Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar Dissertation Program

Current Peace Scholars

Peace Scholar dissertation fellowships are awarded annually to outstanding doctoral students enrolled in recognized programs at U.S. universities. The fellowships support one year of dissertation research and writing on topics addressing the sources, nature, prevention, and management of international conflict. For further information please consult the Peace Scholar Overview page.

The 2009-2010 Peace Scholar Dissertation Fellowship is from September 1, 2009 – August 31, 2010 unless otherwise indicated.

• Xanthe Ackerman
• Louis-Alexandre Berg
• Paola Castaño-Rodriguez
• Benjamin Coates
• Neerada Jacob
• Patrick Johnston
• Janet Lewis
• James Long
• Tanya "Negeen" Pegahi
• Benjamin Schonthal
• Paul Staniland
• Lorenzo Vidino

Xanthe Ackerman

Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar
Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University

Project: "After War in Africa: Can the Education Sector be Harnessed to Prevent a Return to Conflict? Case Study on Uganda, with perspectives from South Sudan and Liberia"

Xanthe Ackerman’s dissertation examines how in post-conflict Africa a country’s education system can meet stakeholder needs and mitigate the risk of violent conflict.  Low and inequitable levels of development can be preconditions for a return to conflict, especially when the conflict was motivated by ethnic and regional disparities. In such an environment, the education sector has tremendous potential to contribute to peace-building if scarce resources are used strategically, for instance, to promote equal access, peaceful curriculum and methods, and safe spaces for communities.  Her research focuses on northern Uganda.

Ackerman is a doctoral student in the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. She is the founding chair of the Advancement of Girls’ Education Scholarship Fund.  She has worked in Africa and Latin America with CARE, the UN, and the World Bank on issues related to community development and security.  She recently conducted a study on education in northern Uganda with Save the Children.  Ackerman holds an M.A. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a B.A. from New York University.

Publications:

• “Primary is Not Enough: Proposal for Safe and Affordable Secondary School for Girls in Malawi,” Africa Policy Journal, Harvard Kennedy School of Governance (Spring 2007).
• “Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration in Sudan: Achievements, Challenges and Opportunities in Context” (Africa Peace Forum) (2007).
• “Inversión Privada Extranjera y Retos Al Poder Regulatorio Del Estado: Un Estudio de Caso del Complejo Metalúrgico de Doe Run en Perú.” Translation: “Private Foriegn Investment and Challenges to the Regulatory Power of the State: A Case Study of the Doe Run Mining Complex in Peru,” with D. Jones, Revista Peruana de Derecho de la Empresa, No. 59 (2005).

E-mail: xanthe.ackerman@gmail.com

Louis-Alexandre Berg

Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar
Department of Government, Georgetown University

Project: "From Patronage to Public Good: The Political Economy of Post-Conflict Security Sector Reform"

Louis-Alexandre Berg focuses on the politics of security sector reform in post-conflict states. His dissertation seeks to explain why political leaders in some post-conflict countries, but not others, reform police and military institutions to make them more accountable to the public. He looks at the political economy of security sector reform to analyze how domestic and external political pressures shape incentives for elites in post-conflict states to give up exclusive control over security forces and allow reforms to succeed.

Berg is a doctoral student in Government at Georgetown University.  He currently works in USAID’s Office of Democracy and Governance, where he has designed justice sector development programs in Haiti, El Salvador, the DRC, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Pakistan, and Jordan. He has worked for the State Department Office of War Crime Issues, conducted research on post-conflict rule of law for the U.S. National Security Council, and worked for the U.N. in Sierra Leone. Additionally, he worked on peace building programs in the Middle East with Search for Common Ground and Seeds of Peace. Berg holds an M.P.A. in international affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and a B.A. in international relations from Brown University.  He speaks French and Spanish.

Publications:

• Jordan Rule of Law Assessment and Evaluation of Judicial Interventions, co-authored with Glenn E. Robinson, Mary Noel Pepys, and Sewar Masa’deh (Washington D.C.: U.S. Agency for International Development, January 2008).
• Pakistan Rule of Law Asessment, co-authored with Richard Blue and Richard Hoffman (Washington D.C.: U.S. Agency for International Development, December 2008).
• Haiti Conflict Assessment, co-authored with Katie Hamlin, Sharon Bean, Charles Weden and Yves Francois Pierre (Washington D.C.: U.S. Agency for International Development, June 2006).

