Fellows 2016-2017

The Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance (NCGG), directed by Helen V. Milner, is pleased to announce the selection of its 2016-2017 fellows for the Center's three fellowship programs: Globalization and Governance Fellowship Program, Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in Regional Political Economy, and the Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Program.

The 12th cohort of NCGG fellows chosen from a large pool of applicants from all over the globe will be in residence in September 2016 through June 2017, pursuing their own research projects and contributing to the intellectual life of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance 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 2016-2017 academic year will be:

Cameron Ballard-Rosa is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University, and also holds an M.A. in Economics from Yale. His research interests include political economy, international relations, comparative politics, and formal theory. Cameron is currently working on a book project on the political logic of international sovereign debt default, with particular emphasis on the ways that urban-rural conflicts, including sensitive food subsidies, may vary across different regime settings. He uses formal theory, large-n statistical analysis, and close case study reading of several countries to present substantive and robust evidence for his primary hypotheses explaining sovereign default in autocracies and democracies. His broader research interests exist at the intersection of international and comparative political economy, and include political responses to fiscal crises as well as the effects of economic change on political institutions and redistribution.

Nikhar Gaikwad is a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Science department at Yale University. He will be joining the Political Science department at Columbia University as an Assistant Professor in 2017. His research interests span international and comparative political economy, with a focus on the politics of economic policymaking, business-state relations, and identity. He has a regional specialization in South Asia, which he studies in comparative perspective with Brazil and other democratic settings. His research focuses on two types of competition that recur in the political arena:  economic contestation and identity conflict. A main line of inquiry studies how cultural divisions offset economic rivalry when actors contest distributive policies. A second stream of research investigates how conflicts of interest between economic agents influence the policymaking process. He uses this interplay between competing interests as a theoretical lens to study questions related to political representation, policy change, and development. His research has been published or is forthcoming in the American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, and the Quarterly Journal of Political Science. 

Joshua D. Kertzer is Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard University. His research explores the intersection of international security, foreign policy, political psychology, and experimental methods. He is the author of Resolve in International Politics (Princeton University Press, 2016) along with articles appearing in a variety of outlets, including the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, International Studies Quarterly, and World Politics. His work has also received a number of awards, including the American Political Science Association’s Helen Dwight Reid and Kenneth N. Waltz awards, as well as recognitions from the Peace Science Society, International Society of Political Psychology, and Council of Graduate Schools.

David Lindsey is a PhD candidate at the University of California, San Diego. His research centers on the causes of international conflict, with a particular emphasis on the role played by information. His dissertation focuses on the ways that concrete policy choices about diplomacy, intelligence, and military strategy shape the informational context in which states make choices about war and peace. Additional ongoing research examines the role of delegation within the executive branch on the conduct of foreign policy. His work has appeared in the Journal of Politics and International Studies Quarterly.

Laura Paler is an Assistant Professor in the political science department at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Paler’s research is on the political economy of development. Her main interest is in studying how different sources of revenue (natural resource rents, foreign aid, and taxes) affect political behavior, governance, and development. She also has ongoing projects on post-conflict reintegration and identity politics. Her work employs a variety of experimental methods, original survey and behavioral data collection, and extensive field research, most recently in Indonesia, Colombia, Uganda, Lebanon, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Dr. Paler completed her Ph.D. in political science at Columbia University in 2012 and she is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C. 
 
Lauren Peritz is an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on the effectiveness of international organizations in promoting economic cooperation. While at Niehaus, Lauren will work on a project that examines domestic political barriers to compliance with legal rulings from the World Trade Organization and European Court of Justice. Beyond her work on international courts, Lauren is also interested in the proliferation of preferential trade agreements, especially network effects.

Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in Regional Political Economy

Nils Hägerdal’s research interests revolve around armed conflict and political instability in the contemporary Middle East and in May, 2016 I will defend my dissertation about ethnic cleansing in the Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990. The dissertation studies micro-level variation in violence and displacement during this civil war using both quantitative and qualitative techniques. I argue that the conflict displays a lot more variation than is commonly appreciated because militias targeted political opponents rather than all members from other sectarian communities. To collect data and conduct interviews for this dissertation I spent 14 months at American University of Beirut in Lebanon. During the Niehaus fellowship I am excited to continue working on this topic as well as to start a new project about the long-term effects of imperial rule and decolonization in the Arab world. Before coming to Harvard I earned a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University and an MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago but I am originally from Malmö, Sweden and became interested in the Middle East because I grew up in a city with many immigrants who arrived as refugees from the region and had classmates at school from Lebanon, Iraq, Tunisia, Iran and Turkish Kurdistan.
 
