Faculty Research

The Burkle Center funds faculty research working groups and faculty research projects led by UCLA faculty in support of the study and analysis of significant questions of international policy and politics.

Faculty Research Working Group activities can take various forms, such as a series of roundtables, reading groups, speaker symposia or workshops centered on a theme.

Faculty research project grants are seed grants designed to jump start major grant proposals in the realm of international relations, U.S. foreign policy, and issues of global cooperation and conflict.

All research themes must address a topic or topics related to international relations, U.S. foreign policy, and/or issues of global cooperation and conflict.

THE BURKLE CENTER AWARDED GRANTS FOR THE FOLLOWING PROJECTS:

2023-24 | 2022-23 | 2021-22 | 2020-21 | 2019-20 | 2018-19 | 2017-18 | 2014-15 | 2013-14 | 2012-13

2011-12 | 2010-11 | 2008-10 | 2008-09

2023-24 Projects

Internationalized Policing and Japan in the Global 1960s: The Politics of Counterinsurgency and Order

William Marotti, Associate Professor, UCLA Department of History

Research Project: The Burkle Center grant will support an archival investigation of the international work of the Office of Public Safety (OPS) and other American efforts in organizing and directing policing in Japan, part of a global project of policing and politics in the 1960s. This work will deepen my prior investigations on Japan in the 1960s and may potentially inaugurate an entirely different historical project. I expect the work to have ramifications for 1960s scholarship, considerations of international justice, law and politics, Cold War, protest, state violence, and sovereignty alike.

Informational Advantages, If Any, That Intelligence Bureaucracies Provide

Eric Min, Assistant Professor, UCLA Department of Political Science

Research Project: What informational advantages, if any, do intelligence bureaucracies provide leaders? Intelligence gathering is one of the most important and costly endeavors for governments to pursue. Significant finances, resources, human capital, covert activity, and calculated risks are required for intelligence bureaucracies to keep leaders apprised of developments around the world. However, no scholarly work has directly addressed whether and/or when intelligence actually provides leaders with an informational advantage relative to public media. This project will address this question by using computational text analysis methods to compare recently declassified US intelligence documents -- including the President's Daily Brief, the Central Intelligence Bulletin, and the Daily Summary -- with contemporaneous foreign affairs news in the New York Times between 1951 and 1977. Results from this investigation will make meaningful contributions to scholarly debates in international relations literature regarding information asymmetries, leaders, and bureaucracies. In the policy realm, this study is the first systematic empirical test of how the US intelligence apparatus has fared in terms of reporting on and foreseeing world events. Given the scale of resources and efforts invested in intelligence gathering and analysis by governments, learning when and why intelligence-centric bureaucracies provide uniquely valuable information may help reshape discussions about the utility of intelligence in foreign policy.

2022-23 Projects

Inward Foreign Direct Investment and Support for Immigration

Margaret Peters, Associate Professor, UCLA Department of Political Science (top); Doeun Kim, Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA Department of Political Science (bottom)

Research Project: This project explores the relationship between inward foreign direct investment (FDI) and support for immigration in the U.S. FDI is a unique global economic activity in a sense that it brings not only one factor of production but a mixture of the capital, labor, technology, physical facilities, managerial skills, and multi-cultural experience. In addition to the economic benefits that come along with FDI, the managerial style and workers moved from the headquarters promotes more social interaction between the local workers and the firm. First, we argue that IFDI mitigates anti-immigration sentiments and increases support for more open immigration policies. The economic-effect argument can be supported through two different mechanisms. Second, as an increase in immigrants decreases labor costs for MNCs, it is more likely for MNCs to support more open immigration policies in host countries. Therefore, we argue that the lobbying activities of these companies may change the host country’s immigration policies in a more liberal direction. Together, these two mechanisms should lead to more support for immigration. We test our implications using numerous different datasets, purchased in part from this grant.