E-mail: lb262@georgetown.edu

Paola Castaño-Rodriguez

Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar
Department of Sociology, University of Chicago

Project: "The Time of the Victimes": Institutional Practices and Understanding of Violence in the National Commission of Reparation and Reconciliation in Colombia

Paola Castaño’s dissertation examines the process by which the victims of the armed conflict in Colombia are defined by the state as subjects entitled to reparation, truth, justice and memory.  She analyzes the practices of categorization and assistance to the victims in the National Commission of Reparation and Reconciliation (NCRR).  Using an ethnographic approach, her project focuses on two areas of the NCRR: the offices devoted to the daily assistance to the victims; and the Historical Memory Group, a team of scholars producing reports about emblematic cases of the armed conflict based on the testimonies of the victims.

Castaño is a doctoral student in Sociology at the University of Chicago, where she also obtained an MA in 2007.  She is currently working as a preceptor in the Department of Sociology and as a lecturer in Social Sciences College.  She has two BA degrees from the University of Los Andes in Colombia: a Magna Cum Laude degree in Political Science (2003) and a degree with honors in History (2004). She has worked as a professor at the Diplomatic Academy of the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Relations; as a researcher at the University of Los Andes and as a lecturer at the University Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Bogotá. She has also worked as a teaching assistant and as part of the Board of Reviews in the American Journal of Sociology.  Castano speaks Spanish.

Publications:

• “The Violentologists: Intellectuals and the Problem of Violence as an Object of Study in Colombia” (Under Review).
• “The Categorization of People as Targets of Violence: A Perspective on the Colombian Armed Conflict”, in Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency, ed. John Kelly (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2009): 76-95  (Forthcoming).
• “América Latina y la Producción Transnacional de sus Imágenes y Representaciones. Algunas Perspectivas Preliminares” in Cultura y Transformaciones Sociales en Tiempos de Globalización, ed. Daniel Mato and Alejandro Maldonado (Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO), 2007).
• La Construcción de un Campo de Conocimiento: La Historia Mundial (Bogotá; Universidad de los Andes, CESO, 2005).

E-mail: pcastano@uchicago.edu

Benjamin Coates

Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar
Department of American History, Columbia University

Project: "Trans-Atlantic Advocates: American International Law and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1898-1919"

Benjamin Coates specializes in American foreign relations between 1898 and 1919 and the multifaceted role of international law.  His dissertation describes how American international lawyers’ created the academic field of international law and gained unprecedented influence within the State Department.  Drawing on government documents and the lawyers’ private papers, it assesses the successes and failures of lawyers attempts to shape both the conceptualization and conduct of U.S. policy during a period of American transition from isolation to world power.

Coates is a doctoral student in history at Columbia University.  He was a recipient of a Richard Hofstadter Summer Research fellowship and a Dorothy Quinn dissertation fellowship and he has presented papers at the End of Neutrality conference sponsored by the Netherlands Institute of War Documentation, and the 2009 Conference of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. At Columbia, he has served as a teaching assistant for three years and co-chaired the GHA Teaching Committee. Before entering graduate school, he worked as a writer and senior researcher for the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C.  Coates graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in History from Stanford University, where his honors thesis analyzing American policy in El Salvador from 1979-84 earned the Robert M. Golden medal. He speaks French and Spanish.

Publications:

• H-diplo review of John Hepp, “James Brown Scott and the Rise of Public International Law” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 7.2, April 2008.

E-mail: bac2140@columbia.edu

Neerada Jacob

Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar
School of International Service, American University

Project: "Sanctions as a Cause of Nuclear Reversal: (When) Do They Work?"

Neerada Jacob examines the impact of economic sanctions on the reversal of nuclear weapons programs. In her dissertation, she hypothesizes that economic sanctions can cause nuclear reversal if one of three mechanisms operates: resource denial, compellence, or political fracture. Her research involves a comparative study of three countries whose nuclear weapons programs ended (Iraq, Taiwan, and Libya) and one where the outcome is uncertain (Iran).

Jacobs is a doctoral student in political science at American University. She has worked as a teaching and research assistant for five years at American University, and was awarded merit scholarships at the University of Pittsburgh and American University. She has given paper presentations at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, the International Studies Association and the Northeastern Political Science Association. Jacobs holds an M.A. in security and intelligence studies from the University of Pittsburgh with a certificate in Asian Studies, and an M.A. in international politics from Jawaharlal Nehru University. She speaks Hindi and Malayalam.

