.

Lisa J. Laplante
Praxis Institute for Social Justice
Law
West Building Room 116
(609) 734-8172
llaplante@ias.edu

Victor or Violator? Peru and its War Against Terrorism

Can civil liberties and human rights be balanced with national security and a "war against terrorism"? For twenty-five years, Peru has struggled with that question in its ongoing attempt to squelch the home-grown terrorist group Sendero Luminoso. Peru's anti-terrorism strategy has resorted to a range of tactics, falling in and out of legality, including emergency laws, military repression and draconian anti-terrorist legislation that convicted thousands of people, many innocent. Finally in 2003, in the context of Peru's political transition and the work of a truth commission, Peru's Constitutional Court set legal parameters for Peru's anti-terrorist strategy leading to legal reform and new criminal trials. This study will follow the chronology of Peru's war against terrorism using both legal and social lenses to analyze issues related to the delicate and difficult task of balancing individual rights with national security.

Patrick Macklem
University of Toronto
Law
West Building Room 338
(609) 734-8275
pmacklem@ias.edu

Humanitarian Intervention and the International Rule of Law

As international law reorients itself to address the challenges posed by new forms of military and political emergency, it requires a more robust conception of the rule of law in relation to the exercise of sovereign power in the international legal order. My project contributes to this conceptual task by advancing an account of humanitarian intervention that treats its legality and legitimacy as intertwined. This account locates the normative dimensions of humanitarian intervention less in direct ethical duties that we might owe others to prevent their suffering and more in the insight that gross human rights abuses occur within a broader international institutional framework. It comprehends humanitarian intervention as coercive action predicated on a recalibration of the distribution of sovereignty to mitigate a distributive injustice produced by the structure of the international legal order itself. It generates a formal legal requirement that UN Security Council members provide reasons for their decisions, and invalidates certain substantive reasons that Security Council members might rely on when authorizing or vetoing the use of force. In some circumstances, humanitarian intervention can amount to an international illegality despite its authorization by the Security Council. In other circumstances, humanitarian intervention can possess legal validity despite the lack of Security Council authorization.

Daijiro Okada
Rutgers University
Economics
West Building Room 314
(609) 734-8364
dokada@ias.edu

Scale of Social Cooperation: Markets and Law

We develop models of large-scale (self-enforced) social cooperation. We apply the models to explain emergence, or breakdown thereof, of large-scale, uniquely human enterprises such as markets and law (including social norms). The models' predictions will be compared to empirical evidence from areas as diverse as economics, anthropology, and history, as well as biology.

Bruno Perreau
Sciences Po
Political Science
West Building Room 117
(609) 951-4527
bperreau@ias.edu

Open Community and its Enemies: Homosexuality and the Rule of Law in Contemporary France

My project at the Institute for Advanced Study is based on research regarding, on the one hand, French public policy and, on the other, gay and lesbian politics. I argue that the regulation of homosexuality plays an active part in the legitimation of the political order, both in ordinary and exceptional circumstances, such as during war or in a post-war period.

I intend to study the role of homosexuality in the discourses that inform the law and that the law enacts. From a Foucauldian perspective this means analyzing the contemporary epistémè: why do we think in terms of law? My hypothesis is that anxiety about homosexuality (as one form of difference) promotes an implicit need for constitutionalism: homosexuality is somehow perceived as a heterotopian community revealing the contingency of law. This perception is not specific to France but the French response to it is largely original: a condemnation of any community within the State.

Ralf Poscher
Ruhr-Universität
Law
West Building Room 333
(609) 734-8268
rposcher@ias.edu

A General Legal Theory and Doctrine of the State of Exception

The new forms of terrorism emerging with the attack on the World Trade Center as well as social and environmental challenges as in the French autumn riots or in New Orleans forced western democracies to take special legal measures to cope with threats to their form of life. These extraordinary legal measures led to a new discussion about the state of exception. My research project explores how the state of exception can be described in relation to the legal system and what legal form and concrete regulation a legal regime of a state of exception could and sensibly should, obtain. The project aims, in its analytical part, at a legal theory, and in its constructive part, at a general legal doctrine of the state of exception. The result of the project should be a comprehensive theoretical and structural account of the state of exception, which can serve as a guideline for jurisprudential, doctrinal but also public discussions on extraordinary legal powers in the defense against terrorism and other hazards which are likely to persist or recur in the years to come.

Nancy Ries
Colgate University
Anthropology
West Building Room 319
(609) 734-8350
nries@ias.edu

Power and Potato: Public Cynicism and the Everyday Experience of the Postsocialist State

Whether asserting that a country “survives on potatoes,” narrating the experience of everyday urban aggressiveness, or describing the social effects of mafias and acts of terror, Russian discourse expresses a deep cynicism about institutions of power, governance, state, economy, and law. Many scholars view such widespread cynicism as a negative political force in postsocialist societies – and surely it has both significant and subtle destructive capacities. However, ethnographic findings suggest that cynical discourses about the rule of law and the power of civil society also germinate conceptions of governmentality and sociability in Russia.

By the very practices in which they evade and work around the state, survive economic collapse and personal, familial, community, and national poverty, and talk about “warped” polities, cynical elites, and the everyday violations and terrors of public life, people may constitute and reconstitute structures of citizenship and statehood, formulate and rehearse collectivism, and negotiate political ethos. In so doing, they may be stabilizing forms of statehood denied them by the actually existing state.

Whereas some may see communal cynicism as an effect of flawed governance, Power and Potato argues that we might look for multiple ways in which the Russian state is dynamically given form out of discourses and activities labeled – even by those who speak and employ them – as cynical or corrupt. Such a study in no way anticipates a smooth horizon of utopian statehood and civil society emerging from the rocky shoals of the post-Soviet condition. It does, however, seek to identify practices and conceptual frames which stabilize interpersonal and national community.

