Biography:
Paul Staniland is a Professor of Political Science. He is the author of the award-winning book Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse (Cornell 2014), as well as a number of peer-reviewed articles on civil war and international security. Staniland's regional focus is South Asia, and he has done field research in India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma/Myanmar, and Singapore. He is currently working on a book on relations between governments and armed groups in post-colonial South Asia.

Staniland is also a nonresident scholar in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Staniland’s research focuses on political violence and international security, with a regional focus on South and Southeast Asia. His first book, Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse, was published by Cornell University Press in 2014. His second book, Ordering Violence: Explaining Armed Group-State Relations from Conflict to Cooperation, was published by Cornell in 2021. 

2023-24 Project: Great Power Rivalry and Internal Politics in Modern Asia

My book project explores when and how major power interstate competition becomes present in the internal politics of third-party states, and why the nature of this presence varies. International alignment choices are sometimes irrelevant on the home front, sometimes occupy a recurrent but fluid place in domestic politics, and in yet other circumstances tightly overlap with, and accelerate, fundamental internal political cleavages. International rivalries can be fused with internal political struggles, in ways that can foil the intentions of outside actors, generate surprising, unintended, often-violent consequences, and become captured by seemingly weak domestic players. I explore a world in which domestic factions and political cleavages are embedded within and connected to external geopolitical rivalries. Empirically, the project examines post-1945 South and Southeast Asia, mixing interview, historical, and quantitative data to explore when and how the major power rivalries of this period have refracted into the internal politics of smaller (though often still hugely important) states. A fellowship would fund two primary activities. First, I would take a trip to India and Nepal during the fall of 2023 to do interviews and gather materials on how major power competition has affected domestic politics. The primary focus would be on Nepal, a country which has spent much of the last 70 years trying to manage its relationships with China, India, and the US, with huge domestic repercussions and relevance. Second, I would use the funding to hire two research assistants to pursue a set of country cases and quantitative codings.

2019-20 Project:

India is a rising power: its rapidly growing economy, large military, and pivotal strategic location have made it a far more important international player than in decades past. Yet it is also a highly competitive democracy that faces serious poverty and numerous demands on government resources. This nascent book project explores the relationship between these domestic politics and India's foreign security policy. It investigates Indian public opinion toward foreign affairs, gathers extensive new quantitative data on when and how parties, politicians, and political movements have mobilized around foreign policy, and uses detailed case studies of specific crises and policy decisions to explore how policymakers understood their domestic incentives and constraints.

Paul Poast’s research uses quantitative analysis and diplomatic history to understand international relations. Specifically, he is interested in how anarchy can complicate the ability of sovereign actors to make credible commitments, such as repaying debt, honoring an alliance, or upholding a bargain. His research is presently focused on four projects: the political economy of international security, alliance politics, research methods for international relations, and the international politics of the American Civil War. Poast is the author of The Economics of War (McGraw Hill-Irwin, 2006) and the developer of NewGene, a data management tool for creating data sets for use in the quantitative analysis of political science.

Adom Getachew is Professor of Political Science, Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity and the College at the University of Chicago, as well as interim chair of the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity. She is a political theorist with research interests in the history of political thought, theories of race and empire, and postcolonial political theory. Her work focuses on the intellectual and political histories of Africa and the Caribbean. Her work focuses on the intellectual and political histories of Africa and the Caribbean. She is author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019) and co-editor with Jennifer Pitts of W. E. B. Du Bois: International Thought (2022). She is currently working on a second book on the intellectual origins and political practices of Garveyism—the black nationalist/pan-African movement, which had its height in the 1920s. Her public writing has appeared in Dissent, Foreign Affairs, the London Review of Books, the Nation, and New York Times. She is on the faculty board of the Pozen Center for Human Rights, a fellow at the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, and a faculty affiliate at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture. Prof. Getachew joined the CISSR (Center for International Social Science Research) Faculty Advisory Board on July 2022.