E-mail: neerada.jacob@american.edu

Patrick Johnston

Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar (Non-Stipendiary)
Department of Political Science, Northwestern University

Project: "The Treatment of Civilians in Effective Counterinsurgency Operations"

Patrick Johnston tracks historical trends in the causes of success and failure in counterinsurgency campaigns with an eye to identifying appropriate analogies and lessons for our present and future wars. In his dissertation, he explores the emerging consensus, which is based on past campaigns in Malaya, Vietnam, and Iraq, that effective counterinsurgency requires a strategy of protecting civilians and engaging in nation building. Using a new database of all major counterinsurgency campaigns between 1800 and 1999, he argues that there is little precedent for the effectiveness of this type of strategy. He demonstrates that alternative models of counterinsurgency have proven successful historically, and that these models remain effective in certain parts of the world. However, they often run counter to contemporary norms of governance and human rights, presenting policy makers with a difficult choice between liberal ideals and military effectiveness.

Patrick is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University and a research fellow at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (BCSIA). In the 2007-08 and 2008-09 academic years, he was a pre-doctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). He has also been awarded a competitive fellowship from Northwestern University. Johnston holds an M.A. in Political Science from Northwestern University and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Minnesota, Morris.

Publications:

• “The Geography of Insurgent Organization and its Consequences for Civil Wars: Evidence from Liberia and Sierra Leone,” Security Studies, Vol 17 No 1 (2008).
• “Negotiated Settlements and Government Strategy in Civil Wars: Evidence from Darfur,” Civil Wars, Vol 9 No 4 (2007).
• “International Norms, Commerce, and the Political Economy of Insecurity in Sierra Leone,” Canadian Journal of African Studies, Vol 41 No 1 (2007).
• “Timber Booms, States Busts: The Political Economy of Liberian Timber,” Review of African Political Economy, Vol 31 No 101 (2004).

E-mail: Patrick_Johnston@hks.harvard.edu

Janet Lewis

Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar
Department of Government, Harvard University

Project: "Ending Conflict Early: Incipient States of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency"

Janet Lewis examines why the Ugandan government has been effective in resolving conflicts with many of the 16 insurgent groups that operated within its borders since 1986, but has been less successful with others, such as the Lord’s Resistance Army. In her dissertation, she focuses on the earliest stages of rebellion and government response, as these stages are often omitted from existing studies, and because they are critical for learning why conflicts are, or are not, averted before large-scale violence and its attendant humanitarian costs emerge.

Lewis is a doctoral student at Harvard University. She has conducted research for the Brookings Institution, the RAND Corporation and the U.S. Government Accountability Offices (GAO). Additionally, she has worked with youth from conflict regions, including the Middle East, the Balkans, and Cyprus while working for five summers with Seeds of Peace. Her fieldwork experience includes Uganda, Israel, Gaza City, and South Africa, and she has presented her work in the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard and at a conference on Order, Conflict, and Violence at Yale Universitiy. Lewis holds an M.A. in International Policy Studies and a B.A. with Honors in Political Science from Stanford University.

Publications:

• “Poverty and Conflict: What Policymakers Should Know” with Susan E. Rice and Corinne Graff, Working Paper Series on Global Economy and Development, #02 (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, December 2006).

Contributing author to the following GAO publications:

• Terrorist Financing: Better Strategic Planning Needed to Coordinate U.S. Efforts to Deliver Counter-Terrorism Financing Training Abroad (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Accountability Office, October 2005).
• Terrorist Financing: U.S. Agencies Should Systematically Assess Terrorists’ Use of Alternative (Non-Banking) Financing Mechanisms (Washington, D.C.: U.S. General Accounting Office, November 2003).
• International Trade: Advisory Committee System Should Be Updated to Better Serve U.S. Policy Needs (Washington, D.C.: U.S. General Accounting Office, July 2002).

E-mail: jilewis@fas.harvard.edu

James Long

Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar
Department of Political Science, University of California- San Diego

Project: "Voting, Fraud and Violence: The Problem of Elections in Emerging Democracies"

James Long explores why elections in new democracies sometimes produce peace but at other times incite political violence. In his dissertation, he argues that citizens view elections as mechanisms of democratic accountability and not zero-sum ethnic contests, but many badly managed elections suffer allegations of fraud and therefore spark protest and state repression. Using extensive survey and exit poll data from Africa, his study contributes to knowledge and policies regarding the promotion of democratic elections and how they can contribute to either peace or violence.

Long is a doctoral student in political science at the University of California, San Diego. He has conducted fieldwork in Uganda with a Fulbright Scholarship and in Kenya with a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Fellowship. Results from his study of voting and fraud in Kenya have been covered by various news outlets, including the New York Times, Slate, The Nation, National Public Radio, and McClatchy’s newspapers. He has consulted for the United Nations Development Program and the African Centre on Open Governance, and conducted additional research on violent conflict and international aid in Ethiopia, Tanzania, Chad, Cameroon, and Sierra Leone. He received an MSc in African Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and a B.A. from the College of William and Mary.

