Interdisciplinary Faculty Research Programs
Faculty-led Colloquia
 Berkeley Workshop in Environmental PoliticsThe Berkeley Workshop in Environmental Politics fosters interdisciplinary and intercampus dialogue on questions of nature, culture, and power, promoting scholarship that is at once conceptually rigorous and empirically grounded, and encouraging innovative use of critical theory to address environmental problems. Professors: Nathan Sayre and Nancy Peluso Spring 2012 Events:
Friday, February 10, 3-5:30 p.m.
223 Moses Hall
"Epigenetic Biopolitics: Race, Population, and Environmental Health"
Becky Mansfield, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, Ohio State University
Friday, March 2, 3-5:30 p.m.
223 Moses Hall
"Denormalizing Embodied Toxicity in a Central Valley Town"
Julie Sze, Associate Professor, Department of American Studies, UC Davis
Friday, April 6, 3-5:30 p.m.
223 Moses Hall
"The Socionature of Farmers Market"
Alison Alkon, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of the Pacific
Friday, April 20. 3-5:30 p.m.
223 Moses Hall
"Cold War, Hot Planet: Environment and Apocalypse"
Betsy Hartmann, Professor, Development Studies, Hampshire College
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 Coupling Biodiversity Dynamics and Human Impacts in the Islands of PolynesiaThis interdisciplinary faculty colloquium will, for the first time, bring together strong, but currently disparate, programs in three different Berkeley departments. Together, the faculty members will bring a new international focus to campus, using the natural laboratories provided by oceanic islands to examine how biodiversity has been modified by the colonization of humans and associated commensal species. Professor: Rosemary Gillespie For Fall 2011, the Coupling Biodiversity Colloquium is conducting a workshop titled "Reconstructing the Past to Better Understand the Present and Plan for the Future," from November 29-December 1 at the UC Berkeley Richard B. Gump South Pacific Biological Research Station on the island of Mo'orea. |
 Religion's Impact on International AffairsIn the last decade religion has increasingly been recognized as central in a range of political movements, struggles and conflicts around the globe. Yet political and other social scientists have had difficulty accounting for religion’s force and impact. An inter-disciplinary approach to the study of religion and politics is critical in overcoming the institutional divides that have hindered the understanding of religion and its role in politics and governance. Professors: Hatem Bazian, Ramon Grosfoguel, and Ron Hassner Spring 2012 Events:
Tuesday, March 6, 12-2 p.m.
223 Moses Hall
"Contemporary Discourses on Religion and Slavery: A Political Critique"
Jane Gordon (Temple University)
Monday, March 12, 4-6 p.m.
223 Moses Hall
"Re-situating 'Global' and 'Local' Religious Cosmopolitanisms and Transnational Santria"
Aisha Beliso-De Jesus (Harvard University)
Tuesday, April 17, 12-2 p.m.
223 Moses Hall
"Islamophobia and Decolonial Politics in Europe Today"
Houria Bouteldja (Dialeg Global Institute, Barcelona and Paris) and Dew Baboeram (Social Science Research Institute, Netherlands)
Tuesday, May 1, 4-6 p.m.
223 Moses Hall
"DISPLACEMENTS: The Politics of Liberation and the Decoloniality of Time"
Alejandro Vallegas (University of Oregon)
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 Slum Health
Health status in the world’s burgeoning urban slums, home to over 1 billion people, is the product of myriad and complex factors – social, geographic, historical, economic, and political – in addition to the obvious ones of poverty, inadequate access to clean water and sanitation, over-crowding, etc. Looking forward, climate change, population dynamics and economic globalization will increasingly affect these challenges and shape options in response. The search for solutions to the problem of health in slums therefore requires not only better data on the spectrum and burden of disease morbidity but also an integrative understanding of its determining factors, matched by creative multidisciplinary insights, tools and methodologies in the design of interventions.
Professor: Lee Riley
Spring 2012 Events:
Tuesday, March 20, 2012, 9 a.m.-12 p.m.
Banatao Auditorum, Satardja Dai Hall
"Global Health, The Unfinished Agenda"
Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
Tuesday, April 3, 2012, 12-2 p.m.
223 Moses Hall
"Urban Health: A Europe/Africa Comparative Approach about Urban Process and Health"
Gerard Salem, Health Geographer, University of Paris V and University of Dakar, Senegal
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 Towards a Global Past: History in an Age of GlobalizationGlobalization may be the wave of the future, but what are its consequences for the past? That is the central question that this colloquium series will address. Through a speaker series that will bring historians of international and global themes into dialogue with scholars in other disciplines, we will ask how globalization alters our maps of the past as well as how we might go about writing its history. Professors: Daniel Sargent and Brian Delay Spring 2012 Events:
Tuesday, March 6, 4-6 p.m.
