Banner year for Global Seed Funds

The Center is thrilled to announce another banner year for the MIT Global Seed Funds (GSF) program. A total of 107 international research projects received more than $2.6 million in funding for the 2023-2024 cycle. These projects were selected from among 226 proposals submitted by faculty and research scientists across the Institute.

Through these seed funds, faculty members are empowered to push the boundaries of scientific discovery, nurture global connections, and shape a more interconnected and collaborative world. Many GSF awardees invite students to participate, providing them the opportunity to engage in cutting-edge research and to contribute to groundbreaking discoveries.

By fostering interdisciplinary collaborations, promoting diversity, and addressing pressing societal challenges, the program plays a key role in MIT's commitment to global engagement.

The GSF is comprised of a general fund that can be applied to any country, as well as multiple country, region, and university-specific funds. This cycle included new funds in additional countries, including Armenia, Brazil, India, and Norway. Current and past awardees are listed here. The next cycle will open in fall of 2024.

The MIT Global Seed Funds (GSF) program helps Institute faculty create exciting new connections with colleagues abroad. GSF supports early- stage, open and publishable research collaborations with researchers at academic universities and public research institutions around the world. Administered by the Center for International Studies (CIS), the GSF program has awarded close to $25 million to over 1,000 faculty research projects since its inception in 2008.

 

MIT-Mexico fosters cross-border collaboration

Favianna Colón Irizarry spent last summer at Tecnológico de Monterrey, working alongside Mexican biotechnology researchers to develop a biodegradable coating that prolongs the shelf life of local foods. Assisting in this and other innovative projects at one of Mexico’s top research institutions was the opportunity of a lifetime, for sure. But, for Colón Irizarry, it’s the tapestry of experiences that accompanied her MIT-Mexico internship that will always resonate.

“From my internship, I gleaned a vital lesson: Cultural proficiency is indispensable,” she says.

A sophomore majoring in chemical-biological engineering, Colón Irizarry is among nearly 500 interns who have traveled to Mexico for a summer of work and study since the MIT-Mexico Program was launched by MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) in 2004. A flagship program within the Center of International Studies (CIS), MISTI offers tailored global experiential learning opportunities to more than 1,200 students each year.

MIT-Mexico has enlisted the support of over 200 host partners in Mexico during the course of its 20-year history.

“It started as one student in 2004 doing an internship. Now in the summer it’s around 30 interns,” says MIT-Mexico Program Director Griselda Gómez, adding that the program has also placed MIT students at Mexican high schools as temporary STEM teachers through 170 Global Teaching Labs since 2012.

As the program begins its third decade, both Gómez and Faculty Director Paulo Lozano point to the number of students MIT-Mexico has involved over the years — contributing to myriad cross-border research partnerships — as the program’s foremost achievement.

“I think the large number of students that have gone to Mexico is a great accomplishment,” says Lozano, a Tecnológico de Monterrey alumnus and now MIT’s Miguel Alemán Velasco Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

He credits Gómez, director of the program since 2006, with the initiative’s overall success, including “being very careful that the places we send our students are safe.”

For her part, Gómez says accommodating the interests of Mexico-bound students across a wide spectrum of academic subjects and fields “is a personal mission for me.”

“If students want to go to Mexico, I really want them to go and have a great experience. If we don’t have a specific project (matching student interests), we will go and look for one,” she says. “It’s very personalized.”

While MIT-Mexico offers internships in MISTI’s designated “impact areas” of climate and sustainability, health, artificial intelligence, and social impact, over the years it has arranged summer internships in several other fields, including architecture, urban planning, agriculture, and aeronautics.

Last summer, for example, MIT-Mexico interns worked on initiatives ranging from research on the continued value of textiles and craft methods to projects investigating low-carbon affordable housing solutions and employing AI for financial literacy. Internship topics planned for this summer include Design of 6G Communication Systems for Smart Cities, based in Mexico City, and Automatically Assessing Patients for Refractive Surgery in the city of Querétaro.

All are designed to promote cross-cultural experiences and strengthen ties between Mexican and MIT students and faculty, while boosting education, innovation, and entrepreneurship in Mexico and developing and exposing MIT’s research outside the United States.