Labor Market Power by Multinational Enterprises: Evidence from U.S. Firms in China

Michael Rubens, Assistant Professor, UCLA Department of Economics (top); Mingzhi (Jimmy) Xu, Assistant Professor, Peking University Department of Economics (bottom)

Research Project: How does the entry of multinational enterprises (MNEs) on local labor markets affect wages and employment? Although it has been well-documented that MNEs tend to be more productive than domestic firms, surprisingly little empirical evidence exists on whether they compete differently for labor. If labor markets are perfectly competitive, the productivity gains from MNEs should be redistributed to workers, but this cannot be taken for granted: MNEs might have market power on labor markets. Verifying this hypothesis is hard, because economists currently lack the methodological tools to distinguish labor market power from (factor-biased) productivity gains. Hence, the aim of this project is twofold. First, we develop an empirical methodology to separately identify labor market power from technological change using firm-level production and cost data. Secondly, we use this methodology to understand how multinational enterprises entering Chinese labor markets differ from domestic firms both in terms of their labor-saving productivity levels, and in terms of their labor market power. In other words, do multinational firms exploit local workers, or do they make them more productive?

Migration, Ethnicity, Race, and Nation (MERN) Workshop

Jasmine Hill, Assistant Professor, UCLA Departments of Public Policy and Sociology (top); Desi Small-Rodriguez, Assistant Professor, UCLA Departments of Sociology and American Indian Studies (middle); Lachlan McNamee, Assistant Professor, UCLA Department of Political Science (bottom)

Project: Racial and ethnic conflicts are central to understanding the contemporary world. Although the study of racial formation, immigration, and identity often center the United States, we believe that scholars have much to gain from a global and comparative perspective view on race and ethnicity. Professors Hill, Small-Rodriguez and McNamee will convene a new faculty research working group focused on the comparative study of migration, ethnicity, race, and nation (or, MERN) around the world. We see MERN at UCLA as a vibrant intellectual community that can foster cross-disciplinary connections, with a particular focus on offering support to early-career faculty and graduate students who would benefit from networking, co-authorship opportunities, feedback on works-in-progress, and inter-disciplinary dialogue. Themes of presentations include comparative understandings of race and ethnicity, settler colonialism and its afterlife, the origins of ethno-racial conflict around the world, the formation of individual ethno-racial identity and South-South and South-North migration.

Part II: The Come Back: The Effects of Australian Detention on Italian POWs Economic Outcomes

Michela Giorcelli, Associate Professor, UCLA Department of Economics (top); Claudio Labanca, Assistant Professor, Monash University Department of Economics (bottom)

Research Project: Prisoners of war (POWs hereafter) represented a major consequence of conflicts. In the First World War, for instance, between 7,000,000 and 8,500,000 persons from all nations were captured. The estimated number of POWs was even higher during the Second World War (WWII hereafter). In the last six months of 1945, in fact, the collapse of the German state and the unconditional surrender of Japan led to the imprisonment of entire armies, bringing the estimated number of POWs up to 35,000,000 (Davis, 1977). Despite the high number of POWs that resulted from the two world conflicts alone, little is known about the economic consequences of their stay in the countries of detention, or their performance when they returned in their country of origin. In this project, we shed light on this unexplored topic using a unique historical episode: the case of Italian POWs in Australia during WWII. At the beginning of WWII, Australia was a developing country. Despite its rich agricultural and industrial potentials, one of the major obstacles to the Australian economic development was lack of manpower. To alleviate this shortage, during WWII the Australian government gave availability to receive prisoners of war from the Allies. While the Australian government asked for 50,000 POWs, around 20,000 of them arrived in the country between 1941 and 1945. Most of them (18,000) were Italians, 1,500 were Germans, and 700 were Japanese. These POWs were then displaced across farming areas in the country. In 1947, when the Geneve Convention was signed, all the POWs were allowed to return to their home country. In this project, we plan to focus on the Italian POWs because they were, by far, the largest group of prisoners that Australia hosted. Moreover, according to Australian historians, the Italian POWs brought with them specific agricultural knowledge that, joint with their contribution in a reducing manpower shortage, substantially helped Australian development (Hall, 2000).