Publications:

• “The Presidential and Parliamentary Elections in Kenya, December 2007: Evidence from an Exit Poll,” with Clark Gibson, Electoral Studies (Forthcoming).
• “Crunching the Numbers for Evidence of Fraud,” with Karuti Kanyinga and David Ndii (Nairobi, Kenya: Society for International Development, Forthcoming).
• “Voting and the Violence in Kenya,” San Diego Union Tribune(January 15, 2008).

E-mail: jdlong@ucsd.edu

Tanya "Negeen" Pegahi

Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar
Department of Political Science, University of Chicago

Project: "Dangerous Deterrent? Evaluating the Risk that Nuclear Acquisition Will Embolden Weak States"

Tanya Pegahi’s dissertation investigates the conditions under which the acquisition of nuclear weapons “emboldens” states to do things they otherwise would not do; how frequently these conditions are likely be obtained; and how severe the resulting effects will be.

It exposes logical flaws in the conventional wisdom that acquisition automatically emboldens weak, dissatisfied states at lower levels of conflict against their stronger, nuclear-armed adversaries.  The dissertation shows instead that acquisition’s emboldening effect is highly contingent and unlikely to obtain, and therefore has implications both for policymakers in existing nuclear states fearful of further proliferation and those in currently non-nuclear states desirous of acquisition for expansionist purposes.

Pegahi is a doctoral student in political science at the University of Chicago. She is a pre-doctoral fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and has been a security analyst at the RAND corporation and a Fulbright Scholar to Pakistan. She holds an M.A. in political science from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in Chinese and Political Science from Williams College. She speaks Chinese, Urdu, Persian and Arabic.

Publications:

• Striking First: Preemptive and Preventive in U.S. National Security Policy, with Karl P. Mueller et. al (RAND DRR-3361-AF, January 2007).
• The Tribes of Waziristan, with C. Christine Fair, Narayan Badhey and Michael Tseng (RAND PM-1699-DIA, April 2004).
• Concluding chapter, with Daniel Byman and Nora Bensahel, in The Future Security Environment in the Middle East: Conflict, Stability, and Political Change, ed. Byman and Bensahel (RAND MR-1640-AF, January 2004).
• “The Disintegrating Profile of Palestinian Suicide Bombers,” RAND-MIPT Quarterly Bulletin (2^nd quarter 2002).

E-mail: npegahi@uchicago.edu

Benjamin Schonthal

Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar
Department of History of Religions, University of Chicago

Project:"Regulating Religion: State Regulation of Religion in Post-Colonial Sri Lanka”

Benjamin Schonthal’s dissertation investigates the history of various laws and state institutions that regulate the practice of religion in contemporary Sri Lanka.  Using interview and archival research, he looks at why these structures were created (or amended) and how they mediate relationships among Sri Lanka’s Buddhist majority and its Hindu, Muslim and Christian minorities, and between religious communities and the state.  It argues that governments, since independence, have produced conflicting visions of Sri Lanka’s religious pluralism by enacting laws and creating government offices that limn different legal and conceptual boundaries between Buddhism and minority religions, and between the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’.

Schonthal is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History of Religions at the University of Chicago. He recently returned from fieldwork in Sri Lanka as a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellow. He was a Jacob K. Javits Fellow, Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar and a Thomas J. Watson Fellow.  He has worked for the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions, a non-profit organization that promotes interreligious dialogue and has helped edit two books for Mark Juergensmeyer on religion and global civil society. He holds masters degrees from the University of Chicago, University of Sydney and UC Santa Barbara and a B.A. in Religion/Asian Studies from Bowdoin College.  Schonthal has language competence in Tamil, Sinhala, Sanskrit, Pali, German and French.

Publications:

• "Translating Remembering," in the Sri Lanka Reader: History, Politics, Culture.  John C. Holt (ed.). Duke University Press. 2010.
• “A New Day for Sri Lanka.”  Report “In the Field” for US Institute of Peace: http://www.usip.org/in-the-field/new-day-sri-lanka.
• “Protestant Buddhism,” “Sarvodaya Movement” and “World Parliament of Religions” in Encyclopedia of Global Religion and Society, ed. Mark Juergensmeyer and Wade Clark Roof (Sage Publications, 2009).
• “Untangling Uposatha: Indology, Etymologic and History in Buddhist Studies,” South Asian Graduate Research Journal, Vol 16 No 1 (2006).