Hilary Silver
Brown University
Sociology
West Building Room 337
(609) 734-8266
hsilver@ias.edu

Social Exclusion and Social Solidarity

In Europe and beyond, social exclusion is a recognized social problem of increasing multi-dimensional disadvantage that ruptures the social bond of solidarity and impedes full participation in normatively proscribed social activities. Yet social exclusion is neither well defined nor familiar to American social scientists. During my stay at the Institute, I will try to clarify the concept, draw out its theoretical implications, and write a book to acquaint Americans with a sociological perspective and an empirical literature influential in other parts of the world. The book will draw upon a wide range of historical and contemporary examples to illustrate various perspectives on social exclusion and social solidarity. I also hope to derive some implications of social exclusion and social solidarity for social justice and welfare policies.

Brian Z. Tamanaha
St. Johns University
Law
West Building Room 335
(609) 734-8256
btamanaha@ias.edu

The Contrast Between Rhetoric and Reality in the Rule of Law

I am intrigued (and disturbed) by rhetorical invocations of the rule of law that contrast sharply with the reality of the situation. This takes place within the United States, in the context of the war on terror, as well as in other countries and on the international level. My project will explore the contrast between rhetoric and reality in a number of these contexts, which promises to offer insights about the uses and abuses of this phrase.

Olivier Tercieux
CNRS - Ecole Normale Superieure
Economics
West Building Room 306
(609) 734-8263
otercieux@ias.edu

Robust Equilibria in Non-cooperative Games: Theory and Applications

This project aims to contribute to recent literature that characterizes robust predictions in non-cooperative games, i.e., predictions of a given game that are not (too) sensitive to slight departures from the assumption that this game is common knowledge. More specifically, our first goal is to show that the impact of slight departures from the common knowledge assumption is highly dependent on the way incomplete information is modeled. In particular, it is claimed that allowing for rich models of incomplete information where, for instance, players can have heterogeneous priors or non-partitional information, may dramatically shrink the set of robust predictions. Following Bergemann and Morris (2005), our second goal is to propose applications of this literature to the theory of mechanism design. Defining robust mechanisms, we claim that using direct mechanisms is not without loss of generality when one wants to robustly implement, i.e., implement a social choice function with an equilibrium that is robust.

Lakhdar Brahimi
Director's Visitor Associated with the School
Political Science
West Building Room 308
(609) 734-8283
lbrahimi@ias.edu

In 2000, Lakhdar Brahimi chaired an independent panel that was tasked with making recommendations on how to improve the performance of United Nations Peace Operations. The panel's report, commonly known as the Brahimi Report, was endorsed by the Millennium Summit and quite a few of its recommendations have been - and still are being - implemented.

Conflict and post-conflict situations in our globalized world raise far more issues than those addressed in the Brahimi Report. In the post 9/11 environment, these issues need to be looked at against the background of an International Order still struggling to emerge from the Cold War Era and the sharply divided and often confused approaches to what has been [improperly?] called the War on Terror.

Salman Ahmed, from the United Nations, worked closely with Brahimi in several UN Peace Operations. He also contributed significantly to the Brahimi Report. During the past year, Lakhdar Brahimi and Salman Ahmed have discussed often and in depth the possibility of producing a book from their shared experiences as well as from the experiences of other UN colleagues. They hope to make a modest contribution to the already rich base of knowledge about conflict and post-conflict problems, and reflect more broadly on the shape and direction of international relations in the years to come, both inside and outside of the United Nations.

Piero Gottardi
University of Venice
Economics
West Building Room 315
609-734-8365
pgottardi@ias.edu

Markets and Contracts under Asymetric Information and with Endogenous Information Acquisition

The general objective of the research which I intend to undertake is the analysis of the properties of markets and contractual arrangements in economies where information is asymmetric. Models where markets for contracts coexist, and interact, with other markets will be studied and developed. Such analysis will allow then various economic applications (to the form of optimal taxation, executive compensation,...). I also intend to study situations where information may be acquired, at a cost, and unverifiable reports over it may then be traded on the market, to investigate under what conditions markets for information will emerge, and what would be their properties. The tradeoff between flexible and rigid contracts and the role that the presence of unforeseen contingencies may have in such choice, will also be investigated.

Ariel Furstenberg
Shalom Hartman Institute and Tel-Aviv University
Political Science
West Building Room 313
(609) 734-8269
ariel@ias.edu

Jewish Political Tradition: Politics in History

The project focuses on the history of Jewish political thought from the ancient period to modern times. The project, chaired by Prof. Michael Walzer, has been proceeding for several years, and two volumes of it have been already published (Yale University Press). The part of the project on which I am working is entitled "Politics in History" and it deals with Jewish intellectual reactions to historical events as well as other conceptions of political phenomena such as war and peace.

A.B. Huber
University of California, Berkeley
Literature
West Building Room 313
(609) 734-8258
abh@ias.edu

A.B. Huber

War’s Production: Narrative Form and Optics of Terror in "The General Theatre of Death," 1937-1947

This project returns to the US in the middle years of the twentieth century, and considers the ways in which death was remade by new logics and technologies of violence, and human destruction on an industrial scale. Considering the language of materials including the 1945 United States Strategic Bombing Survey, portfolios of censored American and Japanese photographs of the atomic devastation, and the wartime writings of Benjamin, Auden, and Agee, I hope to attend to the critical convergence of new forms of human death, and the death or dissolution of old theoretical and testimonial forms. I am particularly interested in the ascension of American policies targeting civilian morale (at home, and in the air and atomic war abroad) and the attendant shift in the perception and language of security, fear and fatality. How was death refigured in the anxious literature of the war, and earliest postwar period?