223 Moses Hall
"Empire of the Air? Pan American Airways in Africa during World War II"
Jenifer Van Vleck, Yale University
In August 1941, the U.S. and British governments secretly authorized Pan American Airways, the United States' exclusive international airline, to operate a military supply route across Africa to the Middle East and beyond. The story of Pan Am's activities as a military contractor during World War II has largely disappeared from the historical record, yet the airline played a critical role in enabling the success of the Allied war effort as well as the global expansion of U.S. military and commercial power. Pan Am's presence in Africa, moreover, was an early experiment in what would later be called "modernization and development." Employing 1,000 U.S. managers and some 10,000 local laborers, the company's wartime subsidiary, Pan American Airways-Africa (PAA-Africa), embedded American technology, manpower, capital, and culture into regions of Africa that had formerly been dominated by the European imperial powers. As such, the project embodied (and indeed facilitated) larger transformations in the international system: namely, the gradual replacement of the European colonial order by an ascendant "American Century," which purported to be based on the control of markets rather than the conquest of territory--an empire of the "air," rather than of the sea or land. Adapted from the author's forthcoming book, No Distant Places: Aviation and the American Ascendancy (Harvard University Press), this paper uses the story of Pan Am's wartime activities in Africa as a lens onto broader themes in U.S. and international history, including the role of corporations in enacting foreign policy, the transnational politics of race, the material and discursive infrastructure of American globalism, and the analytic utility of "empire" as a way of conceptualizing the United States' rise to global hegemony.
Dr. Van Vleck's teaching and research focus on the United States and the world, cultural history, and the history of business and technology. Her forthcoming book, No Distant Places: Aviation and the Global American Century (Harvard University Press), argues that aviation, and ideas about aviation, were instrumental in facilitating the United States’ rise to global hegemony during the mid-twentieth century. Van Vleck’s other publications include “The Logic of the Air: Aviation and the Globalism of the ‘American Century,’” New Global Studies 1.1 (Fall 2007) and “An Airline at the Crossroads of the World: Ariana Afghan Airlines, Modernization, and the Global Cold War,” History and Technology 25:1 (March 2009). Her new book project,Ambassadors with Bulldozers: Morrison Knudsen and the Engineering of American Global Power, is a transnational history of modernization and development, engineering, and environmental transformation.
Van Vleck received her Ph.D. from Yale in 2009. Her awards and fellowships include the Theron Rockwell Field Prize, the Edwin W. Small Prize, the AHA/NASA Fellowship in Aerospace History, the Daniel P. Guggenheim Fellowship (Smithsonian Institution), and the John Morton Blum Fellowship for Graduate Research in American History and Culture.
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 Water Management in Mediterranean Climates: Past and Future AdaptationBoth the developed and developing world confront growing water shortages, driven by population increases, expansion of high-value agriculture, and exacerbating climate change. This research colloquium focuses on interdisciplinary implications for improving water security in California and other Mediterranean climate regions. By including government agencies actively involved in adaptation to climate change, the colloquium hopes to increase the ‘uptake’ of its results into public policy. Professors: Matt Kondolf and Benjamin Porter Website: laep.ced.berkeley.edu/research/floodplains Spring 2012 Events:
Friday, March 9 & Saturday, March 10, 2012, 8:30 a.m.-6 p.m.
112 Wurster Hall
“Wise Use of Floodplains: Adaptation in America and Europe”
Despite massive investments in flood control structures in the 20th Century, recent catastrophic floods have challenged existing policies and management practices. Floodplain communities have discovered that their residual risk has increased, that their aging conventional infrastructure is no longer sustainable, and they are not resilient to flood losses. In the US, the ‘Unified National Program for Managing Flood Losses’ (1966) has not led to enduring solutions. At the national and international levels, the US and the EU have moved from flood control and flood damage reduction paradigms to flood risk management, with new appreciation for the ecological benefits of floods and the challenges with existing technologies.
This workshop explores the range of tools available for managing floodplains, ranging from geomorphic risk-informed land-use policies and setting aside flood bypasses, to structural approaches such as construction of dams and levees. We propose a framework for ‘wise use’ of floodplains, focusing both on large river floodplains (drawing examples from the Sacramento, Mississippi, Missouri river valleys), as well as constrained urban river floodplains. For both settings, we consider flood risk management (including residual risk), the historical roots of floodplain management approaches (drawing largely on past experience in these two hotspots), current policies, and proposed reforms. Through comparative analysis of historical and current approaches in the US and the EU, the workshop examines implications of the recent EU Flood Directive and proposals now in Congress to reform US floodplain policy.
Sponsored by the Institute of International Studies. Co-sponsored by the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, the EU Center of Excellence, UC Berkeley, and the Institute for Water Resources, US Army Corps of Engineers, Washington DC.