Lucy Martin
is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. She has a Ph.D. in Political Science and an M.A. in Economics from Yale University. Her research interests include comparative politics, the political economy of development, African politics, experimental methods, and formal theory. Lucy is currently working on a book project examining the relationship between taxation and political accountability in sub-Saharan Africa. In recent work she provides new experimental evidence from Uganda that taxation has a behavioral effect on citizen preferences, decreasing toleration of corruption and increasing the demand for accountability. The book expands on the experimental results, analyzing when and how governments will tax citizens, given that doing so may increase accountability pressures. Beyond her work on taxation, Lucy is interested in corruption and accountability more generally. She is currently conducting research on when corruption will induce citizens to take part in collective action, and how citizens decide whom to blame for accountability failures. She is also interested in the psychological mechanisms that affect when citizens will take part in elections or protests.  Her work has been covered in The Economist.

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:

Biniam Bedasso is a political economist with diverse interests in the economics, politics and institutions of African countries. Biniam was a Robert S. McNamara fellow of the World Bank as well as a Young African Professionals fellow of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Ethiopian Development Research Institute. Biniam received a PhD in Public Policy from Maastricht University in 2013.

Maria A. Gwynn. PhD, (magna cum laude) Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany (2015). Magister Juris, University of Oxford, UK (2008). LLB (Honours) Facultad de Derecho y Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Nacional de Asunción, Paraguay (2004). Further postgraduate diplomas: International Practice Diplomas in International Arbitration and Merger & Acquisitions from the College of Law of England and Wales & International Bar Association (2005/6). Researcher at UNIDROIT (June-July,2007); Visiting Scholar, Center for International Legal Education, School of Law, University of Pittsburgh (2012-2013); Junior Academic Visitor, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford (2013-2014); Admitted to law practice in Asuncion, Paraguay by the Supreme Court of Justice since 2005; passed the Multi-State Professional and Responsibility Examination of the National Conference of Bar Examiners in the US (2016). Publications: “Contratos Internacionales para el Sector Privado” El Lector, Asunción-Paraguay, 2007; “South American Countries’ Bilateral Investment Treaties: A Structuralist Perspective”. Journal of International Dispute Settlement (2015) 6(1): 97-117; and “Power in the International Investment Framework”, Palgrave Mcmillan, UK, forthcoming 2016.
 
Peace A. Medie is a Research Fellow in the Legon Centre for International Affairs and Diplomacy (LECIAD) at the University of Ghana and an Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Fellow. Her research centers on the dynamics of violence during and after conflicts and the steps that state and non-state actors take to address this violence. Her book manuscript, Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence against Women in Africa, examines how international organizations and the women’s movement have influenced the implementation of gender-based violence norms in Liberia and CÔte d’Ivoire. Peace’s research has been supported by grants from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Political Science Association. Her work has been published in African Affairs, International Studies Review, and Politics & Gender and has won several awards, including the 2012-2013 African Affairs African Author Prize. She delivered the Royal African Society’s 2015 Mary Kinglsey Zochonis Lecture. Prior to joining LECIAD, she was a Dissertation Fellow in the African and African Diaspora Studies program at Boston College. She earned a Ph.D. in Public and International Affairs from the University of Pittsburgh.

Seydou Ouedraogo is Assistant Professor and Researcher at Université Ouaga II, Burkina Faso, and Coordinator of FREE Afrik, an independent research institution based in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. He is an economist who received his training in African (Burkina Faso and Benin) and French (Université d’Auvergne/CERDI) Universities. His research concerns banking and monetary economy, development strategies, and economy of culture. He co-founded, with other economists, the Institute FREE Afrik, an independent research institution on West African economies, where he leads the research team of the Institute. Dr Ouedraogo also acts as a consultant for international and African public and private institutions, offering his expertise, on a volunteer basis, to cultural and civil society actors and cultural organizations.

Joint Fellowship: Center for the Study of Democratic Politics (CSDP) and the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance

Pia Raffler is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at Yale University. Her work lies at the intersection of comparative politics and political economy. Pia studies the politics of development, focusing on governance, bureaucracy, and electoral politics in Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular Uganda. She is interested in how theories on democratic political accountability travel to settings where many of their core assumptions – informed voters, political checks and balances, and a Weberian bureaucracy are not met. Her dissertation research focuses on political oversight of bureaucrats and implications for public service provision in local governments in developing states. She uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to measure causal relationships and disentangle the underlying mechanisms. During her time at CSDP and NCGG, Pia will work on turning her dissertation into a book and continue working on three extensions, each focusing on a different link in the accountability cycle: candidate selection, retrospective voting, and direct accountability. Pia holds an M.A. and M.Phil. from Yale University and a Master’s degree in International Affairs from Columbia University.