Contemporary Ethiopian is, without question, facing enormous challenges. At the core of these challenges lay a state-building process major constituencies and elite groups were either alienated from, forced to acquiesce to, or coopted into. Unable to derive political legitimacy from democratic participation, successive governments largely relied on coercion and neopatrimonialism,...
Hannah Arendt claimed that aœtotalitarianisma emerged as a new word to designate a new form of evil in politics. However, she added, the use of a new word does not imply that we understand what this novelty consists in. This dissertation is an attempt to understand the novelty of totalitarian...
Many democratic theorists suggest that harmonious relationship between groups are critical for democracy; however, far less is known about how everyday experiences promote or impede such intergroup harmony. In this dissertation, I explore a common, but overlooked, form of intergroup contact casual, brief experiences with outgroup strangers. I propose a...
Many key crises of international security are tied to the spread of nuclear weapons and technology, but what makes a state nuclear remains subject to controversy. The possession of nuclear technology does not always grant legal and political nuclear status”a phenomenon evident not only in the recent debate over Irans...
This dissertation provides an explanatory framework to explain the variations in battle-spaces, alternatively seen as wartime authority configurations across time and space. I place these variations along types of states along their functional dimension, and their respective forms of state power on the ground. I argue that these variations are...
This dissertation examines the political thought of Sheldon Wolin. Perceiving a crisis of technocratic liberalism in the postwar period, Wolin develops a critique of modernity that emphasizes the loss both of political vision and of local cultures and traditions. His subsequent radical democratic theory identifies a contrapuntal American tradition of...
My dissertation explores the dynamics of Northeast Asia’s island disputes, specifically the Dokdo/Takeshima dispute between Korea and Japan and the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute between Japan and China. I focus on three questions that are important for academic and policy purposes and are not well addressed by existing theories: 1) what explains...
Existing political science literature tells us that the common factors of political participation include factors such as civic skills, available free time, and income. However, few have expanded their studies to include to private politics, and to see what factors influence private political participation. Private political participation refers to “the...
This dissertation examines the construction and regulation of over-the-counter derivatives markets before and after the 2007-2009 global financial crisis. It addresses two questions: How did the market for derivatives traded outside traditional exchanges grow so large and crisis-prone with so little public regulation? And, why, given derivatives’ contribution to the...
This dissertation explores public and private hybridity in the production of sovereign power, or hybrid sovereignty, through the cases of the English East India Company, Blackwater, International Chamber of Commerce, and Amnesty International. It asks: What forms and dynamics are featured in hybrid sovereignty? What implications does hybrid sovereignty have...
Responsibility is a central political concept, yet the dynamics of contemporary political life call into question commonsense accounts of individual moral responsibility; it is difficult to ascribe responsibility to individual agents when faced with political dilemmas like global climate change. In response to this dilemma, this project engages two questions....
Why do the institutional outcomes of armed separatist conflicts vary? Separatist conflicts have diverse institutional effects. Though many separatists hope to create sovereign states, few achieve their aims. More often, their conflicts lead to forms of intra-state autonomy, independent but unrecognized de facto states, or territories under foreign occupation. These...
This dissertation project is one of the first to explicitly study the theoretical and empirical relationship between public opinion and the policies of unelected administrative agencies in the United States. This research addresses two important questions: (1) given the absence of a direct electoral connection between bureaucrats and the public,...
Though more serious during the economic reform than in Mao-era, corruption has not totally got out of hand of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It is not too rampant to control and its destructive effects appear to have been limited from impeding the economic growth. To study the "resilience" that...
For all its significance in world affairs, the United Nations is full of paradoxes. As a system - i.e. as a collection of independent yet interrelated entities - its contradictions derive from the juxtaposition of forces encouraging fragmentation and calls for improved harmonization. On its part, the reality of inter-organizational...
This research investigates under what conditions political institutions may induce longer and more expensive financial crisis resolutions by assessing the impact of power distribution on government responses to crisis situations. A new model is elaborated in which power distribution plays a key role in the evolution of financial crises, from...
Late twentieth-century architecture is increasingly charged with the task of constructing sites of meaning that generate awareness and understanding in the wake of catastrophic historical events. My dissertation explores the challenges of memorializing these events, in order to recover the importance of memory for politics. Insisting on the role of...
How can political challengers avoid co-optation and other forms of moderation? This dissertation illuminates how institutional participation led to the co-optation of the Indigenous Australian movement and the factors which equipped the Ecuadorian Indígena movement to elude a similar fate. Most contestants in political struggles must at some point consider...
The dissertation research examines the evolution of EU social and employment policy in regard to gender equality in the labor market and analyzes how EU guidelines of the European Employment Strategy (EES) and EU directives on social policy have different effects on political processes in the United Kingdom and Germany....
In this dissertation I examine the impact of core values on foreign policy opinion, the dynamics of value change, and the differences between elites and the mass public in their values change. I find that two core values - humanitarianism and democracy - strongly affect citizens' support for various anti-terrorism...
In this dissertation I examine the relationship between voter turnout and legislative representation in the United States Congress. My main contention is that political elites react to electoral participation in formulating public policies. I posit that the institutional advantages of incumbency in the House of Representative reduces turnout in congressional...
This is a detailed study of Congress's China policy, with a view toward building a theory of congressional policymaking. I argue that committees, bicameralism, and presidential veto have severely constrained Congress's ability to legislate on China policy. I analyze China bills introduced between 1973 and 2006. I report evidence that...
Studies on consolidated democracies have long concluded that there is a positive relationship between socioeconomic status and turnout. The strength of the empirical findings that linked electoral participation to socioeconomic variables elevated this correlation to a law-like principle and made it possible to assume that this electoral behavior would prevail...
This dissertation explains why some rebel groups act in a highly coercive fashion toward local populations, only to shift to increasingly contractual behavior, and why other groups that share similar circumstances evolve in the opposite direction. Drawing upon fieldwork in Sudan, Iraq, Turkey, and Colombia, this study examines three rebel...
This dissertation develops a theory of rebel-state engagement during armed conflict that links these varied interactions to processes of institutional change in the state in which they unfold. Conventional wisdom portrays conflict zones as lacking institutions or pitting armed groups and states as competitors. Yet, this dissertation finds that rebels...
In an environment with limited time and resources, why do some legislators repeatedly sponsoring the same bills that never pass? Are they only appealing to constituents or lobbyists, or do they reintroduce legislation for strategic purposes? Bachrach and Baratz (1962) characterize the second-face of power as having control over agenda-setting....
The concept of deportation has become increasingly important in recent years, as states more and more turn to removal as a technique of control over population and territory. But within the field of political theory the concept of deportation has not yet received the attention it deserves. This dissertation helps...
The growth of incarceration in the United States, a symptom of the concomitant broader institutionalization of a ‘carceral state’, is unquestionably one of the most significant developments in the nation's history. Despite this significance, the public response to the growth and deleterious consequences of incarceration has been notably restrained. This...