The Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance (NCGG), directed by Helen V. Milner, is pleased to announce the selection of its 2009-2010 fellows for the Center’s three fellowship programs: Globalization and Governance Fellowship Program, Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in Regional Political Economy, and Global Leaders Fellowship Program.

Globalization and Governance Fellowship Program

Through the Globalization and Governance Fellowship Program, NCGG will award six one-year research positions to a group of very talented scholars chosen from a large pool of close to 100 applicants from all over the globe. These awards are designed to promote basic research in the areas of international and comparative political economy, international organization, global governance, and globalization. Our scholars for the 2009-2010 academic year will be::

Raphael Auer is an economist at the International Research Unit of the Swiss National Bank, which he joined in 2006 after receiving his Ph.D. in Economics from MIT. His research interests cover international trade, open macroeconomics, and economic growth. His recent research analyzes how industrial composition and within-industry firm reallocation respond to trade liberalization when firm’s output is differentiated by product characteristics such as quality. A second branch of his research analyzes pricing-to-market decisions of international firms and the effect of import competition on inflation dynamics. Raphael is also a member of the advisory board of walras.org and a research associate at the Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

Terrence Chapman is an assistant professor in the Government Department at the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled Securing Approval: the Politics of Multilateral Authorization, which investigates why governments frequently seek multilateral approval for foreign policies. His other work examines the relationship between international financial markets and civil unrest and the strategic uses of international organizations in crisis bargaining. His work has been published or is forthcoming in International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Conflict Resolution.

Stephen Kaplan will receive his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University in August 2009. The guiding question shaping his research agenda is whether markets and democracy are compatible in an age of financial globalization. His dissertation, entitled From Spendthrifts to Misers: Globalization and Opportunistic Politicians, examines this question by exploring Latin American economic policymaking behavior in a globalized world. Stephen offers a new theory, based on a structural change in global finance, to explain the demise of "economic populism" and political business cycles in the region. To test his theory, he employs a multi-method approach, using both large-N statistical work and a comparative case study analysis of three South American countries: Argentina, Chile, and Venezuela. Before returning to academia, Stephen worked as an economist in the Development Studies and Foreign Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Following his fellowship year, Stephen will join the faculty of George Washington University's Department of Political Science and Elliott School of International Affairs.

Adam Leudtke, an Assistant Professor in political science at University of Utah, received his Ph.D. from University of Washington in 2006, where his dissertation committee was chaired by Jim Caporaso. Luedtke's research is on immigration, globalization and international organizations. He is co-author (with Lina Svedin) of the forthcoming book, Controlling Chaos: Risk Regulation in the European Union and the United States (Palgrave), and is editor of the forthcoming book, Migrants and Minorities: the European Response (Cambridge Scholars Press). He has also published articles in the following peer-reviewed journals: Governance, European Union Politics, Policy Studies Journal, International Migration, Comparative European Politics, and the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis.

Andreea S. Mihalache expects to receive her Ph.D. in Political Science from the Pennsylvania State University in the summer of 2009. Her research agenda centers on the interactions between politics and foreign direct investment (FDI) and is motivated by a broader concern with the impact of globalization on human welfare and political development. In her dissertation she examines the relationship between FDI and political violence, showing that investors across industries differ systematically in both reactions to and impacts on conflict. During her tenure of the NCGG fellowship, Andreea will explore U.S. multinationals’ use of political tools to alleviate risks from conflict, asking how firm characteristics and the socio-political environment interact to determine firms’ inclusion of political and social initiatives in their risk management portfolios. The project relies on cross-disciplinary insights and combines large-N analyses of industry-level FDI inflows with survey responses and investors' answers in open-ended interviews.

Krzysztof J. Pelc is a Ph.D. Candidate at Georgetown University. His current research considers how specific aspects of international economic rules advantage some actors over others, and how such distributional effects determine the evolution of these rules, and the resulting prospects for international cooperation. This has led him to examine, among other topics, escape clauses in economic agreements, unilateralism in international trade, and labor and environmental standards at the GATT/WTO. His work appears in International Organization, the International Studies Quarterly, the Transition Studies Review, and Democracy and Society, and is supported by research and travel grants from the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council, the American National Science Foundation, and Georgetown University. He is expecting to defend his dissertation in August 2009.

Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in Regional Political Economy

The Niehaus family’s generosity to the Center has funded the new Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in Regional Political Economy created with the goal of developing a new generation of scholars able to analyze and make policy recommendations about the regional political economy in the Middle East, East, South, or Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America. This fellowship program attracted over 80 applicants for only two slots. Our recipients for the upcoming academic year are Gökçe Göktepe and Basak Kus.

Gökçe Göktepe is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Politics at NYU and holds a MA in economics from Stanford University. Previously she studied economics at Bosphorous University, Istanbul and attended Robert College, Istanbul. Her research areas are comparative political economy, international political economy and quantitative methodology. Her doctoral theses empirically analyses the role of the military in the economic decision making in developing countries (Turkey, Pakistan and Thailand) where de facto democratization has not accompanied these countries’ de jure democratic transitions. While at the Center for Globalization and Governance, Gökçe will focus on turning her dissertation into a book manuscript. She will also be working on a project that seeks to explain the lack of democratization in the Middle East by constructing a new dataset to test hypothesis derived from a game-theoretic model of democratic transition in construction. This project focuses on the military-state alliance as a rational ruling coalition strategy that has not yet received attention in the IR literature.

Basak Kus received her PhD in Sociology from University of California-Berkeley in 2008. In the 2008-2009 Academic Year she was a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at Yale University’s MacMillan Center for International Studies.
Basak’s main research interests are in the fields of economic sociology, political sociology, and comparative-institutional analysis. In her dissertation she examined how states affect the patterns of informalization in the economy through regulatory means, quantitatively, across a broad set of countries, as well as historically with an in-depth study of a developing country case that of Turkey. Basak has completed several articles from this research. She is currently working on her book manuscript, and at the same developing a new research project that will explore the political and social outcomes of social welfare provision by non-state actors, particularly religious ones, in Turkey and the Middle East.

Global Leaders Fellowship Program

Up to six fellowships will be awarded in each of the next five years, beginning in September 2008, for a year’s study at Oxford followed by a year at Princeton. The program will create a network of scholars and practitioners with expertise in the key issues surrounding globalization.

Global Leaders Fellowship (GLF) scholars for two-year period, FY2009-2010:

Ana Arroio is from Brazil. She obtained her doctorate from the University of Sussex in 2000 and plans to work on how individuals in developing countries can best capture the benefits of technological advances and information flows in the global economy.

Arunabha Ghosh is an Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Fellow, currently at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. He is currently working on the governance of the climate change regime, including technology development and transfer, linkages between the trade and climate regimes, global energy governance, and national-level governance arrangements. Arunabha has expertise on monitoring, surveillance and compliance systems in international regimes, particularly global trade and climate change. Arunabha was previously Policy Specialist at the United Nations Development Programme in New York and co-author of three Human Development Reports, and has worked at the World Trade Organization in Geneva. He has led research on transboundary water basins, intellectual property and the rights of indigenous people, violent conflict and extremist movements, and has undertaken/advised research projects on aid, financial crises and trade negotiations for DFID (UK), IDRC (Canada), and the Commonwealth Secretariat. His advocacy efforts for human development span a documentary on the water crisis set out of Africa, presentations to the President of India, the Indian Parliament and other legislatures, training of ministers in Central Asia, public lectures in Australia, Germany, Spain, Sweden and the United States, and regular articles in the print media. Arunabha is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities.

Arunabha has a D.Phil. and M.Phil. in International Relations from the University of Oxford as the Marvin Bower Scholar at Balliol College. As Radhakrishnan Scholar, he earned a First Class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford. Arunabha graduated with Honours in Economics at the top of his class from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi. He speaks Bengali, English, Hindi and basic Spanish.

George Gray Molina is from Bolivia. He gained his doctorate in Politics at Oxford University in 2004 and plans to work on how trade and labor policies affect growth and inequality, focusing on Bolivia.

Bo Qu is from China. He gained his doctorate at Peking University in 2007 and plans to work on international monetary cooperation, focusing on the role of China.

