Scholars 2012-13

Marco Battaglini is an economic theorist who has worked on problems of strategic communication, contractual design and collective choice. His current research is focused on the study of dynamic economies, with special emphasis on the political economy determinants of public investments, public debt and taxation.

Where the Black Caiman Walks: Legacies of Violence and Life against Culture among Ayoreo-speaking People of the Gran Chaco

Lucas Bessire studies the contradictory ways that indigenous kinds of humanity are defined and governed in Latin America, in order to describe how the category of culture increasingly delimits a reductive positics of legitimate life. How might we conceptualize an alternative foundation for a publicly relevant anthropology of indigeneity?

Matching, Investments and Learning in Marriage and Labor Markets

My research will focus on two main areas. The first is the application of matching models to marriage markets, to understand the economic and social consequences of sex ratio imbalances. These imbalances have become particularly large in parts of East and South Asia. The second is the analysis of dynamic models of contracting between firms and workers or managers, when there is uncertainty regarding the ability of the worker. One part of the research will consider a situation where both matching and learning are important, i.e., when there is learning about managerial ability in a large market where managers must be matched to firms.

Ethnic Cleansing and the Long-Term Persistence of Exploitative Institutions: Evidence from the Expulsion of the Moriscos

Recent research in economics stresses the importance of institutions in generating long-term differences in economic growth across countries. To better understand the mechanisms through which exploitative institutions dampen growth, I will use micro-level institutional variation from the Kingdom of Valencia, Spain, from 1575 until the present day. Prior to 1609, the Moriscos (Hispano-Muslims converted to Christianity) of Valencia were subject to exploitative institutional arrangements. After the expulsion of this population in 1609, formerly Morisco areas retained exploitative arrangements that persisted until the 19th century. Preliminary results suggest that these institutional arrangements decreased incomes, stymied the development of the non-agricultural sector, increased criminal activity and decreased the use of money. Additional archival sources will also enable the investigation of the effects of these institutions on educational attainment and to analyze the effects of the advent of a more benign institutional framework in the 19th century.

The Particularism of Political Theory: Globalized Intellectual Traditions meet Islamic Knowledges in Turkey

This project examines the intellectual basis for the Islam-based politics of the ruling AKP in Turkey, and argues that its immense electoral success is partly due to its unique ideology that merges globalized/Western political thought with local Islamic knowledges. The project studies the educational backgrounds, intellectual formations and discourse of Islamist intellectuals and intellectual activities of the AKP circles.

Education and the Human Good

My project is to develop philosophical accounts of education, human flourishing, and the relationships between them, in defense of a version of the view that learning has intrinsic value. It is a project of theoretical synthesis, predicated on a moderate naturalism about what is good for human beings and a modified Rawlsian constructivism regarding justice, building on my work on Aristotle’s ethics and collaboration with Richard Ryan, an influential figure in eudaimonistic psychology.

The Political Economy of Regulation and Public Sector Agencies

The project I will pursue while at the Institute for Advanced Study examines how and why some government administrative agencies achieve superior policy performance, which leads to better economic performance. Using game theoretic models and the application of econometric methods to a new large US government personnel database and other well- established databases of politicization, this project integrates the literature on personnel economics with the literatures on political economy and institutions to explain the performance of administrative agencies. It describes how particular types of organizational structures, civil service incentives, and political management can yield superior policy outcomes by incentivizing bureaucrats to invest in expertise while also insuring political control by elected officials. Extensions to the theory describe how the endogenously determined contours of legislative mandates on the speed and scope of policy implementation, with particular reference to regulation and deregulation, can affect the bureaucrats’ willingness to invest in expertise and implement policies effectively. The research will then compare the theoretically predicted types of optimal structures against the empirically estimated performance metrics to explain differential performance across agencies across time, and how that agency performance affects economic performance in regulated and deregulated industries.

Controlling the Poor: Welfare Fraud Enforcement in the Contemporary Social State

Welfare reform in Western countries has revitalized the traditional bureaucratic routine of welfare control, defined as the institutional arrangements and practices aimed at checking that recipients comply with the rules of benefits. Why did this revival occur? How has a bureaucratic routine been raised to the status of a political and policy issue? How is it implemented? Thanks to the comprehensive study of the French case, set in an international comparative perspective, the answers to these questions provide an original contribution to the analysis of the new balance between politics, economics, and morals that define the contemporary social state.

