PEOPLE

PhD Candidate Noel Anderson was awarded a National Fellowship from the Miller Center and a Jennings Randolph Peace Scholarship from the United States Institute of Peace for the 2015-2016 academic year. He presented "Explaining Changing Trends in the Incidence of Civil War: Competitive Intervention and its Consequences for Intrastate Conflict" at the University of Chicago's Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security in April. He also presented "Competitive Intervention and the Angolan Civil War, 1975-1991" at the Tobin Project Forum on National Security in Cambridge in January, at the International Studies Association's Annual Convention in New Orleans in February, and at the Midwest Political Science Association's Annual Conference in Chicago in April.

PhD Candidate Mark Bell presented "What Do Nuclear Weapons Offer States? A Theory of State Foreign Policy Response to Nuclear Acquisition" at the Harvard Belfer Center International Security Project Seminar in March, and "Beyond Emboldenment: The Effects of Nuclear Weapons on State Foreign Policy" at the International Studies Association Annual Meeting in February. He has accepted a Managing the Atom/International Security Project predoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Belfer Center for the 2015-2016 academic year.

Associate Professor of Political Science Fotini Christia has been named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in the inaugural year of the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship program, which will provide support for scholars in the social sciences and humanities

Frank Stanton Chair in Nuclear Security Policy Studies and Professor of Political Science Frank Gavin served as Director of the Nuclear Studies Research Initiative (NSRI) and convened the 2015 NSRI conference in Airlie, VA. He, along with collaborators at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, also received a major grant to develop the "Carnegie International Policy Scholars Consortium and Network," a program aimed at providing advanced graduate students in international affairs with the skills, substantive knowledge, and mentorship needed to successfully pursue careers both in the academy and the world of practice.

Senior Advisor Jeanne Guillemin was an invited delegate to the 2015 Paris Assembly, a conference on open-source learning and scientific research organized by the Centre de Recherche Interdisciplinaire (CRI) in Paris and Sage Bionetworks, Seattle, Washington, with support from the Institut Pasteur and the City of Paris. The sessions were filmed and are available, along with the agenda and list of participants, on the Assembly website. She also presented a paper, "The 1925 Geneva Protocol and Reactions to the Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons in War," at the international conference "100 Years of Chemical Warfare: Research, Deployment, Consequences," which marked the first use of chemical weapons in World War I in April 22, 1915 at Ypres (Belgium), and was sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society.

CIS Research Fellow Jerome Klassen's new book, Joining Empire: The Political Economy of the New Canadian Foreign Policy (University of Toronto Press, 2014), received the 2015 book prize awarded by the Society for Socialist Studies at the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences in Ottawa, Canada.

PhD candidates Marika Landau-Wells and Steve Wittels have both been awarded Tobin Project Graduate Student Fellowships for the 2015-16 academic year. The Tobin Project aims to support aspiring scholars interested in collaborative work and focusing their research on real-world problems. The fellows are primarily from the fields of security studies and from disciplines focused on the relationship between democracy and markets. The fellowship includes $2,000 in research funding and also involves participation in a year-long forum.

Stanton Nuclear Security Predoctoral Fellow Julia Macdonald received a Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center Predoctoral Fellowship for the 2015-16 academic year. She presented "Leadership Beliefs and State Threat Assessment: Saddam Hussein and the Iraq War 2003" and "Understanding the Way Societies Choose Their Means of War: U.S. Public Perceptions of Manned versus Unmanned Weaponry" at the ISA Annual Meeting in New Orleans in February. She also presented "Believing the Threat? Assessing the Effectiveness of Nuclear Coercion in International Crises" at the NSRI Meeting in Airlie, VA, in May.

PhD student Philip Martin presented "Want and Able: Strategies of Rebellion in Post-Colonial Africa" at the 2015 MIT-Harvard-Yale Political Violence Conference, hosted at MIT in April. Martin was also nominated as a finalist for the 2015 Trudeau Doctoral Scholarship, administered by the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation.

Assistant Professor Rich Nielsen received a Junior Scholar Fellowship at Brandeis University Crown Center for Middle East Studies during the 2015-16 academic year.

Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and MIT Political Science Department Head Melissa Nobles was just named Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

Ford International Professor of Political Science and Director of the MIT Brazil program Ben Ross Schneider presented "Democracy, Big Business, and the Challenges of Industrial Policy in Brazil," at the World Bank in April 2015. He presented "The Middle Income Trap: More Politics than Economics," at the University of Frankfurt in April 2015, and at Sabanci University and Bilkent University in May 2015.

PhD candidate Amanda Rothschild accepted a predoctoral fellowship in the International Security Program with the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. She presented "Genocide Proofing: The Effects of Ethnic, Racial, and Religious Homogeneity in Militaries on Mass Atrocity," at the 2015 International Studies Association Annual Convention in February. She also gave presentations on April 3rd for the Tobin Project, on March 19th for the Boston College Political Science Honors Program and International Studies Program, and on April 22nd for the Boston College Arts and Sciences Honors Program Student Board's Alumni Panel.