2021-22 Projects

Worlds Unseen: Henry Wallace, Herbert Hoover, and the Making of Cold War America

Kevin Y. Kim, Assistant Professor, UCLA Department of History

Research Project: Through the Cold War and beyond, U.S. foreign policy is normally understood as arising from “containment”: a wide-ranging post-World War II grand strategy aimed at containing the United States’ global adversaries. This project complicates this notion, and its normative implications for U.S. foreign policy and international relations, by exploring how two prominent U.S. policymakers—U.S. vice president and Democratic Party liberal Henry Wallace and former U.S. president and Republican statesman Herbert Hoover—pursued two influential strategic alternatives which challenged official Cold War policy: “engagement” and “restraint.” Emphasizing international cooperation and compromise, on the one hand, and strategic efficiency and retrenchment, on the other hand, Wallace and Hoover’s strategic views, more than prior studies acknowledge, influenced official and private arenas of international relations in the United States and other postwar states and societies. This study proposes to examine how Wallace and Hoover’s strategic views resonated among policymakers, legislatures, and larger publics. By researching their political networks, allies, and critics from World War I through the Vietnam War, this project aims to provide a new framework for understanding not only U.S. foreign policy and international relations in the Cold War era, but U.S. and other societies as contested, diverse polities which engaged global issues at local, national, and global scales.

The Politics of Punishment: Why Non-Democracies Join the International Criminal Court

Leslie Johns, Professor, UCLA Departments of Political Science and Law

Research Project: The International Criminal Court (ICC) has extensive powers to prosecute individuals for core crimes under international law, including aggression, crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes. Yet the ICC can only prosecute crimes involving states that have formally joined the Court, thereby accepting the Court’s jurisdiction. Three puzzling facts surround this process. First, many governments that join the ICC are fighting severe conflicts with extensive international crimes. Second, many of these governments have themselves committed extensive international crimes. And finally, many ICC prosecutions begin with self-referrals, in which governments ask the ICC to investigate crimes that occurred in their own states. These facts yield an important puzzle—why do political leaders make themselves vulnerable to criminal prosecution by joining the ICC and asking the Court to investigate crimes in their own states?

My co-author and I argue that instead of constraining governments, the ICC is a tool that enables political leaders to punish their rivals. When a state joins the ICC, its leaders become nominally vulnerable to ICC prosecution. However, leaders have extensive influence over ICC investigations because the ICC Prosecutor relies on the cooperation of member-states to investigate crimes, collect forensic evidence, provide witnesses, and arrest indicted individuals. Political leaders can therefore enable the prosecution of some individuals, while hindering the prosecution of others. ICC investigations thus become a tool for sitting leaders to target their domestic opponents. We provide both quantitative and qualitative evidence of this behavior.

2020-21 Projects

Developing Down Under: The Case of Italian Prisoners of War in Australia

Michela Giorcelli, Assistant Professor, UCLA Department of Economics (top); Claudio Labanca, Assistant Professor, Monash University Department of Economics (bottom)

Research Project: Prisoners of war are a major consequence of conflicts. In the First World War, for instance, between 7,000,000 and 8,500,000 persons from all nations were captured. The estimated number of prisoners was even higher during the Second World War when the collapse of the German state and the unconditional surrender of Japan led to the imprisonment of entire armies, bringing the estimated number of prisoners up to 35,000,000. Despite the high number of prisoners of war that resulted from the two world conflicts alone, little is known about the economic consequences of their stay in the countries of detention, or their performance when they returned in their country of origin. This project aims to shed light on this unexplored topic using a unique historical episode: the case of Italian POWs in Australia during WWII. Specifically, we plan to collect data on the universe of Italian POWs that Australia detained between 1941 and 1945 and link them with information about their stay in Australia, as well as their labor market performance when, after 1947, they were allowed to return to Italy. With this new data in hands, we aim to answer the following two questions: 1) What was the effect of Italian POWs on local Australian agricultural and industrial development? 2) How did Italian POWs perform in the labor market when they returned in Italy?

