Department of Political Science Bulletin September

Department of Political Science Bulletin
September, 2002

Welcome to the Fall, 2002 edition of the Department of Political Science Bulletin. The department has undergone a number of exciting changes recently. Many new colleagues have joined us, while others have retired. Many of our former students are now embarking on new careers or continuing their studies at other universities. We will use this bulletin to keep everyone up to date about what the faculty, students and staff in political science have been doing. If there is any news you would like to pass on about important events in your career, please let us know. I hope you enjoy reading it, and wish everyone a happy and productive fall.

James Meernik, Chair, Department of Political Science.

Getting Ink

Mohammad Al-Momani’s, “Legal Systems of the World: Syria”, was published in Legal Systems of the World: A Political, Social, and Cultural Encyclopedia.

Patrick Brandt’s “Using the Right Tools for Time Series Data Analysis” was published in the most recent issue of The Political Methodologist

Elizabeth Oldmixon’s, “Culture Wars in the Congressional Theater: How the U.S. House of Representatives Legislates Morality, 1993-1998” appears in the September issue of Social Science Quarterly.

Richard Ruderman’s “Frederick Douglass and Slavery” has been published in Tempered Strength: Studies in the Nature and Scope of Prudential Leadership, edited by Ethan Fishman.

.Alex Tan’s “Transformation of the Kuomintang Party in Taiwan” was published in the Autumn 2002 issue of the journal Democratization.

Acceptances

James Meernik’s “Equality of Arms? The Individual Versus the International Community in War Crimes Tribunals” was accepted for publication in Judicature.

James Meernik, Joseph Ignagni and Rebecca Dean’s “Executive Influence on the U.S. Supreme Court: Solicitor General Amicus Cases, 1953-1997” was accepted for publication in the American Review of Politics.

Alex Tan’s “Party Actors and Party Change: Does Factional Dominance Matter?” was accepted in the European Journal of Political Research. As well, Alex’s “Political Choices and Economic Outcomes: A Perspective on the Differential Impact of the Financial Crisis on South Korea and Taiwan” will be published in the August 2003 issue of Comparative Political Studies.

Getting Gelt

Peter VonDoepp was awarded $4800.00 Research Initiation Grant for his project "Judicial Effectiveness in Emerging African Democracies". The study examines factors shaping judicial independence and activism in four of Africa's newer democracies.

Appearances

A number of faculty and graduate students took part in the annual American Political Science Association meetings in Boston over Labor Day Weekend.

Elizabeth Oldmixon chaired a panel on “Faith Based Policy in the Political Arena”.

Steve Poe and Linda Keith (PhD 1999) presented “Personal Integrity Abuse and Domestic Crises”. Steve also served as a discussant on a panel on human rights and international factors.

Richard Ruderman took part in the roundtable panel on “Prudential Leadership”.

Wenda Sheard presented, “Multicollinearity: The
Necessity of Joint Examination of Structure Coefficients and Beta Weights”.

Alex Tan was appointed assistant coordinator of the APSA Conference Group on Taiwan Studies for 2002-2004 term.

Neal Tate presented a paper entitled “Regime Support and Appellate Courts: A Comparative Analysis of Litigation Outcomes”. The paper was coauthored with Stacy Hanie, LSU, Reggie Sheehan, Michigan State, and Don Songer, South Carolina. It is a product of the authors' NSF-sponsored High Courts Judicial Database Project. Tate also completed his term as Section Chair by presiding over the meetings of the APSA Organized Section on Law and Courts.

John Booth gave a speech at the Student Government Association/Hillel-sponsored memorial and reflection on peace at the Shrader Pavilion on September 11.

Awards

Frank Feigert was honored as a winner of the Minnie Stevens Piper Award at the Faculty Convocation ceremony. The award goes annually to the most outstanding professors in Texas. Congratulations!

Cece Hannah has won the UNT Staff Contribution Award. There will be a ceremony honoring her and the other winners, Tuesday, Oct. 1 at 3 pm in the Gateway Center. Congratulations and thank you for all your hard work.

Alumni News

Adel Al Jubeir (B.A., PSCI) has appeared on news programs numerous times in recent months as an advisor to the Foreign Ministry of Saudi Arabia.

Sabine Carey (MA 1998) has accepted a faculty position at the University of Nottingham in England.

Sean Carey (MA 1998) has accepted a faculty position at Oxford University in England.

Wesley Milner (Ph.D. 1999) was recently named Head of International Programs at Evansville University.

Max Yu (Ph.D. 2002) has been named Assistant Professor of Political Science at Fu Hsing Kang College, Taipei, Taiwan and also a Fellow of the International Security Forum of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and National Defense.

Events

The Department will be hosting the “Democracy and Markets” Symposium on Saturday, November 9 from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm in 322 Wooten Hall. Guest speakers include: John Freeman, Steven Lewis, Kelly Kadera and Robert Franzese. More information at www.psci.unt.edu/mand.htm

The Women of PoliSci is being organized by Erum Shaikh. All interested graduate student and faculty women are encouraged to get involved and contact Erum.