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 Center for Causal InferenceThe Center for Causal Inference and Program Evaluation seeks to further research on developing tools for making causal inferences in the social sciences. The study of causality has become increasing interdisciplinary, and the Center seeks to foster greater dialogue between the various disciplines that are contributing to the growing literature, including political science, economics, statistics, biostatistics, and computer science. Professor: Jas Sekhon |
 iGoviGov-Institutions and Governance Program at the Institute of International Studies promotes interdisciplinary research and education on the origins, effects, and evolution of institutions. The goal of the Program is to advance our understanding of the ways that institutions shape economic and political outcomes as well as the ways that political and economic factors shape institutions. Mission:
For more information, please visit the iGov site: igov.berkeley.edu |
 International Law & Politics ColloquiumIn this Colloquium, participants will address some of the most challenging questions of international law and politics by studying the cutting-edge work of the field’s leading scholars. Each class meeting will feature a guest speaker who will present their research; subjects include issues in international trade, global administrative law, international criminal law, and international legal theory. Colloquium students will be expected to produce short comments in response to the assigned workshop papers and to actively participate in workshop discussion. Professors: Katerina Linos and Saira Mohamed |
 International Relations TheoryOn Monday afternoons, IIS hosts an informal colloquium where a prominent speaker is invited to participate in a conversation with affiliated faculty, graduate students and visiting scholars about pressing issues of international relations. Professor: Ron Hassner
Spring 2012 Events:
Monday, February 6, 4-5:30 p.m.
202 Barrows Moses Hall
“Testing the Surge: Why did Violence Decline in Iraq in 2007?"
Speaker: Jake Shapiro (Princeton)
Monday, February 13, 4-5:30 p.m.
223 Moses Hall
“Are State Religions the Norm or the Exception? The Religion and State Project Round II”
Speaker: Jonathan Fox (Bar Ilan)
Monday, February 27, 4-5:30 p.m.
223 Moses Hall
“Interest Configuration and Negotiation”
Speaker: Nina Kelsey (Berkeley)
Monday, March 5, 4-5:30 p.m.
223 Moses Hall
“Institutional Legacies of Insurgency: Governance in Turkey, Uganda, and Kosovo”
Speaker: George Willcoxon (Berkeley)
Monday, March 19, 4-5:30 p.m.
223 Moses Hall
“Non-Military Foreign Intervention in Domestic Social Movements”
Speaker: Rochelle Terman (Berkeley)
Monday, April 9, 4-5:30 p.m.
202 Moses Hall
“Norm Transgression and the Rise of Suicide Terrorism” and "Inferring Norm Cascades through Natural Language Processing"
Speaker: Joe Gardner (Berkeley) and Rengyee Lee (Berkeley)
Monday, April 16, 4-5:30 p.m.
223 Moses Hall
“Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Threat to National Security?”
Speaker: Alison Bond (Berkeley)
Monday, April 23, 4-5:30 p.m.
223 Moses Hall
“The Effect of Regular and Public Competition for Office on Interstate Conflict”
Speaker: Alexander Debs (Yale)
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 Political Economy SeminarThe Political Economy Seminar brings faculty and students together from across the campus. The seminar primairly focuses on formal or applied (game) theory analysis of topics in political economy or political science, e.g., voting, learning in elections, corruption, political selection and bad governments, civil and interstate conflict. Professors: Ernesto Dal Bo and Robert Powell |
 PublicationsThe Global, Area, and International Archive (GAIA) is a program of the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in collaboration with the University of California Press and the California Digital Library. GAIA provides a robust online and print environment for emerging areas of research on political life worldwide. Its mission is to publish peer-reviewed books from across the humanities and social sciences that illuminate complex global phenomena, including those that contribute to the renewal of area studies. All volumes carry the joint imprint of GAIA and the University of California Press. They are published simultaneously in free, open-access digital and reasonably priced paperback editions, in order to serve a truly global community of scholars and to encourage international intellectual exchange. Browse GAIA's open-access digital volumes in the California Digital Library's eScholarship service. Buy GAIA paperbacks from the University of California Press. GAIA publishes four book series in addition to independent monographs and edited volumes in international studies. Nathan MacBrien, Publications Director
Nathan MacBrien is the editor of the Global, Area, and International Archive (GAIA). He has worked as a scholarly acquisitions and manuscript editor for more than fifteen years, including at Stanford University Press and the University of Pittsburgh Press. He has published books in a wide range of fields, including history, sociology, anthropology, political science, the history of science, social theory and criticism, and area studies (especially East Asia, Latin America, and Russia and East Europe). He holds a bachelor’s degree in music history from Oberlin College, and is ABD in historical musicology from the University of Pennsylvania.