Politics and International Law: Making, Breaking, and Upholding Global Rules

Leslie Johns, Professor, UCLA Department of Political Science and UCLA School of Law

Research Project: International law shapes the food we eat, the products we buy, the rights we hold, and the wars we fight. Turn on the television news, browse an Internet news site, listen to talk radio—you cannot escape international law. Yet despite the importance of international law to our everyday lives, few resources examine the intersection of politics and international law; namely, how international law works and why it matters. This book, Politics and International Law: Making, Breaking, and Upholding Global Rules, provides a comprehensive account of the way that states make, break, and uphold global rules. In particular, it argues that changing notions of political authority over the past 500 years have progressively shifted both who made law and how law was made. This theoretical argument is illustrated with detailed analyses of the law of the sea, international trade, foreign direct investment, human rights, use of force, armed conflict, criminal responsibility, and environmental protection.

Migration and the Demand for Transnational Justice

Leslie Johns, Professor, UCLA Department of Political Science and UCLA School of Law (top); Máximo Langer, Professor, UCLA School of Law (middle); Margaret Peters, Associate Professor, UCLA Department of Political Science (bottom)

Research Project: Domestic courts often prosecute foreign nationals for severe crimes—such as crimes against humanity, genocide, torture, and war crimes—that are committed on foreign territory against foreign nationals. Sometimes national legislation gives a domestic court the authority to prosecute foreign nationals for severe crimes that occurred on foreign territory. Other times, judges must argue that international law grants domestic courts the authority to conduct these prosecutions, even absent national legislation. What factors explain such prosecutions and national legislation? In a series of research articles, we argue that transnational justice is driven fundamentally by the political economy of migration. The movement of people across borders, as both economic migrants and refugees, exerts political pressure on local governments to conduct criminal investigations and prosecutions for crimes that occurred in other states, by and against foreign nationals. It also creates national-level pressure on public officials to pass national legislation that facilitates these prosecutions.

2019-20 Projects

A "Natural Alliance": India, Israel, the United States, and the Muslim in the National Imaginary

Vinay Lal, Professor, UCLA Departments of History and Asian American Studies

Research Project: There is an emerging nexus of India, Israel, and the United States which may well have a critical role to play in modern politics and geopolitical alliances. In each of these democracies, the “question of the Muslim” has assumed ever increasing importance in political discourse, domestic politics, and in the imaginary of the nation. Just as India's relations with Israel have improved dramatically, all the more extraordinary in that the two countries had no diplomatic relations for several decades and that India has the world's second largest Muslim population, so has India been increasingly tilting towards the United States, mindful no doubt of China's growing prowess. I propose to look at this triangular relationship, shaped in the first instance by the notion that each of these democracies is being encircled and encroached upon by Muslims, as a geopolitical reality of our times and ponder the considerable implications not merely for future relations among these countries but for the global world order, counter-terrorism operations, and, most significantly, the increasingly fragile rights of Muslim minorities in democracies.

Get Out: How Authoritarian Governments Decide Who Emigrates

Margaret Peters, Associate Professor, UCLA Department of Political Science

Research Project: Even the most authoritarian governments allow some citizens to leave. How do they decide who exits and who stays? In this project, we explore the trade-offs that autocrats face in managing emigration. On the plus side, autocrats can rid their states of potential challengers and opposition supporters. There may also be economic benefits due to expropriation of emigrants' property, reduction in social welfare benefits, skills upgrading, remittances, and even payment by democratic governments for the release of some citizens. On the negative side, emigrants may represent a loss of human capital, signal the level of opposition to the wider world, and spread norms of democracy back to their home countries. We examine how autocrats balance these trade-offs using archival data from the German Democratic Republic under Communist rule.

Computational International Relations Workshop

Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, Assistant Professor, UCLA Department of Public Policy (top); Jungseock Joo, Assistant Professor, UCLA Department of Communication (bottom)

Research Project: Professors Joo and Steinert-Threlkeld will host a workshop to convene social scientists who apply computational methodologies to international relations. “Computational methodologies” refers to the tools and skills necessary to acquire and analyze data produced from records of online human interaction, digitized archival data, or government records. Topics that computational approaches help investigate can include radicalization, decision making in war, economic competition, conflict diffusion, and communication and conflict, among others. Though there is much exciting work that has been, or will be, published in leading journals, there is no recognized community of computational international relations scholars. The support of the Burkle Center will allow us to build this community. In addition to the networking opportunity, the goal is to have this workshop be the first in an annual series. The workshop will therefore build an initial community and identity around a promising new approach for international relations research.