Beyond the long-lasting impact interns say the experience has had on their lives (Gómez reports several “love stories” and even marriages have resulted), “it’s also a connection between researchers in Mexico and researchers at MIT — collaborations that may lead to exciting collaborative research later on,” Lozano says.

Lozano is MIT-Mexico’s second faculty director, taking over about a decade ago from now-retired political economy professor Michael Piore, who helped found the program in response to a proposal from a group of Mexican students attending MIT. Gómez says MIT-Mexico is unique among MISTI programs in that students from the host country were the catalyst for forming it and MIT alumni in Mexico were largely responsible for the funding that got it off the ground. It was also MISTI’s first program in a Spanish-speaking country.

Learning and practicing how to speak Spanish “in real life” was a primary motivator for what Matt Smith now calls “one of the best decisions I could have made for myself.” Smith, a second-year computer science and engineering major, was among 35 students who spent their January Independent Activities Period in Mexico through the Global Teaching Lab program. Assigned to teach at a Mexico City high school, Smith says the language barrier gradually melted away — at least partially — over a three-week period in which he immersed himself in local museums, parks, and culture and was amazed and impressed by the number of peaceful gardens and natural areas throughout the bustling city.

Like Global Teaching Lab programs in other countries, the MIT-Mexico program aims to increase interest in STEM topics at host country schools. It matches MIT students with high schools in Mexico, and materials are adapted from MIT online resources to prepare tailored workshops on STEM subjects that complement the local school’s curriculum.

The third piece of MIT-Mexico is the provision of the MIT Global Seed Fund (GSF) grants administered through CIS. GSF promotes and supports early-stage collaborations among MIT researchers and their counterparts in Mexico. The program has awarded more than 50 such grants to over 100 researchers since 2012 to fund collaborative projects that can involve both MIT and Mexican students.

With his appetite whetted by the Global Teaching Lab, Smith came back from Mexico in January determined to apply for an MIT-Mexico internship this summer.

“I decided that three weeks wasn’t enough for me to fully digest the entire city — so why not go again?” says Smith, who was accepted and leaves in early June for a research position at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional in Mexico City.

“Being in another country made me realize how much I’d like to travel the world and see the experiences that other people are having,” he adds. “I highly recommend the experience for anyone looking to do something impactful in another country while exploring the best parts of the community.”

 

Ethnic dynamics and climate change in Africa

Evan Lieberman is the Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa at MIT, and is also director of the Center for International Studies. During a semester-long sabbatical, he’s currently based at the African Climate and Development Initiative at the University of Cape Town.

In this Q&A, Lieberman discusses several climate-related research projects he’s pursuing in South Africa and surrounding countries. This is part of an ongoing series exploring how the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences is addressing the climate crisis.

Q: South Africa is a nation whose political and economic development you have long studied and written about. Do you see this visit as an extension of the kind of research you have been pursuing, or a departure from it?

A: Much of my previous work has been animated by the question of understanding the causes and consequences of group-based disparities, whether due to AIDS or Covid. These are problems that know no geographic boundaries, and where ethnic and racial minorities are often hardest hit. Climate change is an analogous problem, with these minority populations living in places where they are most vulnerable, in heat islands in cities, and in coastal areas where they are not protected. The reality is they might get hit much harder by longer-term trends and immediate shocks.

In one line of research, I seek to understand how people in different African countries, in different ethnic groups, perceive the problems of climate change and their governments’ response to it. There are ethnic divisions of labor in terms of what people do — whether they are farmers or pastoralists, or live in cities. So some ethnic groups are simply more affected by drought or extreme weather than others, and this can be a basis for conflict, especially when competing for often limited government resources.

In this area, just like in my previous research, learning what shapes ordinary citizen perspectives is really important, because these views affect people’s everyday practices, and the extent to which they support certain kinds of policies and investments their government makes in response to climate-related challenges. But I will also try to learn more about the perspectives of policymakers and various development partners who seek to balance climate-related challenges against a host of other problems and priorities.

Q: You recently published “Until We Have Won Our Liberty," which examines the difficult transition of South Africa from apartheid to a democratic government, scrutinizing in particular whether the quality of life for citizens has improved in terms of housing, employment, discrimination, and ethnic conflicts. How do climate change-linked issues fit into your scholarship?