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 U.S. Foreign PolicyThe draw down in U.S. forces from Iraq and the anticipated reduction of the International Security Assistance Force from Afghanistan will not eliminate the critical foreign policy challenges facing US security over the next few years. The rise of China, democratic revolutions in the Arab World, European financial instability, nuclear proliferation, and international terrorism are just some of the problems that the US government now faces. The Institute of International Studies will be hosting a Spring Semester speaker series to address these and other challenges to US foreign policy. We will feature prominent acting and former foreign policy practitioners and scholars over the course of the Spring 2012 semester. The schedule currently includes the following speakers. Dates for additional speakers will be posted as they are confirmed. Professor Neil Joeck Spring 2012 Events:
Wednesday, February 22, 4-5:30 p.m.
223 Moses Hall
"Ten Years after 9/11: The Changing Role of the Intelligence Community in US Foreign Policy"
Chris Kojm, Chairman, National Intelligence Council
Intelligence collection and analysis play a critical supporting role in the development and implementation of foreign policy. The attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 exposed critical shortcomings in the US intelligence community. In the decade since those attacks, major organizational and substantive changes have been made in how the US intelligence community functions. Chris Kojm is the current Chairman of the National Intelligence Council and one of the authors of the 9/11 Commission report that identified the problems within the Intelligence Community and recommended reforms to improve its performance. He will discuss how intelligence has changed, the role it currently plays in the policy process, and what more needs to be done to ensure that the US intelligence community provides the kind of support US policy makers need as they confront current challenges in US foreign policy.
Wednesday, March 7, 4-5:30 p.m.
223 Moses Hall
"Should We Talk to Terrorists?"
Ambassador Mitchell Reiss, President, Washington College
The threat of terrorism to US security and international peace and stability did not begin with the September 11, 2001 attacks against the US and will not end when US troops leave Afghanistan. How best to respond to terrorists has been a challenge to past Administrations, not just to Presidents Bush and Obama. It has recently been reported that in addition to military means, the Obama Administration is engaged in some form of discussion with at least part of the Taliban leadership. Negotiating with an enemy has always been a delicate diplomatic undertaking. Ambassador Mitchell Reiss brings extensive experience to this issue in addition to his recent e-book, Negotiating with Evil. As Director of the State Department's Policy Planning Office, he negotiated the Northern Ireland peace agreement and as the Director of the Korea Energy Development Organization he negotiated the implementation of the Framework Agreement with North Korea.
Wednesday, March 14, 4-5:30 p.m.
223 Moses Hall
"Afghanistan and U.S. Foreign Policy"
Dr. Ashley Tellis, Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
The war in Afghanistan has been going on for over a decade, but there is now an end in sight — at least for US forces. President Obama has decided that all US troops will be withdrawn by the end of 2014. As part of the drawdown, the US has committed to training the Afghan National Security Forces so that they will be able to assume all security responsibilities. Furthermore, the administrative transition process is underway with 18 new areas recently turned over to Afghan governance. Yet the Taliban continue to attack throughout Afghanistan, suggesting that regardless of US policy, war will continue. Given this dynamic, what are our policy options? Dr. Ashley Tellis brings to this issue his extensive experience as Senior Advisor to the US Ambassador in India, as Senior Director for Strategic Planning at the National Security Council, and as informal advisor to the Under Secretary of Political Affairs at the State Department.
Wednesday, April 4, 4-5:30 p.m.
223 Moses Hall
"Why Pakistan Matters"
Dr. Neil Joeck, Senior Fellow, Center for Global Security Research
US foreign policy challenges with respect to nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and China come together in its relationship with Pakistan. Few would have predicted that this state, which began improbably out of the ashes of British colonialism in 1947, would assume such importance. But as the war in Afghanistan continues, Pakistan may play an important role either in prolonging the conflict or in achieving a peaceful resolution. Beyond the war in Afghanistan Pakistan's continuing insecurities about India and its ambivalent approach to terrorism make it, in the words of former President Clinton, "the most dangerous place in the world." Dr. Neil Joeck, currently a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley, recently completed two years as the National Intelligence Officer for South Asia, and also served as Director for Counterproliferation Strategy at the National Security Council and Member of the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department.
Monday, April 9, 4-5:30 p.m.
223 Moses Hall
"Nuclear Proliferation: What's to Worry About?"
Ambassador Robert Gallucci, President, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Preventing nuclear proliferation continues to be one of the biggest foreign policy challenges for the United States. Iran is only the most recent country aspiring to develop nuclear weapons despite having signed the Treaty on the Prevention of Nuclear Proliferation. Iran follows the example of North Korea, who formally withdrew from the treaty after acquiring the necessary technology for a bomb. Libya was on the same path before shifting gears in the mid-2000s, while Pakistan, India, and Israel stayed out of the treaty and took their own paths to a nuclear arsenal. Before serving as Dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and President of the MacArthur Foundation, Ambassador Robert Gallucci spent a storied career in the State Department addressing these challenges.
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University of California, Berkeley
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