Pooja Sharma is an Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Fellow based at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs. Her current research is focused on international trade governance where she is investigating the diversity in trade agreements from a governance perspective. She argues that international trade agreements tend to vary not only in terms of their economic implications but also along their governance dimension. The aim of the research is to explore strategies for better aligning global institutions with the interests of people in developing countries. Her previous research includes the political economy of trade policy (published in the Review of Development Economics), regional integration (published in National Strategies for Regional Integration, Anthem Press for the Asian Development Bank, 2009), multilateral trade liberalization (available in the World Trade and Development Report, Oxford University Press, 2007) and trade transaction costs (available at the GTAP website). Pooja Sharma was previously a Fellow at the Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS), New Delhi, Visiting Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), New Delhi and Consultant, National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), New Delhi. Pooja Sharma was educated at the University of Delhi (BA (Hons) and MA in economics) and received her Ph.D. in economics at the University of Cincinnati.

Global Leaders Fellowship (GLF) scholars for two-year period, FY2010-2011:

Le Thanh Forsberg is from Vietnam. She obtained her doctorate from Lund University in Sweden in 2007 and plans to work on how institutional inequality in developing countries shapes and affects the outcomes of public health policies and what role international donors can play in the governance of public health-care.

Rahmane Idrissa is currently a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Florida. He was born 1971 in Niger and first went to University in Senegal, at the University Cheikh Anta Diop, taking courses in Philosophy and Political Science. He wrote a Philosophy Maîtrise thesis in 1998 on the political geography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau before beginning his research into the decade-long democratic transition of Niger in the 1990s. In 2001 he won a Fulbright fellowship to study in the Political Science program of the University of Kansas and then began a PhD at the University of Florida in 2003. His research focuses on democratization in West Africa. His doctorate examines the relations between the francophone elite in Niger and other social groups (including the West African Muslim community) and their alternative visions of political and social order – and the way alternative notions of legitimacy and social order have gathered force in the context of democratizing efforts within a much-weakened state. Alongside this work, Rahmane has also written and published on other issues, such as maternal health care.

Leany Barreiro Lemos has a Masters in Political Science and a Doctorate in Comparative Studies on the Americas, both granted by the University of Brasilia, Brazil. Her dissertation “Legislative Control in Presidential Democracies: Brazil and United States in Comparative Perspective” was twice awarded: it won the Best Doctoral Dissertation Prize 2005-2006, by the Latin American Political Science Association, and Honor Mention at the 2006 Great Prize of Doctoral Dissertation, awarded by Capes, the Brazilian Agency for Higher Education and Research. She was an APSA/ Fulbright Congressional Fellow in 2003-2004; Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University (2003-2004); and Visiting Research Associate at the Centre for Brazilian Studies and St. Antony´s College, University of Oxford (2006). She has edited the book "The Brazilian Federal Senate after the 1988 Constitution" (2008), and has published several articles on Legislative Studies. Leany Barreiro Lemos has been a permanent staffer of the Brazilian Federal Senate since 1993, where she has served as senior advisor or chief of staff to a number of influential senators. Currently, she is also an Associate Professor at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Brasilia. She is married to Carlos Pio and the mother of Phillipo Gomes (20), Paola Gomes (18) and Thiago Gomes (13).

Ren Hongsheng is from China. He obtained his doctorate at Nankai University in 2003 and plans to work on the relations between developing countries and multinational enterprises and devising strategies that could enhance the interests of countries and corporations alike.

Dima Noggo Sarbo was born and raised in Ethiopia, and did primary and secondary education in Gore, in the South West of the country. He went to university in Addis Ababa and graduated with a B.A. in Political Science. He joined Ethiopian government service as a civil servant working in three ministries, Community Development and Social Affairs, Land Reform, and Agriculture, before going on to the United Nations Institute for Economic Development and Planning (IDEP) in Dakar, Senegal, from where he graduated with a Post Graduate Diploma in Economic Development and Planning in 1978. He briefly worked as a researcher with the United Nations Environment Training Programme (ENDA) and the Council for the Development of Economic and Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA), both based in Senegal.

In the 1980s, Dima was involved in relief work among refugees and internally displaced persons in Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia. When the military government in Ethiopia collapsed in 1991, he became a member of the new government as a member of the transitional legislature and a cabinet minister in 1991-1992.

From 1993 until 2003, Dima worked as a consultant on development and peace issues in Africa, mainly for non-governmental organizations, among which are the Lutheran World Federation, the Heinrich Boell Foundation and Responding to Conflict. In 2003, he joined the University of Tennessee for a PhD in Sociology, where he also taught undergraduate classes in sociology between 2004 and 2008. He is expected to graduate in the Spring of 2009.