Reparations and Human Rights

Following the devastating violence of World War II, an emerging discourse of reparations and human rights sought to articulate new precepts against state harm of individuals. Traditionally, reparations could be claimed by one state from another as compensation for the ”costs of war.” For the first time in history, however, the idea of reparations was extended to encompass individual and group claims for redress for state-sponsored violence in the name of human rights. I am completing a book that analyzes the interconnected ideas of reparations and human rights in the context of Cold War Asia. This project is fundamentally nterdisciplinary. Reparation is a key term in political theory and law, but it is also a central concept in psychoanalysis—in particular, object relations—yet the two are rarely discussed in relation to one another. I will explore unexamined links between political and psychic genealogies of reparation in order to investigate the possibilities, as well as the limits, of repairing war, violence, and colonialism in the wake of changing conceptions of the human wrought by genocide and nuclear holocaust. In the space of Cold War Asia, these unexamined links make it possible to analyze the ascension of reparations and human rights, not only as a moral response to, but also, and indeed, as a form of continued state violence.

Effect of Development Program on State-building: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan

The goal of the project is to exploit a large-scale field experiment to analyze the effect of a community-based development program on the success of state building efforts in Afghanistan. The program under study is the largest development program in Afghanistan, which prescribes the creation of democratically elected local councils and sponsors development projects. I will analyze the effect of the program on improving the attitudes of the villagers toward state institutions and government. I will also examine whether newly created councils assume the responsibilities of legitimate local governments and whether their creation improves the quality of local governance.

The Political Economy of Femonationalism

This research project aims to reconstruct, analyze and interpret the contemporary mobilisation of feminist ideas of gender equality by right-wing nationalist parties in Europe. I propose to call this phenomenon "Femonationalism." The project focuses on three countries in particular–France, Italy and the Netherlands– and adopts an interdisciplinary approach and methodology, involving sociological and political theory, migration studies, gender studies, discourse analysis, and political-economic perspectives. Research is organised in five thematic sections. First, I provide a detailed overview of some of the most significant cases of Femonationalism by discussing the history and contemporary morphology of the mobilization of the notion of gender, particularly against Islam, by Dutch, French and Italian nationalist parties and feminist intellectuals in the last decade. Second, I critically discuss the concept of populism, which has been widely employed in the scholarly and public debate to describe right-wing Islamophobic parties, and propose the need for a rearticulation of this debate in terms of considering the "nationalist" contours of such parties, in order to understand the symbolic and performative function of their mobilization of gender. Third, I analyse the shift from multiculturalism to assimilation registered in recent European integration policies and the paradigmatic role played by the "headscarf controversy" in this process. Fourth, I provide an overview of the most important critical interpretations of the contemporary femonationalist discursive formation and assess their importance and limits. Finally, I seek to demonstrate the need to understand Femonationalism on the basis of the different roles of male and female Muslim (and non-Western) migrants in these three European labor markets, in the current restructuring of the European economy and ongoing processes of the "commodification of care."

Geographies of Trade and Conceptions of Economic Space: Comparing Genoese and Geniza Merchants in the Twelfth Century

The geography of the medieval world is not our geography. Recent work defined by seas and oceans at best replaces one modern spatial construct, the nation, by imposing another. Yet concrete regionality—the economic, political, religious, and intellectual divisions of space that mattered to medieval actors—is scarcely examined. I use mercantile records to explore region not from the high culture of the literary record, but as a practical problem. We see geography as experienced by those whose profession made them use and consider connections between places. I compare the Genoese and Geniza merchants, whose activities intersected across the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and whose records are the richest medieval sources. Through this work, I uncover how the complex interplay of business practice, institutions, infrastructures, political control, and definitions of community created practical and imaginative regions for medieval traders. In this way, I propose a new way of writing both economic and Mediterranean history.

