Congratulations to our 2024 Simpson Research Grant in International Studies for ABDs Recipients!
Matthew Ryan Kovac
My dissertation project, One Struggle: A Global History of the Irish Republican Movement, 1956-1994, seeks to explain how the “Troubles” in the North of Ireland, so often depicted as a localized ethno-religious conflict, became a global flashpoint in the struggle for decolonization. By following the activities of Irish solidarity committees across Europe, Australasia, and the Americas, I trace how Irish republicans imagined themselves, and were imagined in turn, as partners in a truly worldwide struggle for national liberation and social revolution – an alliance which challenged conventional boundaries between First World and Third World, Global North and Global South. In the process, I will show how radical hubs like Amsterdam and Frankfurt served as important conduits to better-known “Meccas of Revolution” in Algiers and Beirut, facilitating the flow of ideas, people, and matériel between Irish republicans and Third World liberation movements. These networks, I argue, helped to position the Irish republican struggle squarely within the Third World project, forging alliances with the African National Congress (ANC) and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and paving the way for what I term the “global Irish republican moment” of the 1980-1981 hunger
strikes.
Nadia Almasalkhi
In countries like Lebanon where poor governance leads many to emigrate, the substantive political participation of emigrants in competitive elections holds the potential to strengthen accountability mechanisms for politicians and enhance homeland democracy.The Lebanese parliamentary elections of 2018 and 2022 marked the first elections in which the Lebanese diaspora could participate from abroad. Between 2018 and 2022, the number of ballots cast by Lebanese émigrés at international polling stations rose by over 200 percent, while turnout among their in-country counterparts did not significantly change. In my dissertation, I investigate the drivers of this increase in Lebanese expatriate political participation using mixed methods, including computational analysis of social media activism and interview methods. Through in-depth interviews with election organizers and eligible Lebanese expatriate voters in the United States, Canada, and the United Arab Emirates, I seek to understand processes of transnational voter mobilization and how national contexts shape transnational engagement.
Alyssa Rene Heinze
Alyssa is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley and a Research Associate at the Center on the Politics of Development. She researches gendered understandings of: the political economy of local development, political inequality, and the consequences of climate change using mixed (in-depth qualitative, experimental, and machine-learning) methods. Her research is located in the Global South, with a focus on India. In her dissertation project, Alyssa explores the relationship between water scarcity, state intervention to control natural resources, and gendered subordination in rural India.
Emily Fjaellen Thompson
My dissertation project combines ethnographic, archival, and documentary research to trace the convoluted paths of hidden, forgotten, or otherwise unpublished photographic collections in Ayacucho, the epicenter of the Peruvian internal armed conflict (1980-2000). By collaborating with professional and amateur photographers in a joint search for their disappeared archives, I ask what previously ignored material markers of memory reveal about the future of politicized memory work in Peru as well as how we understand the afterlives of intense violence more broadly. Long after the “official” end of the internal armed conflict that claimed 70,000 lives, my work approaches the current political rupture in Peru as an opening to consider how previously ignored photographs are circulating unevenly to inform traumatic memory, accrue social meaning, and contest prior narratives of reconciliation.
Johanna Reyes Ortega
My dissertation evaluates why revolutionary elites promote women's full citizenship through legislation, access to exercising such citizenship, and an ideological commitment to gender equality across three dimensions: political rights, economic rights, and physical integrity rights. My central argument is that the level and type of women's incorporation into legal and political systems after revolutions depends on whether the system of oppression faced by women was vertically imposed (by the old regime or an outside force) or horizontally imposed (by the revolutionaries themselves). If vertical, I hypothesize elites will incorporate women via ideological appeals to liberation. If horizontal, merely pragmatic symbolic representation will occur. I plan to test this theory through a comparative historical analysis of four social revolutions, with a focus on the Cuban case. My research methodology involves process tracing using archival records, interviews with revolutionaries, and text analysis of official archives and media publications. With the support of a Simpson Fellowship, I will conduct extensive fieldwork in Cuba and my additional cases to collect archival data on the evolution of gender policies and elite approaches to women's rights after the revolution.