A: I never saw myself as a climate researcher, but a number of years ago, heavily influenced by what I was learning at MIT, I began to recognize more and more how important the issue of climate change is. And I realized there were lots of ways in which the climate problem resonated with other kinds of problems I had tackled in earlier parts of my work.

There was once a time when climate and the environment was the purview primarily of white progressives: the “tree huggers.” And that’s really changed in recent decades as it has become evident that the people who've been most affected by the climate emergency are ethnic and racial minorities. We saw with Hurricane Katrina and other places [that] if you are Black, you’re more likely to live in a vulnerable area and to just generally experience more environmental harms, from pollution and emissions, leaving these communities much less resilient than white communities. Government has largely not addressed this inequity. When you look at American survey data in terms of who’s concerned about climate change, Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans are more unified in their worries than are white Americans.

There are analogous problems in Africa, my career research focus. Governments there have long responded in different ways to different ethnic groups. The research I am starting looks at the extent to which there are disparities in how governments try to solve climate-related challenges.

Q: It’s difficult enough in the United States taking the measure of different groups’ perceptions of the impact of climate change and government’s effectiveness in contending with it. How do you go about this in Africa?

A: Surprisingly, there’s only been a little bit of work done so far on how ordinary African citizens, who are ostensibly being hit the hardest in the world by the climate emergency, are thinking about this problem. Climate change has not been politicized there in a very big way. In fact, only 50 percent of Africans in one poll had heard of the term.

In one of my new projects, with political science faculty colleague Devin Caughey and political science doctoral student Preston Johnston, we are analyzing social and climate survey data [generated by the Afrobarometer research network] from over 30 African countries to understand within and across countries the ways in which ethnic identities structure people’s perception of the climate crisis, and their beliefs in what government ought to be doing. In largely agricultural African societies, people routinely experience drought, extreme rain, and heat. They also lack the infrastructure that can shield them from the intense variability of weather patterns. But we’re adding a lens, which is looking at sources of inequality, especially ethnic differences.

I will also be investigating specific sectors. Africa is a continent where in most places people cannot take for granted universal, piped access to clean water. In Cape Town, several years ago, the combination of failure to replace infrastructure and lack of rain caused such extreme conditions that one of the world’s most important cities almost ran out of water.

While these studies are in progress, it is clear that in many countries, there are substantively large differences in perceptions of the severity of climate change, and attitudes about who should be doing what, and who’s capable of doing what. In several countries, both perceptions and policy preferences are differentiated along ethnic lines, more so than with respect to generational or class differences within societies.

This is interesting as a phenomenon, but substantively, I think it’s important in that it may provide the basis for how politicians and government actors decide to move on allocating resources and implementing climate-protection policies. We see this kind of political calculation in the U.S. and we shouldn’t be surprised that it happens in Africa as well.

That’s ultimately one of the challenges from the perch of MIT, where we’re really interested in understanding climate change, and creating technological tools and policies for mitigating the problem or adapting to it. The reality is frustrating. The political world — those who make decisions about whether to acknowledge the problem and whether to implement resources in the best technical way — are playing a whole other game. That game is about rewarding key supporters and being reelected.

Q: So how do you go from measuring perceptions and beliefs among citizens about climate change and government responsiveness to those problems, to policies and actions that might actually reduce disparities in the way climate-vulnerable African groups receive support?

A: Some of the work I have been doing involves understanding what local and national governments across Africa are actually doing to address these problems. We will have to drill down into government budgets to determine the actual resources devoted to addressing a challenge, what sorts of practices the government follows, and the political ramifications for governments that act aggressively versus those that don’t. With the Cape Town water crisis, for example, the government dramatically changed residents’ water usage through naming and shaming, and transformed institutional practices of water collection. They made it through a major drought by using much less water, and doing it with greater energy efficiency. Through the government’s strong policy and implementation, and citizens’ active responses, an entire city, with all its disparate groups, gained resilience. Maybe we can highlight creative solutions to major climate-related problems and use them as prods to push more effective policies and solutions in other places.

