DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

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.

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.

To keep Tampa Bay clean, we could use tax breaks to reward pro-environment business behavior.

Are you interested in teaching English abroad on a Fulbright? Meet Nuo (Anor) Chen, current Fulbrighter in Taiwan. Also meet Amy Kehoe, NU's campus contact for Fulbright teaching awards. Get your questions answered!

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell discussed technological competition with China, China’s role in the Russia-Ukraine War, concerns over Taiwan and future U.S.-China diplomacy at a virtual town hall Tuesday. Political science Prof. Iza Ding, a local organizer of the town hall, said she had noticed growing interest in discussing China-adjacent topics at NU and considers the event on Tuesday a success. Ding taught “Political Science 355: Politics of China” in Fall 2023, where she observed many students interested in the topic. She added that many NU faculty members and students are also working on “China-related projects.” “The larger goal is really to build a community … regardless of people’s political positions, we want to make the public more informed and be able to make up their own minds about their opinions on China,” Ding said.

Racial violence is central to the American polity. We argue that support for violence, specifically anti-Black violence, has a long historical arc in American politics dating back to chattel slavery. In this paper, we argue that the racial violence associated with the “great replacement” conspiracy is much more pervasive among the white American public because of the historical legacy of anti-Black violent sentiment. To investigate the prevalence of this idea, we conducted a preregistered simple priming experiment aimed to tap into top-of-mind ideas about racial demographic change. Our experimental design spans multiple data sources, including two probability samples, over the course of a year.

In March, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced a major change in how the federal government collects data about race and ethnicity. These updates will affect how federal agencies count people of Hispanic/Latino and Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) descent. The addition of a “MENA” category is a welcome change that will allow millions of MENA Americans to have formal representation in the American system. And this update means the federal government will now categorize their racial and ethnic identity in meaningful ways. But these recent changes introduce some caveats that are important to acknowledge – particularly related to the erasure of Black ethnic identity.

Andrew Thompson (Ph.D. '21) has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania starting in July.

In February, French President Emmanuel Macron created a stir among his European Union and NATO allies when he declared that the West should consider deploying troops to Ukraine. Though his remarks were immediately repudiated by several of his European counterparts, they reflect fears in Europe and the U.S. that Ukraine is losing the war against Russian aggression. Macron’s timing was no coincidence. It came just weeks after a lack of ammunition and artillery forced Ukrainian forces to retreat from the city of Avdiivka, despite four months of heavy fighting that cost Russian forces over 47,000 soldiers and 360 tanks. The growing concern about the Ukrainian military’s ability to resist the Russian onslaught in 2024 has been compounded by the political impasse in Washington over funding the next tranche of military aid for Kyiv.