E-mail: bens@uchicago.edu

Paul Staniland

Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar (Non-Stipendiary)
Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Project: "Explaining Cohesion, Fragmentation, and Control in Armed Groups"

Political scientists have shown that the cohesion or fragmentation of warring insurgent groups is a key determinant of civil wars' duration, patterns of violence against civilians, and the success and failure of negotiated settlements. Fragmented organizations lack discipline, abuse civilians, and struggle to implement peace-building programs, while cohesive armed groups are more militarily effective, and also better able to control their fighters and factions during negotiations and de-mobilization. While scholars have argued that the organization of armed groups helps explain important dynamics of civil wars, there has been relatively little work on the causes of this variation in groups' structures. Staniland's research explores why some insurgent groups hang together while others fall apart, by offering a theory of organizational control to explain these differences across groups. He argues that patterns of cohesion and fragmentation are caused by the interaction of two variables: the structure of the social base upon which a group mobilizes, and the presence or absence of two external state/diaspora support for the organization. He tests his theory using detailed comparisons of 24 major armed groups in civil wars in Kashmir, Northern Ireland, and Sri Lanka.

Staniland has been a researcher at the RAND Corporation analyzing religious politics as well as a research assistant for professors Roger Petersen, John Mark Hansen and Stathis Kalyvas. He has been awarded a World Politics and Statecraft Fellowship for dissertation fieldwork in South Asia from the Smith Richardson Foundation in 2008, and a fellowship from the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University for 2008-2009. He received his BA from the University of Chicago in political science. He speaks basic Hindi and Urdu.

Publications:

• "Foreign Policy Making in India in the Pre-Liberalization and Coalition Era," in Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy: India's 'Neo-Federal' Foreign Policy, ed. Amitabh Mattoo and Happymon Jacob (London: Routledge, forthcoming).
• Analyzing Religious Politics and Violence, with Gregory Treverton (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, MG-564, forthcoming).
• "Explaining Civil-Military Relations in Complex Political Environments: India and Pakistan in Comparative Perspective," Security Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2 (April 2008).
• "Resentment, Fear, and the Structure of the Military in Multi-Ethnic States," with Roger Petersen, in Insecurity in Intrastate Conflicts: Governments, Rebels and Outsiders, ed. Stephen Saideman and Marie-Joelle Zahar (London: Routledge, 2008). 

E-mail: ptsan@mit.edu

Lorenzo Vidino

Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar
Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University

Project: "Soft Approaches to Counterterrorism: Counter Radicalization in Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Italy"

Understanding that long term solutions to terrorism will be achieved only when radical ideologies will no longer appeal to young Muslims, over the last few years several European countries have implemented various counter-radicalization programs. Vidino’s dissertation aims at analyzing the characteristics, goals and challenges of such programs, devoting detailed attention to the experiences in Great Britain and the Netherlands. Particular focus will be placed on the dilemma facing authorities in most countries: can non-violent Islamists be engaged and used as partners against violent radicalization?

Lorenzo Vidino is a doctoral student in the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is a fellow at the Initiative on Religion in International Affairs, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is the author of a book, congressional testimonies, and frequent articles in several prominent newspapers and academic journals. Vidiono is currently working on a book for Columbia University Press, which will be published in 2010. A native of Milan, Italy, he holds a law degree from the University of Milan Law School and a Masters Degree in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He speaks Italian, French, Spanish, and German.

Publications:

• “Islamism and the West: Europe as a Battlefield,” in Islamism, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, ed. Jeffrey Bale and Bassam Tibi (Routledge/ Taylor & Francis, 10:1, 2009).
• “Homegrown Terrorist Networks in the United States: A New and Occasional Phenomenon?” in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism (January 2009).
• “Islam, Political Islam and Jihadism in Italy,” Current Trends in Islamist Ideology (Hudson Institute, August 2008).
• “The Multi-layered Threat of Islamism to Europe,” Journal of Counterterrorism and Homeland Security International, Vol 14 (Summer Issue, 2008).
• “The Hofstad Group: The New Face of Terrorist Networks in Europe,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism (July 2007).
• “Aftermath of the Danish Cartoon Controversy,” with Pernille Ammitzbøll, Middle East Quarterly (Winter 2007).
• Al Qaeda in Europe: The New Battleground of International Jihad (Amherst: NY, Prometheus, 2005, Translated and published in Danish by Gyldendal, 2006).

E-mail: lorenzovidino@gmail.com