|
Members 2007-2008
Faculty | Staff
| Past Members
2007-2008
Members
Benjamin
Brower
Texas A
& M University
History
West Building Room 114
(609) 734-8170
bbrower@ias.edu 
|
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.
|
Sari Wastell
University
of London
Anthropology
West
Building Room 336
(609) 734-8274
swastell@ias.edu
| When
Justice at a Distance Comes Home: Humanitarian Law and International
War Crimes Prosecutions in the Hague versus the Jurisdictionf of the
ex-Yugoslav States
Most
parties, whether adopting a critical or a celebratory stance in respect
of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
(ICTY), recognize that at the time of its establishment in 1993, it was
the only possible venue for the prosecution of wartime atrocities
committed in the former Yugoslavia. Thirteen years on, however, the
2010 completion strategy anticipates the Tribunal’s closure
and
the full transfer of prosecutorial responsibility to the national
jurisdictions based in Sarajevo, Zagreb, Belgrade and Pristina. This
research explores the tensions and challenges involved both in this
process of transition, as well as in the articulation of legal and
extra-legal fora across international and national levels. Borrowing
from scalar theory and building on nearly two years of intensive
research in the Hague and the national jurisdictions (with prosecutors,
victim and witness support workers, outreach programs, political
activists, and NGO workers), it develops an account of recent practices
as well as some provisional suggestions for a different model of
transitional justice - one which might better harness the successes and
failures of the ICTY to underpin future, similar endeavors, not least
in the maturation of the International Criminal Court.
|
Visitors
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.
|
Helen
Nissenbaum
Term
2
New York University
Philosophy
West Building Room 115
609-734-8171
helen@ias.edu
| Values-at-Play
The project is an analytic framework and
methodology for taking social, ethical, and political values into
consideration in the design of computer and information systems, with
attention to the content and mechanisms of video games.
|
Ian
Roxborough
State
University of New York, Stony Brook
Sociology
West
Building Room 119
(609) 734-8367
iroxborough@ias.edu
| The Third World in the Worldview of American
Military Strategists
This
is a combination of intellectual history and sociology of
knowledge. I
propose to write a monograph on how US strategic thinkers have
conceptualized operations in developing countries. Using
recent work
on Cold War intellectual history as a model, I build on this to analyze
debates within the US military about threats emanating from the global
periphery (rogues, weak states, Islam, "chaos," ethnic conflict,
"evil-doers," etc.) and appropriate US responses. The
military has
engaged in a wide-ranging internal debate since the end of the Cold War
on the nature of the new security environment–"it's still a
dangerous
world"–and since 9/11 this debate has increasingly focused on
"weak
states." I describe the worldview(s) of different groups
within the
strategic community, examine how these are internally articulated, and
show how they are closely tied to visions of the nature of American
society. I describe the internal logic, contradictions,
tensions,
unexamined assumptions, and processes of reasoning of contemporary US
strategists.
|
Research
Assistant
| 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
| 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?
|
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