Ford International Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for International Studies Richard Samuels presented "Making Japanese Security Work without Rear View Mirrors or Slippery Slopes," to the Conference on Japan in East Asian Security at the Free University of Berlin in January 2015 and presented "The Secrecy Debate in Japan," to the workshop on Secrecy, Surveillance, Privacy, and International Relations sponsored by CIS at Endicott House in April 2015. He was also named an Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Graduate School of East Asian Studies at the Free University of Berlin, for the years 2015-2017. In March 2015, he delivered a lecture to Albuquerque International Association titled, "Japan: Grand Strategy and the Future of North East Asia," and presented "Japan's Grand Strategy and Nuclear Weapons Options," at Sandia National Laboratory's National Security Speakers Series in Albuquerque. At the February International Studies Association conference, he participated on the panel "Japan, Economics and Security in the Asia-Pacific Region: A Roundtable In Honor Of T.J. Pempel," delivering remarks on "T.J. Pempel's Contributions to the Study of Japan and East Asia." He also presented "Evaluating Japan's New Secrecy Law," to the Council on Foreign Relations' Working Group on Japanese Nationalism and the conference on Japanese National Security at the Free University of Berlin in January 2015. He delivered the lecture "The Rhetoric of Crisis: Japan's Response to 3.11" at Wesleyan University and University of Pennsylvania, and acted as moderator for MIT's Roundtable on Innovation with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. He also became a member of the US-Japan Eminent Persons Group for the year 2014-2015.

Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning and Director of the Special Program in Urban and Regional Studies (SPURS) Bish Sanyal traveled to Israel in February as guest speaker at Ben-Gurion University to deliver the keynote speech at the Israeli Planning Association's Annual Conference. Bish gave a presentation on 'Planning Sensibilities: Old and New'. Also in February, Bish spoke at the Harvard Kennedy School's 'India Matters' discussion series. Bish spoke on: "Slum Redevelopment in Mumbai: Lessons Learned". In March, Bish moderated a panel on "India's Urban Urgency: The 100 Smart Cities Call" at Harvard's India Conference. He continues to serve on the advisory committee for the newly formed Indian Institute for Human Settlements, and the committee held its first annual virtual meeting in March which Bish attended. In May, Bish participated in a small workshop at the Ford Foundation in NY to explore the importance of rural-urban connections, and drivers of inequality that operate along those connections in the Asia region.

Co-Director of MISTI Italy Serenella Sferza received the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences "Infinite Mile: Great Ideas Award".

Associate Professor of Political Science David Singer presented his book project, "Balancing Acts: Banks, Markets, and the Politics of Financial Stability" at the Stanford International Relations Seminar in March.

Ford Professor of Political Science Kathleen Thelen has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation's most prestigious honorary societies and a leading center for independent policy research.

PhD candidate Alec Worsnop received a Predoctoral Research Fellowship at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies in the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. He also presented "Insurgent Military Effectiveness During the First Indochina War" at the 2015 ISA Annual Conference in February.

PUBLISHED

Assistant Professor of History Sana Aiyar, Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora.Harvard University Press, April 2015.

Associate Professor of Political Science M. Taylor Fravel, "Projecting Strategy: The Myth of Chinese Counter-Intervention," The Washington Quarterly Vol. 37, No. 4 (Winter 2015) (with Christopher P. Twomey)

________________“Things Fall Apart: Maritime Disputes and China’s Regional Diplomacy,” in Jacques deLisle and Avery Goldstein, eds., China’s Challenges: The Road Ahead. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 

________________ "Conflict and Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific Region: A Strategic Net Assessment, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 2015 (one of many co-authors)

Stanton Nuclear Security Predoctoral Fellow Julia Macdonald, "Eisenhower's Scientists: Policy Entrepreneurs and the Test-Ban Debate 1954-58" Foreign Policy Analysis (January 2015).

Assistant professor Rich Nielsen, "Computer Assisted Text Analysis for Comparative Politics" Political Analysis (Spring 2015) (one of several co-authors)

CIS Research Affiliate Alessandro Orsini, "Are Terrorists Courageous? Micro-Sociology of Extreme Left Terrorism" Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Vol. 38, No. 3 (2015): 179-198.

Ford International Professor of Political Science and Director of the MIT Brazil program Ben Ross Schneider, Designing Industrial Policy in Latin America: Business-Government Relations and the New Developmentalism, Palgrave, 2015.

PhD Candidate Amanda Rothschild, "[President] fails to call out anti-Semitism" The Boston Herald, February 13, 2015

________________"Universities add to women's struggle by imposing lessons in inequity," The Boston Globe, January 25, 2015.

CIS Research Fellow Mansour Salsabili, "How Iran Became the Middle East's Moderate Force" Op-Ed, The National Interest, March 20, 2015.

________________"Hit and Run, Iran? The Military Dynamics of Nonproliferation",Modern Diplomacy, February 2, 2015.

Associate Professor of Political Science David Singer (with Layna Mosley), "Migration, Labor, and the International Political Economy" in Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 18 (2015).