In the MIT Global Diversity Lab, along with political science faculty colleague Volha Charnysh, political science doctoral student Jared Kalow, and Institute for Data, Systems and Society doctoral student Erin Walk, we are exploring American perspectives on climate-related foreign aid, asking survey respondents whether the U.S. should be giving more to people in the global South who didn’t cause the problems of climate change but have to suffer the externalities. We are particularly interested in whether people’s desire to help vulnerable communities rests on the racial or national identity of those communities.

From my new seat as director of the Center for International Studies (CIS), I hope to do more and more to connect social science findings to relevant policymakers, whether in the U.S. or in other places. CIS is making climate one of our thematic priority areas, directing hundreds of thousands of dollars for MIT faculty to spark climate collaborations with researchers worldwide through the Global Seed Fund program.

COP 28 (the U.N. Climate Change Conference), which I attended in December in Dubai, really drove home the importance of people coming together from around the world to exchange ideas and form networks. It was unbelievably large, with 85,000 people. But so many of us shared the belief that we are not doing enough. We need enforceable global solutions and innovation. We need ways of financing. We need to provide opportunities for journalists to broadcast the importance of this problem. And we need to understand the incentives that different actors have and what sorts of messages and strategies will resonate with them, and inspire those who have resources to be more generous.  

 

Rethinking the Iraq war

The term “fog of war” expresses the chaos and uncertainty of the battlefield. Often, it is only in hindsight that people can grasp what was unfolding around them.

Now, additional clarity about the Iraq War has arrived in the form of a new book by MIT political scientist Roger Petersen, which dives into the war’s battlefield operations, political dynamics, and long-term impact. The U.S. launched the Iraq War in 2003 and formally wrapped it up in 2011, but Petersen analyzes the situation in Iraq through the current day and considers what the future holds for the country.

After a decade of research, Petersen identifies four key factors for understanding Iraq’s situation. First, the U.S. invasion created chaos and a lack of clarity in terms of the hierarchy among Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish groups. Second, given these conditions, organizations that comprised a mix of militias, political groups, and religious groups came to the fore and captured elements of the new state the U.S. was attempting to set up. Third, by about 2018, the Shia groups became dominant, establishing a hierarchy, and along with that dominance, sectarian violence has fallen. Finally, the hybrid organizations established many years ago are now highly integrated into the Iraqi state.

Petersen has also come to believe two things about the Iraq War are not fully appreciated. One is how widely U.S. strategy varied over time in response to shifting circumstances.

“This was not one war,” says Petersen. “This was many different wars going on. We had at least five strategies on the U.S. side.”

And while the expressed goal of many U.S. officials was to build a functioning democracy in Iraq, the intense factionalism of Iraqi society led to further military struggles, between and among religious and ethnic groups. Thus, U.S. military strategy shifted as this multisided conflict evolved.

“What really happened in Iraq, and the thing the United States and Westerners did not understand at first, is how much this would become a struggle for dominance among Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds,” says Petersen. “The United States thought they would build a state, and the state would push down and penetrate society. But it was society that created militias and captured the state.”

Attempts to construct a well-functioning state, in Iraq or elsewhere must confront this factor, Petersen adds. “Most people think in terms of groups. They think in terms of group hierarchies, and they’re motivated when they believe their own group is not in a proper space in the hierarchy. This is this emotion of resentment. I think this is just human nature.”

Petersen’s book, “Death, Dominance, and State-Building: The U.S. in Iraq and the Future of American Military Intervention is published today by Oxford University Press. Petersen is the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science at MIT and a member of the Security Studies Program based at MIT’s Center for International Studies.

Research on the ground

Petersen spent years interviewing people who were on the ground in Iraq during the war, from U.S. military personnel to former insurgents to regular Iraqi citizens, while extensively analyzing data about the conflict.

“I didn’t really come to conclusions about Iraq until six or seven years of applying this method,” he says.

Ultimately, one core fact about the country heavily influenced the trajectory of the war. Iraq’s Sunni Muslims made up about 20 percent or less of the country’s population but had been politically dominant before the U.S. took military action. After the U.S. toppled former dictator Saddam Hussein, it created an opening for the Shia majority to grasp more power.