2018-19 Project

Pan African Capital: Finance, Banking, and Economic Self-Fashioning (Cont.)

Hannah Appel, Assistant Professor, UCLA Department of Anthropology, Global Studies IDP

Research Project: In 2015, the IMF wrote that Pan African Banks (PABs) had become much more important in Africa than the long-established European and American banks. Despite this flourishing of locally owned and capitalized banks on the continent, there is almost no social science addressing the phenomenon and its effects beyond bank walls. Pan African Capital: Finance, Banking, and Economic Self-Fashioning explores the emergence of new banking sectors on the African continent. Preliminary questions include: how might our view of global finance shift with African institutions at the center of the inquiry, rather than the periphery? What new banking and financial practices do these institutions facilitate for individuals, corporations, and states? What might a preliminary map of continental capital flows look like? Finally, given contemporary invocations of Pan Africanism as central to corporate mandates, how, if at all, do Pan African histories of utopian socialism and anticolonial struggle fit with the mission of contemporary African financial institutions?

2017-18 Projects

Pan African Capital: Finance, Banking, and Economic Self-Fashioning

Hannah Appel, Assistant Professor, UCLA Department of Anthropology, Global Studies IDP

Research Project: In 2015, the IMF wrote that Pan African Banks (PABs) had become much more important in Africa than the long-established European and American banks. Despite this flourishing of locally owned and capitalized banks on the continent, there is almost no social science addressing the phenomenon and its effects beyond bank walls. Pan African Capital: Finance, Banking, and Economic Self-Fashioning explores the emergence of new banking sectors on the African continent. Preliminary questions include: how might our view of global finance shift with African institutions at the center of the inquiry, rather than the periphery? What new banking and financial practices do these institutions facilitate for individuals, corporations, and states? What might a preliminary map of continental capital flows look like? Finally, given contemporary invocations of Pan Africanism as central to corporate mandates, how, if at all, do Pan African histories of utopian socialism and anticolonial struggle fit with the mission of contemporary African financial institutions?

Project on Resources, Governance, and Development (PRDG)

Darin Christensen, Assistant Professor (right), UCLA Department of Public Policy; Graeme Blair, Assistant Professor, UCLA Department of Political Science (center); Laura Paler, Assistant Professor, University of Pittsburgh Department of Political Science (not pictured); Michael Ross, Professor, UCLA Department of Political Science (left)

Research Project: The grant is to support a new multi-disciplinary initiative called the "Project on Resources, Governance, and Development (PRDG)," which will promote social science research on the policy challenges facing resource-dependent countries. The funds will be used to help cover the costs of a conference at a September 2017 PRDG conference at UCLA that brings together two groups: academics who are committed to empirical research on policy problems in resource-dependent countries; and policymakers and practitioners in multilateral organizations, NGOs, foundations, and extractive sector firms.

Find out more about the project at the UCLA Newsroom.

The Distributional Effects of Globalization on Political Risk

Leslie Johns, Associate Professor, UCLA Department of Political Science

Research Project: Does globalization promote the welfare of the poor, or merely the interests of the rich? In this research project, I examine the impact of globalization at the transnational-level by examining distributional conflicts across firms. In a series of papers, I examine: (1) how variation in industry start-up costs affects the treatment of foreign investors; (2) the distributional impact of international investment treaties on small versus large firms; and (3) the relationship between trade liberalization and industry consolidation. All three of these papers use novel firm-level economic models of trade and investment, and firm-level data on profits, taxation, and market entry and exit.