The Political Economy of Governance and Resistance: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict as a Case Study

In recent years the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has assumed an increasingly pronounced economic dimension. Flotillas have replaced suicide bombers, underground tunnels have created an informal economy in Gaza, and new Israeli legislation has been introduced to halt funding of human rights organizations as well as to penalize supporters of the boycott campaign. In my research I intend to examine these developments by focusing on what I call the economic apparatuses (i.e., dispositifs) of occupation–that is, forms of governance deployed to harness or arrest the population’s energy so as to achieve a series of social, political, and economic objectives (Foucault 2008; Rose 1999). My initial hypothesis is that the proliferation of these apparatuses signifies a shift in modes of governing and resistance in the Occupied Territories and elsewhere. I then examine whether the accentuation of economic governing apparatuses is tied to the reduction of legal and administrative apparatuses.

Electoral Competition and Coexisting Markets: Theory and Laboratory Experiments

The objective of this project is to contribute to a more fundamental knowledge of the political economy system at large with the help of game theory and laboratory experiments. Today, major political economies are struggling worldwide for economic and political stability and, therefore, it is of utmost importance for informed political decision-making to understand the key links between economics and politics that largely determine economic welfare. This project has two pillars: (1) the development of a unified model of electoral competition, and (2) a fundamental analysis of the coexistence of elections and markets. The objective of the first pillar is to unify four baseline models of electoral competition: (i) the spatial model; (ii) the citizen candidate model; (iii) the tactical redistribution model; and (iv) the voter participation model. Such a unified model is important for policy decision-making, because the approximate weight of influence on policy outcomes and hence economic welfare of each of the four baseline models is basically unknown. The second pillar of this project explores the coexistence of the two fundamental principles and institutions in modern democracies: ”one person, one vote” in elections and ”one dollar, one vote” in markets. While markets create economic welfare and inequality, elections can influence the levels of welfare and inequality. There is one particular player type that can potentially undermine the influence of elections: special interests, who introduce money to politics. This project systematically explores the welfare effects of coexisting elections and markets per se and the biases of these effects caused by special interests.

Competitive Policy Entrepreneurship in Legislatures

The process of public policy development involves a variety of individuals and groups, including legislators, legislative committees, chief executives, political parties, and interest groups, competing to get their desired policies enacted in part by making costly investments to improve their quality. We term this process “competitive entrepreneurship” and its participants “policy entrepreneurs,” and propose developing a formal model to explore its implications for the design of legislative institutions. Among the questions we ask are the following: First, what legislative rules incentivize the development of high quality policies in an environment of competitive entrepreneurship? Second, how can formal positions in a legislature–specifically committee assignments–be allocated to encourage the development of high quality policies? Third, how can the allocation of committee assignments in a legislature and the formal rules of legislative consideration be jointly used to encourage policy development? Fourth, how might policy entrepreneurs be encouraged to use quality investments to build support for their favored policies, rather than “pork barrel” or targeted inducements?

Denaturalizing Racism

This book seeks to fundamentally alter how we theorize and study racism. It is divided into three parts, all of which make bold but substantiated claims. The first, ”Denaturalizing Common Sense,” begins with a chapter that asks a number of big questions, addressed in the rest of the book, through a closely observed ethnography of a 2009 police killing of a Black teen in Illinois. It concludes with a chapter that offers a new structural theory of racism. Foregrounding the practical over the representational, the restructured theory squares a host of contradictory theories and findings in the social science of racism. Empirically focusing on the United States, part two, ”Denaturalizing the Nation-State,” brings into question what, to great distortion, is almost always assumed. Through case studies of constitutional law and contemporary scholarship on immigration, the chapters in this part call for two radical shifts that would provide firmer and more critical bases for the study of racism: from an implicit assumption of the United States as a nation-state to an explicit conceptualization of it as an empire-state, and from a narrow preoccupation with the assimilation of migrants to a broader inquiry into the politics of national belonging. The final part, ”Denaturalizing Ignorance,” fixes on symbolic domination, the tacit ignorances of the dominant that routinely structure racial domination. One chapter reconceptualizes Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence that challenges his overreliance on the tacit consent of the oppressed. Examining a mostly forgotten 1924 massacre of Filipino sugar workers in Hawai‘i, I reconceive symbolic violence as the dominant’s tacit nonrecognition of critical subaltern discourses and practices. The last substantive chapter explores the paradoxical but pervasive phenomenon that I label symbolic perversity, the dominant’s tacit ignoring of their own express knowledge of racial inequalities. The empirical findings on Black unemployment and its coverage in the New York Times, over the course of four decades, unsettle two of the most taken-for-granted assumptions about the post-civil rights movement era: that nearly everybody believes in racial equality, at least in principle, and that racism is hard to detect.