Congratulations!

Jim Battista and Amanda Lowery on their recent wedding in the honeymoon capital of the world, Niagara Falls.

Weird, Wide World

To get the ball rolling and provide inspiration, you might appreciate hearing about the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Smith v. United States (1992). This case involved a lawsuit filed by a woman whose husband fell in a crevice while hiking in Antarctica. To collect damages for her husband’s death, the widow alleged that the US government was responsible for his accident because: 1) Antarctica was not a foreign land and therefore subject to certain US laws, and 2) the US government should have posted more signs in Antarctica warning of the hazards of hiking about. She lost as the Supreme Court ruled that the US government was not responsible for accidents that happened abroad, even if the lands were not exactly a foreign country. Who says our courts are spineless!

middle

As part of the new format of the Political Science Bulletin, we will be publishing essays written by faculty, students and others. These essays will be topical and should be of interest to all those with a political science degree or interest. I have asked our new Johnie Christian Family Peace Professor, T. David Mason to contribute the first essay. It concerns a subject we are all familiar with--wars and peace--but provides fresh insight from, naturally, a political science perspective. By the way, if you have suggestions for a better name for this section, by all means pass them on!

With the end of World War II a sea change occurred in the patterns of armed conflict around the world. Whereas wars between nations had marked international politics since the rise of the nation-state system, civil wars – wars within nations – became the most frequent and deadly forms of conflict over the last half of the twentieth century. Whereas Europe and the other major powers (the U.S., China, Japan) had been the site of most of the world’s interstate wars, the Third World – Asia, Africa, and Latin America – became the site of the civil wars that punctuated the history of the last half century. Whereas the international community had some success at brokering settlements to wars between nations, civil wars remained largely immune to any efforts to peace-making, at least for most of the Cold War era.

In one sense, this last trend should not have been surprising. Two nations at war can agree to a truce, retreat to their own territory and, as long as they have some reason to believe their rival will not violate the truce, return to business as usual ante-bellum. In civil wars, by contrast,

... the members of the two sides must live side by side and work together in a common government to make the country work. ... How do groups of people who have been killing one another with considerable enthusiasm and success come together to form a common government?

Fortunately, with the end of the Cold War, this last trend has reversed. UN-mediated peace accords brought an end to civil wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Angola, Bosnia, and Cambodia, to name but a few. Despite the difficulties inherent in sustaining peace in the aftermath of civil war, most of these peace settlements have endured. Despite decades of bloody conflict marked by near genocidal killings in Cambodia and El Salvador, for instance, their post-conflict regimes have survived and managed to sustain the peace. On the other hand, a number of peace settlements have come unraveled, with a resumption of armed conflict not only inflicting more damage on the nation and its people but complicating the prospects for restoring peace by undermining the warring parties’ confidence in the peace process itself. At least three peace agreements have broken down in Angola over the last decade, while Liberia, Colombia, Guatemala, and Sudan (among others) have experienced a resumption of armed conflict following the conclusion of a peace agreement.

These trends define a new agenda for the international community in the new century: how do we sustain the peace in nations previously torn by civil war? What factors distinguish those cases where the peace settlement endured from those where it collapsed? And what measures can the international community take to ensure that peace does endure?

The first lesson we can glean from cases of enduring peace is that building peace involves more than just ending the war. The international community – whether through the UN or some other coalition of nations – has to make a commitment to policing the peace until the institutions of a new political, social, and economic order can take root. Multi-national forces in Cambodia and El Salvador did more than just supervise the disarmament of the combatants. They played an active role in building the institutions of the new order, including training a new civilian police force and a new military force, both of which were designed to give former combatants on both sides confidence that their erstwhile rivals would not be able to take advantage of the truce to reactivate their own war machines and strike preemptively to claim military victory.

Second, building democracy is crucial to sustaining the peace. Just as democracies don’t go to war with other democracies, so it appears that functioning democracies are relatively immune to civil war. Of course, establishing a well functioning democracy involves far more than just holding elections and filling the seats in a legislature. Crafting a constitution that assures a fair chance at representation for all contending parties – including former enemies – requires delicate exercises in statecraft. Peace brokers must forge a new constitution that assures warring parties that their former enemies will not be able to achieve at the polls and in the legislature what they could not win on the battlefield: the political annihilation of their rivals for power. And democratic consolidation requires a commitment on the part of the voting public to give democracy a chance, which means accepting defeat at the polls as well as claiming victory. Consolidating popular loyalty to a new democratic regime means that citizens and elected officials must come to see democracy as “the only game in town.” This requires, among other things, that all parties accept former enemies as legitimate players in the new order.

A year after the events of September 11, perhaps it is appropriate for us to consider not just how we should go about winning the war on terrorism but, perhaps more importantly, what we must do to sustain the peace in the aftermath of civil wars. It should come as no surprise that most of the nations suspected of harboring terrorist cells are those that are still torn by some form of armed civil conflict. Sustaining the peace in nations once torn by civil war may be our best strategy for ensuring that those nations don’t become the new spawning grounds and safe havens for terrorists.