Emigration and Authoritarian Leaders

Margaret Peters, Assistant Professor, UCLA Department of Political Science

Research Project: Emigration is a double-edged sword for autocratic leaders: emigration can stabilize regimes by selecting a more loyal population and attracting investment, trade, and remittances, yet allowing their citizens to be exposed to democracy threatens autocratic leaders. This grant will be used to examine the microfoundations of the argument through a unique survey of migration lottery winners and losers and their families in Bangladesh. We will examine whether those who migrate and their families, who receive remittances, are less likely to engage in politics than those who do not migrate and those who are uninterested in migration.

Leader Traits, Partisan Competition and Political Outcomes

Robert Trager, Associate Professor, UCLA Department of Political Science

Research Project: Do individuals determine the course of history? It is difficult to determine whether variation in state behavior is driven by differences in leaders or differences in the factors that bring leaders to power.

To overcome this problem, we examine natural experiments created by close presidential races. This allows us to test a range of hypotheses about the leader traits that result in war, economic openness, and particular immigration policies.

2014-15 Project

Colonial Career Paths

Christian Dippel, Assistant Professor, UCLA Anderson School of Management

Research Project: A very successful strand of the economics literature has emphasized both the importance of institutions for economic development and the importance of historical colonialism as a source of variation that helps us identify the causal long run effect of institutions.

Concrete Plan: Implicit in all this research are ideas about colonizers’ motives and actions. Yet, we have no actual quantitative evidence on these motives. We aim to quantify one important dimension of colonizers’ actions, the promotion decisions for colonial staff, and to use colonial career paths to quantitatively assess the colonial administration’s motives. The idea is simple: to assess the ordinal and cardinal rankings of (vertically) different positions and (horizontally) different colonies, and to use this to assess what actions and outcomes were most rewarded by the colonial administration.

2013-14 Projects

Strategic (Non)Participation in International Organizations

Leslie Johns, Assistant Professor, UCLA Department of Political Science

Research Project: International organizations aspire to egalitarian decision-making among sovereign states. Yet powerful states often drive decisions, while weaker states are excluded from participation. This research project, which is jointly undertaken with Krzysztof J. Pelc of McGill University, examines the politics of participation within international organizations. We examine participation from the perspective of both powerful and weak states. First, we argue the powerful states that expect to lose within technocratic institutions, such as courts and bureaucracies, seek to politicize issues by broadening participation, while those that benefit from technocratic institutions seek to limit participation by weaker states. Second, we argue that sometimes exclusionary decision-making can benefit those very states that are excluded from participation. Because broader participation hinders dispute settlement, observed exclusion may reflect rational decisions by weak states not to participate, rather than formal or informal constraints on participation. This multifaceted project will use formal, quantitative, and qualitative methods to examine strategic participation in World Trade Organization dispute settlement and rule-making, European Union regulation, and sovereign debt negotiations.

Program on International Migration

UCLA Professor Michael Ross

Hiroshi Motomura, Professor, UCLA School of Law (Working Group Co-Chair); Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, Professor, UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies (Working Group Co-Chair); Ruben Hernandez-Leon, Associate Professor, UCLA Department of Sociology, and Roger Waldinger, Distinguished Professor, UCLA Department of Sociology

Project: Although migration is clearly a domestic issue, it is driven by cross-border social networks; it therefore inherently produces international spillovers – remittances, cross-border communication and travel, diaspora politics, as well as homeland-oriented immigrant philanthropy – that in turn trigger responses from home countries, seeking to influence the emigrants and access their resources. During 2013-14, the Program in International Migration will continue its bi-weekly program of speakers, with plans to once again assemble an interdisciplinary, international group. Invited speakers in 2013–14 are expected to address international refugee protection, comparative immigration policy making, remittances, social networks and migration, and transnational families, among other topics. The bi-weekly series will be complemented by a one-day workshop per quarter. In fall quarter 2013, the one–day workshop will be day–long conference to be held at UCLA in partnership with Colegio de la Frontera Norte (COLEF) (Tijuana). (We anticipate a similar, UCLA day at COLEF, to be scheduled for 2014–15.) The Program is also planning a conference to be held at Sciences Po in Paris in 2014, which will include UCLA students and faculty, as well as counterparts from Europe. The Paris conference is the second in a series of planned events that commenced in March 2012 with an international, interdisciplinary graduate student conference at UCLA, on Migration, Ethnicity, and Urban Change, organized in cooperation with Sciences Po (Paris) and the Berlin Graduate School for Social Science.