“The United States said, ‘We’re going to have democracy and think in individual terms,’ but this is not the way it played out,” Petersen says. “The way it played out was, over the years, the Shia organizations became the dominant force. The Sunnis and Kurds are now basically subordinate within this Shia-dominated state. The Shias also had advantages in organizing violence over the Sunnis, and they’re the majority. They were going to win.”

As Petersen details in the book, a central unit of power became the political militia, based on ethnic and religious identification. One Shia militia, the Badr Organization, had trained professionally for years in Iran. The local Iraqi leader Moqtada al-Sadr could recruit Shia fighters from among the 2 million people living in the Sadr City slum. And no political militia wanted to back a strong multiethnic government.

“They liked this weaker state,” Petersen says. “The United States wanted to build a new Iraqi state, but what we did was create a situation where multiple and large Shia militia make deals with each other.”

A captain’s war

In turn, these dynamics meant the U.S. had to shift military strategies numerous times, occasionally in high-profile ways. The five strategies Petersen identifies are clear, hold, build (CHB); decapitation; community mobilization; homogenization; and war-fighting.

“The war from the U.S. side was highly decentralized,” Petersen says. Military captains, who typically command about 140 to 150 soldiers, had fairly wide berth in terms of how they were choosing to fight.

“It was a captain’s war in a lot of ways,” Petersen adds.

The point is emphatically driven home in one chapter, “Captain Wright goes to Baghdad,” co-authored with Col. Timothy Wright PhD ’18, who wrote his MIT political science dissertation based on his experience and company command during the surge period.

As Petersen also notes, drawing on government data, the U.S. also managed to suppress violence fairly effectively at times, particularly before 2006 and after 2008. “The professional soldiers tried to do a good job, but some of the problems they weren’t going to solve,” Petersen says.

Still, all of this raises a conundrum. If trying to start a new state in Iraq was always likely to lead to an increase in Shia power, is there really much the U.S. could have done differently?

“That’s a million-dollar question,” Petersen says.

Perhaps the best way to engage with it, Petersen notes, is to recognize the importance of studying how factional groups grasp power through use of violence, and how that emerges in society. It is a key issue running throughout Petersen’s work, and one, he notes, that has often been studied by his graduate students in MIT’s Security Studies Program.

“Death, Dominance, and State-Building” has received praise from foreign-policy scholars. Paul Staniland, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, has said the work combines “intellectual creativity with careful attention to on-the ground dynamics,” and is “a fascinating macro-level account of the politics of group competition in Iraq. This book is required reading for anyone interested in civil war, U.S. foreign policy, or the politics of violent state-building."

Petersen, for his part, allows that he was pleased when one marine who served in Iraq read the manuscript in advance and found it interesting.

“He said, ‘This is good, and it’s not the way we think about it,’” Petersen says. “That’s my biggest compliment, to have a practitioner say it make them think. If I can get that kind of reaction, I’ll be pleased.”

 

The rules of the game

At the core of Raymond Wang’s work lies a seemingly simple question: Can’t we just get along?

Wang, a fifth-year political science graduate student, is a native of Hong Kong who witnessed firsthand the shakeup and conflict engendered by China’s takeover of the former British colony. “That type of experience makes you wonder why things are so complicated,” he says. “Why is it so hard to live with your neighbors?”

Today, Wang is focused on ways of managing a rapidly intensifying US-China competition, and more broadly, on identifying how China — and other emerging global powers — bend, break or creatively accommodate international rules in trade, finance, maritime and arms control matters, to achieve their ends.

The current game for global dominance between the US and China continually threatens to erupt into dangerous confrontation. Wang’s research aims to construct a more nuanced take on China’s behaviors in this game.

“US policy towards China should be informed by a better understanding of China’s behaviors if we are to avoid the worst-case scenario,” Wang believes.

“Selective and smart”

One of Wang’s major research thrusts is the ongoing trade war between the two nations. “The US views China as rewriting the rules, creating an alternative world order — and accuses China of violating World Trade Organization (WTO) rules,” says Wang. “But in fact China has been very selective and smart about responding to these rules.”