The Architecture of The Human Condition

In 2012-2013 I aim to complete the manuscript of my second book, The Architecture of The Human Condition, which is the first book-length study of Hannah Arendt’s important 1958 work of political thought. While Arendt’s work has typically been read as an attempt to defend politics against contamination by supposedly non- or anti-political concerns, especially those associated with economic and social issues, in the name of a purified, autonomous practice of self-display and contestation for its own sake, this book fundamentally transforms our view of The Human Condition, showing that its aim is not to separate the political from the economic but to challenge economic reductionism, showing how economic and social phenomena properly understood demand political engagement, and articulating a sense of action that can only be "for its own sake" if it is also capacious and contentful. The book pursues this aim through close reading and a variety of historical and intellectual contextualizations, for instance, by drawing out the idiosyncrasy of Arendt’s surprisingly radical critique of Fordist capitalism from behind Cold War interpretive frames that position her simply as an anti-Marxist.

Toward an Anthropology of International Law: The Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court

This project is dedicated to understanding (in a Weberian sense) the ”social lives” of international courts and tribunals, and the effects thereof on political and judicial outcomes in the international system. Mine is an ethnography of international justice that synthesizes insights from anthropology, political science, and law. Through the lens of the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, notably the evolution of its institutional structure as well as the attitudes and activities of its very sizable and diverse staff (some 300 members), I contribute new and unexpected insights about the inner workings of international justice. By taking seriously a particular sub-set of agents of international criminal law (i.e., prosecutorial staff), their norms and values and preferences, I provide a more subtle account than currently exists of the choices that prosecutors make –and their impact on the effectiveness of international courts and tribunals. By so doing, I contribute to a growing trend in the study of international organizations more generally.

Moral Economies, Legal Economies and the Settler Movement in the Humanitarian Present of Israel/Palestine

The overall aim of the project is to explore the dynamics of appropriation of the human rights discourses and practices by Zionist non-State and para-state actors–specifically the settler movement–in contemporary Israel/Palestine. Over the duration of the fellowship, I intend to develop new paths of reflection and analysis on how human rights discourses and practices progressively reduced the distance between violence perpetrators and victims in Israel/Palestine. The research will consist of reconstructing the historical conditions of emergence of human rights NGOs among the settlers, analyzing the specific moral and legal economies generated within this historical framework, and carrying out the ethnography of the moral discourses and legal techniques articulated by these NGOs. The ultimate focus of the project is the new political practices reproducing the regime of inequality and colonization that characterizes my study area. Fundamentally, the analysis of these dynamics presents traits of enormous epistemological and political interest in the fields and theories of human rights and nation-state formation. In fact, it allows and enlightens the comprehension of the modern short circuit between human rights and citizenship in the contemporary colony of Israel/Palestine.

Half Dead: Gangs, Violence, and Injury in Chicago

In a Chicago neighborhood, in which a historic street gang was founded more than fifty years ago, it is not merely gang members who must deal with the consequences of violence and crime. All residents must cope with the threat of injury. My book grapples with the consequences of the ”war on drugs” together with mass incarceration, the ramifications of heroin trafficking for HIV infected teenagers, the perils of gunshot violence and the ensuing disabilities that gang members suffer—not to mention, the legal trials of police torture victims. Investigating this encompassing context allows me to detail the social forces that make black urban residents vulnerable to disease and disability.

Forensics of Capital: Debt, Sacrifice and Democracy in Senegal

My research investigation uses risk (social hazards, injury, death) and liability (responsibility, debt, accountability) to examine the formation of territorial sovereignty in Senegal and the processes through which it secured standing as a democratic leader in Africa. Instead of merely understanding sovereignty as a matter of governance, this project is located in the historical circumstances through which ”democracy” has prevailed internationally, as an ideal-type, over other forms of governance as a pragmatic way to generate funds for infrastructure and military initiatives. I also examine the way post-independence discourses about the political capacities of sub-saharan African nations are threaded through discourses about where they stand in an international regime of credit-debt in the aftermath of failed structural adjustment programs.