Understanding Fuel Price Shocks

UCLA Professor Michael Ross

Michael Ross, Professor, UCLA Department of Political Science; Jay Ulfelder, Independent Researcher

Research Project: Many news reports suggest that increases in the price of fuel can trigger protests, and even threaten the stability of governments. Our project seeks to collect original data on monthly fuel prices in all countries to statistically explore this hypothesis. We also hope to clarify the conditions under which governments have successfully removed fuel subsidies, without triggering protests. This issue has important economic, political, and environmental implications for many countries.

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2012-13 Projects

British Colonies and the ‘First’ Globalization

UCLA Professor Christian Dippel

Christian Dippel, Assistant Professor, UCLA Anderson School of Management

Research Project: This project seeks to collect detailed annual data on British colonies during the First Globalization from the mid-19th century up to WWI. From the early 19th century, British colonial authorities started collecting amazingly detailed data for each of their colonies, often at the parish-level. A particular emphasis was placed on trade statistics because these constituted the main source of local tax revenues. This data-source, located at the British National Archives and the British Library in London, has never been systematically digitized or used for a large-scale comparative study. This data will therefore both generate original research and exert a positive externality on the profession by making available a very large new data-set which sheds completely new light on a large portion of the 19th global trading world. Understanding how the benefits from globalization can be spread broadly so that they can be harnessed to generate a virtuous cycle in which trade, innovation and economic development become mutually reinforcing is today more relevant than ever.

Diplomatic Calculus: How States Draw Conclusions about Each Others’ Future Behavior

UCLA Professor Robert Trager

Robert Trager, Assistant Professor, UCLA Department of Political Science

Research project: This project focuses on the creation of a new dataset of state inferences about the future behavior and intentions of other states, and the development of grant proposals for the National Science Foundation, the European Research Council and other funding organizations. In the international relations field, no such dataset of inference currently exists despite the centrality of the question of how states draw inferences about each others’ future behavior. The dataset will draw on British inferences from 1854 to 1914, a period that saw many varying international contexts thus providing a unique resource for international relations scholars. Analysis of this data will be used in Trager’s book project, Diplomatic Calculus in Anarchy.

Program on International Migration

UCLA Professor Roger Waldinger

Roger Waldinger, Distinguished Professor, UCLA Department of Sociology (Working Group Chair); Ruben Hernandez-Leon, Associate Professor, UCLA Department of Sociology; Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, Associate Professor, UCLA Department of Education

2011-12 Projects

The Effectiveness of Eco-Labels: An International Perspective

UCLA Professor Magali Delmas

Magali Delmas, Professor of Management, UCLA Institute of the Environment and the Anderson School of Management

Research Project: The difficulty to solve environmental problems has generated the search for alternative governance mechanisms that involve a multitude of actors and organizations. A potentially effective option relates to disclosing information aimed at market actors and civil society via eco-labels. The goal of eco-labels is to elicit increased demand for products perceived as environmentally favorable. This research seeks to uncover the factors that facilitate or hamper the success of eco-labels, whether these factors differ in Europe and in the United States and how to predict the successful adoption of new eco-labels.

Cyberspace, The Globalization of Hinduism, and Protocols of Citizenship in the Digital Age

UCLA Professor Vinay Lal

Vinay Lal, Associate Professor, UCLA Department of History

Research Project: This project is positioned within the framework of the globalization of religion under conditions of modernity and India’s changing role in world politics. It will focus on the politics of democracy and authoritarianism in cyberspace, including the internet’s role in expanding and mobilizing both nationalist Hindus and their secular opponents within the Indian diaspora. It will also explore the transformation of Hinduism as it becomes a global faith, with an emphasis on the worldview of Indian American Hindus in particular.