One critical, and controversial, WTO matter involves determining whether state-owned enterprises are, in the arcane vocabulary of the group, “public bodies,” which are subject to sometimes punitive WTO rules. The US asserts that if a government owns 51% of a company, it is a public body. This means that many essential Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) — manufacturers of electric vehicles, steel, chemicals, for example — would fall under WTO provisions, and potentially face punitive discipline.

But China isn’t the only nation with SOEs. Many European countries, including stalwart US partners France and Norway, subsidize companies that qualify as public bodies according to the US definition. They too could be subject to tough WTO regulations.

“This could harm a swathe of the EU economy,” says Wang. “So China intelligently made the case to the international community that the US position is extreme, and has pushed for a more favorable interpretation through litigation at the WTO.”

For Wang, this example highlights a key insight of his research: “Rising powers such as China exhibit cautious opportunism,” he says. “China will try to work with the existing rules as much as possible, including bending them in creative ways.”

But when it comes down to it, Wang argues, China would rather avoid the costs of building something completely new.

“If you can repurpose an old tool, why would you buy a new one?” he asks. “The vast majority of actions China is taking involves reshaping the existing order, not introducing new rules or blowing up institutions and building new ones.”

Interviewing key players

To bolster his theory of “cautious opportunism,” Wang’s doctoral project sets out a suite of rule-shaping strategies adopted by rising powers in international organizations. His analysis is driven by case studies of disputes recently concluded, or ongoing, in the WTO, the World Bank, and other bodies responsible for defining and policing rules that govern all manner of international relations and commerce.

Gathering evidence for his argument, Wang has been interviewing people critical to the disputes on all sides.

“My approach is to figure out who was in the room when certain decisions were made and talk to every single person there,” he says. “For the WTO and World Bank, I’ve interviewed close to 50 relevant personnel, including frontline lawyers, senior leadership, and former government officials.” These interviews took place in Geneva, Singapore, Tokyo, and Washington D.C.

But writing about disputes that involve China poses a unique set of problems. “It’s difficult to talk to actively serving Chinese officials, and in general, nobody wants to go on the record because all the content is sensitive.”

As Wang moves onto cases in maritime governance, he will be reaching out to the key players involved in managing sensitive conflicts in the South China Sea, an Indo-Pacific region dotted with shoals and offering desirable fisheries as well as oil and gas resources.

Even here, Wang suggests, China may find reason to be cautious rather than opportunistic, preferring to carve out exemptions for itself or shift interpretations rather than overturning the existing rules wholesale.

Indeed, Wang believes China and other rising powers introduce new rules only when conditions open up a window of opportunity: “It may be worth doing so when using traditional tools doesn’t get you what you want, if your competitors are unable or unwilling to counter mobilize against you, and you see that the costs of establishing these new rules are worth it,” he says.

Beyond Wang’s dissertation, he has also been part of a research team led by M. Taylor Fravel, Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science, that has published papers on China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

From friends to enemies

Wang left Hong Kong and its political ferment behind at age 15, but the challenge of dealing with a powerful neighbor and the potential crisis it represented stayed with him. In Italy, he attended a United World College — part of a network of schools bringing together young people from different nations and cultures for the purpose of training leaders and peacemakers.

“It’s a utopian idea, where you force teenagers from all around the world to live and study together and get along for two years,” says Wang. “There were people from countries in the Balkans that were actively at war with each other, who grew up with the memory of air raid sirens and family members who fought each other, but these kids would just hang out together.”

Coexistence was possible on the individual level, Wang realized, but he wondered, “What systemic thing happens that makes people do messed-up stuff to each other when they are in a group?”

With this question in mind, he went to the University of St. Andrews for his undergraduate and master’s degrees in international relations and modern history. As China continued its economic and military march onto the world stage, and Iran generated international tensions over its nuclear ambitions, Wang became interested in nuclear disarmament. He drilled down into the subject at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, where he earned a second master’s degree in nonproliferation and terrorism studies.

Leaning into a career revolving around policy, he applied to MIT’s security studies doctoral program, hoping to focus on the impact of emerging technologies on strategic nuclear stability. But events in the world led him to pivot. “When I started in the fall of 2019, the US-China relationship was going off the rails with the trade war,” he said. “It was clear that managing the relationship would be one of the biggest foreign policy challenges for the foreseeable future and I wanted to do research that would help ensure that the relationship wouldn’t tip into a nuclear war.”

