Fellows 2014-2015

The Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance (NCGG), directed by Helen V. Milner, is pleased to announce the selection of its 2014-2015 fellows for the Center's three fellowship programs: Globalization and Governance Fellowship ProgramPostdoctoral Fellowship Program in Regional Political Economy, and the Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Program.

The 10th cohort of NCGG fellows chosen from a large pool of applicants from all over the globe will be in residence pursing their own research projects and contributing to the intellectual life of the Center and the School of Public and International Affairs.

Globalization and Governance Fellowship Program

Through the Globalization and Governance Fellowship Program, NCGG awarded six one-year research positions to a group of very talented scholars chosen from a large pool of applicants. 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 2014-2015 academic year will be:

Sarah Bauerle Danzman received her Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She will join the faculty at Elon University as an assistant professor of political science and policy studies in August 2015. Her primary field of study is International Relations, with a focus in International Political Economy. She is most interested in issues related to the interaction of multinational firms, domestic societal groups, and host governments in an increasingly global supply chain network. Her dissertation considers the conditions under which governments will pursue policies of openness toward foreign direct investment. She argues FDI reforms are best understood within a broader context of economic reforms that change the preferences of domestic coalitions over FDI while also generating cross-coalitions that benefit from openness to FDI.
Florian Hollenbach is a PhD Candidate in Political Economy and Methods in the Department of Political Science at Duke University. His dissertation research is concerned with fiscal policy in non-democratic regimes and the development of fiscal capacity by authoritarian elites. In addition, he is interested in the study of conflict and economic development, as well as quantitative methods. He is the author of an article entitled, "Technology and Collective Action: The Effect of Cell Phone Coverage on Political Violence in Africa", published in the American Political Science Review and "Stepping Into The Future: The Next Generation of Crisis Forecasting Models", published in the International Studies Review.
Giovanni Mantilla received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on "historical global governance," seeking to understand the origins, design, development and effects of international law, particularly in the fields of humanitarian law and human rights. His current work examines the history and politics of the international humanitarian law of internal armed conflicts, including Common Article 3 to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, and the Additional Protocols to those Conventions, from 1977. Why and how did international standards of humane conduct emerge in an area so sensitive to states? Despite the well-known gravity of civil war violence around the world, little systematic theory-driven research has been devoted to these questions, which Mantilla tries to answer through in-depth archival work.
Shahrzad Sabet received in May 2014 her Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University. She is an associate of Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science. She specializes in international political economy, with an emphasis on political psychology and experimental methods. Her dissertation research investigates the micro-foundations of public opinion toward economic globalization. She is especially interested in identifying the role and effect of non-material factors such as prejudice and nationalism in the formation of public opinion, and in reconciling the effect of these symbolic factors with conventional, self-interest-based models of individual preferences in political economy. One of her recent papers, "Feelings First: Non-Material Factors as Moderators of Self-Interest Effects on Trade Preferences," was awarded the 2013 Carl Beck Award for best graduate student paper presented at the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association (ISA).
Geoffrey Wallace is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He received his PhD in government from Cornell University as well as an MA and BA from the University of Toronto. His research focuses on wartime violence, the design and effectiveness of international institutions, and public attitudes toward foreign policy. His research has been published, or is forthcoming, in International Organization, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and International Studies Quarterly, among others. His first book is entitled, Surrendering the Higher Ground: The Abuse of Prisoners during War and is currently under contract at Cornell University Press. While at the Niehaus Center, he will continue work on a second book manuscript, which employs a series of survey experiments to examine the domestic underpinnings of international legal commitments.

Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in Regional Political Economy

During the 2014-2015 academic year, the Center will welcome its seventh class of fellows in the regional political economy fellowship program 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 large pool of international applicants for only one slot. The Center will welcome Navid Hassanpour in September.

Navid Hassanpour came to the U.S. from Iran as a Ph.D. student in Electrical Engineering at Stanford (Ph.D. 2006). Later he pursued his interest in political theory (M.A. 2009, Philosophy, Stanford) and contentious politics and competitive authoritarianism in the Middle East (Ph.D. May 2014, Political Science, Yale). He is currently working on projects enabled by the recent digital revolution: micropatterns of urban conflict in Cairo and Damascus, dynamics of online electoral conversation during the 2013 Iranian elections, and network experiments of collective risk-taking on Amazon Mechanical Turk. At Princeton he will study the prospects of electoral politics in contemporary Iran while finishing his book manuscript "Communication and Conflict" (under consideration at Cambridge University Press). The book proposes a logic of contagion--instead of coordination--for collective action, and examines the theory in the context of recent Middle Eastern urban uprisings past 2011.

Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Fellowship Program

Building on a partnership established in 2001, Oxford University and Princeton University launched a postdoctoral fellowship initiative, the Global Leaders Fellowship Program, created to enhance the capacity of developing countries in the areas of scholarship and policy.

Beginning in September 2008, up to six fellowships are to be awarded annually to promising, early-career scholars from developing countries, which will allow fellows to spend one year at Oxford and one year at Princeton pursuing post-doctoral research, with funding provided by the program to cover fellows' full living costs. At Oxford they will be based at the Global Economic Governance Programme and the Centre for International Studies within the Department of Politics and International Relations. At Princeton fellows will be based in the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Global Leaders Fellowship (GLF) scholars in Princeton for 2014-15 are:

Nematullah Bizhan is a research associate at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Development Policy Centre, at the Australian National University. Dr. Bizhan completed his PhD at the Australian National University; his thesis examined the impacts of foreign aid on state building and in particular looked the case of Afghanistan between 2001 and 2009.

Bizhan contributed to state building and development efforts in Afghanistan for a decade and has worked with civil society, development organizations and the government. Dr. Bizhan has served in positions such as Director General for Policy, Monitoring and Evaluation of ANDS, head of the Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board Secretariat (JCDB) and Deputy Minister for Youth.

Bizhan has a MA in development economics from Williams College, MA. He was awarded the Fulbright Scholarship (2005 -2006) and the Australian Leadership Award (2009 - 2013).
Akachi Odoemene is a Social Historian trained at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria from where he obtained a Ph.D. in African History in 2008. He has interest in scholarly African issues related to the field of Social History, especially in the areas of Peace and Conflict Studies, Ethnic Studies, Development and Gender Studies, as well as global land governance and political economy in Africa. Dr. Odoemene is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and International Relations, Federal University Otuoke, Bayelsa State, Nigeria.
Vu Thanh Tu Anh comes from Vietnam, where he is the director of research at the Fulbright Economics Teaching Program, jointly established by the Harvard Kennedy School and Ho Chi Minh City’s University of Economics, with core funding from the Fulbright Program of the United States government. His primary research interests include political economy of development, public finance, and industrial policy. He has served as a member of the Board of Experts of the Vietnamese National Assembly’s Economic Committee and The National Finance Supervision Council. He received his Ph.D. degree in economics from Boston College in 2004.

Center for Human Values/Niehaus Center for Globalization & Governance Joint Fellowship

Minh Ly's research in political theory focuses on questions of democratic theory, global justice, ethics and public policy, and the justice of international finance. He is currently working on a book manuscript, Global Deliberation: A Human Right to Deliberative Democracy that examines how states and international organizations can be held democratically accountable for respecting human rights. It argues for a participatory theory of accountability, called deliberative justification that would more strongly protect human rights than accountability through states, while being more feasible than global democracy. He has published in the Review of International Political Economy (2012) and the Routledge Handbook of Global Economic Governance (2013). Ly holds a Ph.D. in political science from Brown University and an A.B. in social studies from Harvard University.

Ministry of Finance Visiting Program

Michihito Kojima is a Visiting Professional Specialist at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He was a former senior advisor for WTO (World Trade Organization) Affairs in the Customs and Tariff Bureau of Japan's Ministry of Finance, in particular being engaged in the intensive negotiation on the recently-concluded Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA). He joined the Ministry in 1994 and for the most of his professional career has been engaged in the issues on customs, tariff and trade policy or on international development, including drafting amended domestic customs laws and regulations, negotiating FTA and WTO legal texts, examining financial aid for infrastructure development in developing countries and providing technical assistance to customs authorities. His research is centered on trade and development. At Princeton, he will research the followings: past, present and future of global trade facilitation in the context of negotiation, implementation and review of the TFA; the role of global tariff policy in the age of Mega-FTA negotiations: GVC (global value chain), trade in value-added and their corresponding trade and development policy.