Changing Politics: New Issue Acceptance and the American Way

My project is a study of two contemporary social movements: the fight for marriage equality and the struggle for a living wage. I chose these movements because I found, during early research, that they presented an intriguing puzzle. While the former has had numerous legal and public de-feats, it has come to occupy an important place in the national political landscape and, over time, swayed majority public opinion in its favor. The latter, on the other hand, has won well over one hundred legislative successes, but suffers from national obscurity and often struggles to have hard-won legislation implemented. In my manuscript, I attempt to answer the question of how the gay marriage movement seems to have won while losing many legal and legislative battles, while the living wage movement seems to have lost, even with numerous policy gains on paper.

How Life Becomes Grievable: A Comparison between Two Earthquakes in China

This book project explores how different ways to grieve the loss of life make a huge difference in producing life’s worthiness or unworthiness. I compare two major earthquakes in China–the Tangshan Earthquake in 1976 and the Sichuan Earthquake in 2008–to make the point. In the former quake, under the ethos of collectivism and class struggle that deemed individual lives insignificant, public grieving was inadequate and even suppressed. In the latter quake, the rising sense of entitlement to protection of life and to public grieving put pressure on the state to implement programs to save and enhance life. Different experiences between survivors of the two quakes testify to the increasing life’s ”grievability”—life is worth more now than three decades ago. This change marked the turning point in the historical gap between improved “governance of life” and the fast rising sense of entitlement in the ”structures of feeling” in the society. On the one hand, valuing life has strongly appealed to the consciousness of governance; on the other hand, historical injustices that had created ”ungrievable lives” remain to be publicly acknowledged and dealt with. This gap indicates an important change of dynamics in China: public grieving has become a crucial site of struggle for redistributing justice in the name of life itself.

Patient-Citizen-Consumers: An Anthropological Study of Right-to-Health Litigation in Brazil

Biehl’s current research explores the social impact of large-scale treatment programs in resource-poor settings and the role of the judiciary in administering public health. He is also writing the history of a religious war—the Mucker war—that took place among German immigrants in 19th century Brazil.

Plato's Gorgias

James Doyle will be working on a book on Plato's Gorgias. This will give an analysis of the main arguments of the dialogue, and an account of the use to which Plato puts the dialogue form, as leveling an implicit critique of Socrates' conception of philosophical method and his associated doctrine of "intellectualism."

Transitional Slippages: Power, Politics, and the Moral Economy of Justice at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal

To what extent can transitional justice mechanisms help people find justice after genocide and mass atrocity? My book project poses this question in relationship to the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC or “Khmer Rouge Tribunal”), which is mandated to try the senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge for crimes committed from April 17, 1975 through January 6, 1979. Such tribunals are often depicted as delivering justice and a host of other goods (for example, peace, reconciliation, healing, closure, democracy, and the rule of law) in an impartial, apolitical manner. My project, based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork at the tribunal and elsewhere in Cambodia, argues that such tribunals are highly normative and political. Through a process of reduction and production, the tribunal shrinks complex political, sociocultural, and personal histories, while producing a liberal democratic subject position and a social imaginary of (civilized) humanity. A recognition of this moral economy of transitional justice and the historical and sociocultural complexities in post-conflict societies is critical to finding locally resonant paths toward sustainable peace.

The Architecture and Social Organization of Global Financial Markets

Karin Knorr Cetina studies (sometimes extreme) expert systems. She is completing a book on institutional currency markets as a global cultural and social form that is based on scopic media mechanisms and partial organization. She is also interested in the financial imagination as characterized by counterfactual thinking and in market morality.

Urban Space and the Racialization of Gender in the Jazz Age

Catherine Rottenberg's research bridges the fields of Jewish-American Studies and African-American Studies, focusing on early twentieth-century Jewish-American and African-American fiction. Her current project utilizes “the city” as an analytical category for examining the transformation of Jewish-American and African-American female identity during the Jazz Age.

Politics in its Limits

Peter D. Thomas’s research project at the IAS focuses on three central themes in the work of Gramsci, Laclau, Schmitt, and Foucault: the nature of politics and processes of politicization, the relationship between politics and the political, and the concept of the political subject.

Sheena Kang is interested in the relationship between language and politics, especially the role of official apologies in addressing historic injustice. She will explore themes such as recognition, responsibility, and political forgiveness in looking at states' willingness or reluctance to apologize.