Cooling tensions

Wang has no illusions about the difficulty of containing tensions between a superpower eager to assert its role in the world order, and one determined to hold onto its primacy. His goal is to make the competition more transparent, and if possible, less overtly threatening. He is preparing a paper, Guns and Butter: Measuring Spillover and Implications for Technological Competition, that outlines the different paths taken by the US and China in developing defense-related technology that also benefits the civilian economy.

As he wades into the final phase of his thesis and contemplates his next steps, Wang hopes that his research insights might inform policymakers, especially in the US, in their approach to China. While there is a fiercely competitive relationship, “there is still room for diplomacy,” he believes. “If you accept my theory that a rising power will try and use, or even abuse, existing rules as much as possible, then you need non-military — State Department — boots on the ground to monitor what is going on at all the international institutions,” he says. The more information and understanding the U.S. has of China’s behavior, the more likely it will be “to cool down some of the tensions,” says Wang. “We need to develop a strategic empathy.”

 

A path to political science

The Global Diversity Lab (GDL) begins its second summer of the Pathways to Political Science internship program. The lab recently followed up with its first cohort of interns to explore how the fellowship may have benefitted their studies and future career plans. Below is an interview with the Pathways to Political Science 2023 summer fellows: Mohammed Bah, Saumyaa Gupta, Sikelelwe Mtshizana, and Yvonne Ilupeju.

GDL: What have you been working on since your GDL internship ended?

Bah: Since my graduation from the University of Rochester, I have been involved in the New York City Urban Fellows Program, a fellowship focusing on urban issues and providing first-hand exposure to the public sector. Through this fellowship, I have been placed with the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, where I am advancing policies and tackling issues related to wastewater treatment and water management.

Gupta: This academic year, I continued working as a research assistant for [GDL graduate affiliate] Elizabeth Parker-Magyar, where I was able to further develop my methods and Arabic language skills. Additionally, I devoted significant time to developing my honors theses for my majors in political science and psychology at Beloit College. For my psychology major, I delved into investigating the levels of trust in authoritarian regimes through the lens of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Specifically, I explored how these regimes fulfill the basic needs of their citizens and how this correlates with their trust in them. In my political science thesis, I collaborated closely with my undergraduate advisor, Professor Beth Dougherty, to analyze the circumstances under which concessions lead to demobilization within protest movements in Jordan.

Mtshizana: This academic year, I have primarily focused on my master’s thesis, which examines inconsistencies in South Africa’s foreign policy. Specifically, I am contrasting South Africa’s response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine with South Africa’s response to the 2023 Gaza conflict. This work is part of the second year of my Master of Social Sciences program at the University of Cape Town. After my time at MIT, I recognized the importance of enhancing my statistical and coding proficiency, prompting me to undertake short courses in R and SQL. Additionally, I’ve taken on the role of co-founding and directing the Politics Postgraduate Project Management Group (PPPMG) within our department. The PPPMG is an initiative which aims to enhance the postgraduate experience by providing research skills workshops, writing support, and professional development opportunities. I’ve also been actively engaged as a teaching assistant and tutor within the department.

I have had the privilege of contributing to an analysis piece on South Africa’s 2024 elections published earlier this year in The Continent, an online platform covering African affairs. I am also engaged as a researcher for 18 months with the Reach Alliance team, which is affiliated with the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. In this role, I am conducting research on how innovations are implemented to impact hard to reach populations to further Sustainable Development Goals. I am also involved in a short-term project as a Risk Intelligence Analyst where I am developing country risk content for an intelligence portal with the Healix Group.

Ilupeju: Following the GDL fellowship, I returned to Ghana, where I graduated from my master’s program at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in March 2024. My master’s thesis “The political ecology of e-waste smuggling into ghana,” explores the complex dynamics and environmental impacts of illegal e-waste smuggling. During my second year of the master’s program, I was honored to receive both an academic scholarship and a research grant from ILLECO (Environmental crime and illegal ecologies) under the Independent Research Fund Denmark. This support was instrumental in advancing my research and concluded in January 2024. Following the completion of my thesis, the research grant from ILLECO was renewed and extended for another year, contingent on producing publications and engaging in joint collaborations. Currently, I am conducting research with ILLECO focusing on environmental crime and illegal ecologies. Alongside this work, I have also been active as a freelance field researcher for both academic institutions and private firms.