Oil & Unbalanced Globalization

UCLA Professor Michael Ross

Michael Ross, Professor, UCLA Department of Political Science

Research Project: This research tries to explain the paradoxical role of the oil-exporting countries in the international system. Economically, these states are highly globalized: they are the source of the world’s single most valuable commodity; they tend to be highly tradedependent; and they are often major capital importers or exporters. Yet politically, they are strikingly unglobalized: they are much less likely than other states to sign major treaties or preferential trade agreements; they are atypically prone to expropriating foreign companies; and they often defy global norms. The researchers argue that this combination of features – high levels of economic integration, combined with low levels of political integration – makes the oil producers a distinctive, and often disruptive, force in the international system.

Diplomatic Calculus: How States Draw Conclusions about Each Others’ Future Behavior

UCLA Professor Robert Trager

Robert Trager, Assistant Professor, UCLA Department of Political Science

2010-11 Projects

Legacies of Pacific Island Militarization

UCLA Professor Elizabeth DeLoughrey

Elizabeth DeLoughrey, UCLA Professor, Department of English (Working Group Chair); Victor Bascara, Associate Professor, UCLA Department of Asian American Studies; Keith Camacho, Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies Department

Project: In recent years, the field of American Studies has turned to the history of the US empire and its transoceanic reach into the Pacific, a vital space for testing US foreign policy. This project focuses on the history of the “Pacific Theatre” during World War II and seeks to highlight multiple methodologies of approaching the complex social, political, environmental, and cultural implications of Pacific Island militarization. How have Pacific Islanders represented and engaged the long history of militarization? Drawing from different disciplinary backgrounds, the three principal investigators held the Legacies of Pacific Island Militarization Workshop on April 18, 2011 in UCLA’s Royce Hall. The workshop was so successful that the group also held a second meeting in August 2011 with local participants to prepare their essays for an edited volume of a journal. (to be determined).

Migration Study Group

UCLA Professor Roger Waldinger

2008-10 Project

Men, Women, and Universal Higher Education

UCLA Professor Susanne Lohmann

Susanne Lohmann, Professor, UCLA Department of Political Science (Working Group Chair); Yasmin Kafai, Associate Professor, UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Systems; Linda Sax, Associate Professor, UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Systems; Sally Blower, Professor, UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine

Project: On March 11 - 14, 2009, Susanne Lohmann presented her research findings at the conference, "The Global Arc of Justice: Sexual Orientation Law Around the World." On May 12, 2009, Lohmann again presented her research findings at UCLA's Royce Hall's Room 314. The first purpose of her research is to argue that higher education not only creates human capital but it also shapes a people’s collective mindset. Worldwide, men tend to study “useful” subjects like engineering, computer science, and business, which have the potential to create human capital and economic growth. Women tend to self-select into the humanities and social sciences, which human-capital theorists like to write off as “useless” but which actually serve to modernize people’s mindsets. On February 8, 2010, Susanne Lohman brought William Clark of UC San Diego to campus to speak on "Being Academic."

2008-09 Project

Women in Conflict Zones

UCLA Professor Sondra Hale

Sondra Hale, Professor, UCLA Departments of Anthropology and Women’s Studies (Working Group Chair); Christine Littleton, Professor, UCLA School of Law; Purnima Mankekar, Associate Professor, UCLA Departments of Asian American Studies and Women's Studies; Susan Slyomovics, Professor, UCLA Department of Anthropology

Project: On April 10th the Faculty Working Group participants will hold a Symposium on Women in Conflict Zones at the UCLA Faculty Center which will feature a keynote/public lecture by Shahrazad Mojab of the University of Toronto, followed by a panel and a workshop designed to explore various conflict zones (e.g., Palestine, Iran (Kurds), Algeria, Sudan, Mexico, Lebanon, Cuba, Eritrea, Tunisia, Philippines, Rwanda/Congo, South Africa, and the United States, where individuals may be actors, warriors, victims, perpetrators, survivors, collaborators, icons or symbols and may be ambivalent, complicit, and have complicated relationships to their adversaries.

Click here to learn more about the Symposium on Women in Conflict Zones.

Published: Friday, March 19, 2010