DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

Rick Perry is both a biography of Perry as a politician and a study of the shifts in state politics that took place during his time in office. Demonstrating that Perry ranks among the most consequential governors in Texas history, Brandon Rottinghaus chronicles the profound ways he accumulated power and shaped the governorship.

One of the first comprehensive introductions to using qualitative methods across the social sciences: includes contributions from over forty experts who have honed their craft by doing qualitative work; provides insight on all aspects of a qualitative research project, from the very first step (finding a research question) to the very last one (finding a publishing venue); teaches readers to undertake qualitative research in an ethical and reflexive way that is both robust and also grounded in self-care; and includes experts on qualitative methods who have been systematically and historically underrepresented in the social sciences.

Few thinkers have provoked such violently opposing reactions as Edmund Burke. A giant of eighteenth-century political and intellectual life, Burke has been praised as a prophet who spied the terror latent in revolutionary or democratic ideologies, and condemned as defender of social hierarchy and outmoded political institutions. Ross Carroll tempers these judgments by situating Burke's arguments in relation to the political controversies of his day. Burke's writings must be understood as rhetorically brilliant exercises in political persuasion aimed less at defending abstract truths than at warning his contemporaries about the corrosive forces - ideological, social, and political - that threatened their society. Drawing on Burke's enormous corpus, Carroll presents a nuanced portrait of Burke as, above all, a diagnostician of political misrule, whether domestic, foreign, or imperial.

Amanda Sahar d’Urso is a government assistant professor at Georgetown University specializing in race and ethnicity politics. She says misrepresentation matters to racial groups such as Middle Easterners and North Africans, who were previously encouraged to identify as white on federal forms. Latinos and Hispanics will also be impacted by combining the separate ethnicity question on the census and making it an option alongside the other racial categories. The previous separation of race and ethnicity confused and failed to collect data on the distinctions of the varying races that Latinos and Hispanics may identify as. “Categorized as white, makes it really difficult in that group to make claims what they need, what we need for the American government,” d’Urso says.

Taboo has been broken in Europe. Only a few months ago, it would have been inconceivable for European leaders to propose sending European troops to Ukraine. But on February 26, French President Emmanuel Macron said the deployment of European forces to Ukraine could not be “ruled out.” Since then, other European officials have joined the chorus; the Finnish defense minister and Polish foreign minister have both suggested that their countries’ forces could end up in Ukraine.

Caste is a concept used to explain persistent forms of social hierarchy and group domination. While it is often associated with India, feudal Europe, and Latin America, scholars in recent years have asked whether it also makes sense to conceptualize the United States as a caste system. This recent discourse overlooks a centuries-long tradition of American civil rights activism—from Frederick Douglass to W.E.B. Du Bois—that understands the United States as a caste system and seeks racial justice through constitutional reform. Returning to this tradition, this talk explores both what the concept of caste misses and what it captures about racial inequality in the United States today.

In his public talk Ian Hurd reframes the debate on world order for IR around a concept of order that acknowledges its political content. It considers various definitions of order in International Relations and shows how these deploy distinct relations with historical facts, scientific models, and policy goals. A political understanding of the idea of world order leads IR scholarship away from causal models and objectivist ontology, and as a result makes it easier to understand the long history of contestation around how world order should be made and who gets to make it.

Eden Melles is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. She is deeply engaged in exploring the dynamics of race, ethnicity, and identity, with a specific focus on Black immigrants and diaspora, social movements, and political behavior. Eden has been honored as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Program Fellow and an American Political Science Association Diversity Fellow. Her research aims to illuminate the complexities of cultural and political integration processes, shedding light on the nuanced ways in which Black diasporic communities influence and are influenced by political landscapes.

El Departamento Nacional de Planeación (DNP) contrató y publicó recientemente, la evaluación institucional, de resultados y de impacto del Programa Nacional Integral de Sustitución de cultivos ilícitos (Pnis) para el periodo 2017-2022 (DNP-986-2022), que fue desarrollada por la unión temporal Ipsos-Uniandes 2023. Esta columna resume los hallazgos de la evaluación del DNP y de sus recomendaciones. Estos resultados son de la mayor importancia para la implementación de la política de drogas de este y los próximos gobiernos, en lo que concierne a los esfuerzos de transformación territorial en las regiones cocaleras.

Earlier this year voters in El Salvador went to the polls and handed a resounding mandate to presidential incumbent Nayib Bukele, who secured a second five-year term – largely propelled by support for his crackdown on the country’s powerful criminal gangs. His decision to seek a second consecutive term, which many legal scholars criticized as unconstitutional, has raised fears of a growing authoritarian creep in El Salvador. This has been compounded by growing allegations of human rights abuses leveled against Bukele’s anti-gang campaign.