GDL: What are your plans for the coming year?

Bah: This fall, I will be attending the University of California, Irvine, to pursue a doctoral degree in Urban and Environmental Planning and Policy. I am excited to further my education and research in this field and contribute to addressing pressing environmental challenges.

Gupta: I will begin my PhD in political science at Yale University in the fall. Following my graduation from Beloit College, I plan to attend UW Madison’s Middle Eastern and Mediterranean Language Institute to enhance my proficiency in Arabic.

Mtshizana: Following graduation, my immediate plan is to pursue employment in the industry to cultivate practical experience, refine my research skills, and consolidate the direction of my doctoral studies. I am resolute in my aspiration to pursue a PhD in the near future. However, I believe that gaining industry experience will not only enhance my research capabilities and broaden my interest and scope but will also afford me the opportunity to determine the precise focus of my doctoral research. This approach should ensure that my doctoral studies are aligned with my long-term academic and career goals, as well as the contribution my work will make in the scholarly community.

Ilupeju: Following my graduation, I have continued my work as a researcher with ILLECO, focusing on environmental crime and illegal ecologies. This role has allowed me to collaborate with leading experts and deepen my research skills. Additionally, I have been active as a freelance field researcher, providing insights for academic institutions and private firms. This fall, I am excited to begin my PhD in Political Science at Boston University, specializing in Comparative Politics. I look forward to exploring political dynamics and policy responses across different countries and contributing to the academic community through my research.

GDL: Looking back on your GDL experience, what were the most valuable aspects of the internship for you?

Bah: My GDL internship was incredibly impactful in shaping my post-graduation plans. Not only did I learn valuable research skills, but I also gained exposure to groundbreaking research conducted by MIT professors and graduate students through the weekly seminars. These seminars offered a unique opportunity to understand graduate school admissions and position myself as a strong candidate. The connections I made with graduate students were particularly helpful; their support and advice have been invaluable, and I remain in contact with some of them to this day. Most importantly, my faculty mentor, Professor Noah Nathan, has played a vital role in my journey. His continued guidance and investment in my success, from my time at GDL through the graduate school application process, helped me navigate and select the right doctoral program. The support and resources provided by the GDL team and Dr. Nathan were instrumental in my successful admission to top programs.

Gupta: My experience at GDL has been invaluable in shaping my future aspirations. Through my internship, I discovered a deep-seated passion for research and a keen interest in developing quantitative methods skills. At GDL, they hosted info sessions for applying to grad schools and research seminars where I learned more about current research in the field, new methods, and new topics. The guidance and mentorship I received from the GDL community, including faculty, grad students, and mentors, have been instrumental in preparing me for applying to doctoral programs. The supportive environment and ongoing connections I forged at GDL continue to enrich my academic journey, even beyond the conclusion of the program.

Mtshizana: My GDL internship experience was profoundly influential in shaping my post-graduation plans, particularly regarding pursuing a PhD in the United States. Engaging with faculty members and graduate students offered a unique and enriching opportunity to build meaningful connections, gather insights into their academic journey, research life, and the nuances of graduate life. The internship experience also served as a great opportunity to work and advance my coding and research skills. It catalyzed a proactive approach to further skill development, particularly in statistics, which not only broadens my options when considering PhD programs but also equips me with the necessary tools to thrive in an American graduate program.

Ilupeju: My GDL internship experience was incredibly influential in shaping my post-graduation plans. One of the most significant gains was the opportunity to build meaningful connections with esteemed faculty members, graduate students, and my GDL cohort. These relationships provided me with invaluable mentorship and guidance, which played a crucial role in my decision to pursue a Ph.D. in Political Science. The internship also equipped me with advanced research skills and methodologies that have been instrumental in my ongoing work, including my current research with ILLECO and my freelance fieldwork, providing a strong foundation for my academic and professional growth.