CISSR SPOTLIGHT

Professor Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking After Empire Wins 2021 Frantz Fanon Award

CISSR Book Fellow and Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science, Adom Getachew’s  Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination won the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s 2021 Frantz Fanon Award which is given annually to books of special interest to Caribbean thought. Professor Getachew’s book draws on the political thought of anticolonial nationalists such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Julius Nyerere revealing a project of world making born from the decolonizing political thought of Black Atlantic intellectuals and leaders. Their groundbreaking political theories further challenged the racial order that remained in the post imperial world. Their communities formed regional federations and created the "New International Economic Order" in order to strengthen their demands for a more egalitarian world and challenge the international order. Using archival research from Ghana, Trinidad, Switzerland, Professor Getachew explains the development of this political theory. While completing Worldmaking After Empire, Professor Getachew was awarded a CISSR book workshop to receive feedback on the working manuscript. Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination was published by Princeton University Press and has received many awards since its release in 2020. 

The CISSR Board are proud to continue these Book Workshops & Monograph Enhancement Awards for University of Chicago faculty. The CISSR Board will continue to support completely virtual, hybrid, and in person workshops per approval through the Social Sciences Division for all in-person events. All University of Chicago faculty are encouraged to apply, provided their manuscripts 1) focus on international, transnational, or global issues, and 2) use social scientific methods. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis.

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NEWS & RESEARCH ROUNDUP

Editorial: "Refusing Imperial Amnesia in the War on Terror”

Darryl Li, 19-20 CISSR Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Associate Member of the Law School, wrote a recent article for Middle Eastern Research and Information Project (MERIP) reflecting on the two-decade-long War on Terror how the media framed the  September 11 attacks with imperial amnesia, and that’s in contrast to MERIP coverage. He also shares links to historical reporting from the MERIP as the war unfolded across the years, helping to refute narratives which obscures the effects of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. "The act of remembering—of forging memory in community—is ever necessary to counter the amnesia that constantly works to render imperial violence benign, that even today seeks to erase the War on Terror just as it erased the horrors that preceded and enabled it.” 

Photo Courtesy of Jason Smith - UChicago News

Transitional Justice Enabling Democratic Backsliding

In a new issue of Constitutional Political Economy, 17-21 CISSR Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of Political Science, Monika Nalepa builds on existing theories of democratic backsliding by zooming into the constitutional crisis in Poland after 2015. She finds that an unfinished transitional justice project gave Law and Justice party (PiS) the excuse and pretext to start reelecting into office aspiring autocrats. Almost immediately upon coming to power PiS began to reshuffle the Constitutional Tribunal, the constitutional court in Poland, and to introduce reforms to “flatten” the structure of the judiciary system. This case study fits into a larger pattern of how younger democracies are more susceptible to efforts that weaken their constitutional courts, in part because the constitutions themselves are younger, but also, in part, because their societies are not yet well socialized to the ideas of rule of law, both of which put human rights, especially ethnic and religious minority rights, at stake.  

Additionally, in a recent article on domestic terrorism, Prof. Nalepa and Colleen Murphy (University of Illinois) argue that to better prevent domestic terrorism, the United States must fundamentally change the vetting process for screening new hires. This is especially important when vetting those with the most power in society like the military and law enforcement.

American Missionaries in Jinan, China, 1881-1891

In a new research article titled Placing the U.S. State in the Interior of China: the Jinan Missionary Case, 1881-1891 and published in Pacific Historical Review, 19-20 CISSR Dissertation Fellow Daniel Knorr refutes mainstream assumptions of the “informal” imperialism brought by U.S. missionaries in the Pacific. Knorr argues that missionaries were not simply beneficiaries of the state; they constructed it. This article examines the intertwined processes of state-extension and place-making through property disputes between Presbyterian missionaries and local elites in Jinan, China in the 1880s, to highlight how “place” and “state” are not static constructs but products of dynamic social interactions. 

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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT…

In an interview with WTTW, 17-21 CISSR Faculty Fellow and Director for Program on the Global Environment (PGE), Sabina Shaikh talks about the impact of climate change on US and global migration. “For some people, they’ll be displaced, and they’ll be forced to move. While for other people, they may not even have means to migrate or to move,” Shaikh said. “Then they’re going to be left with the negative impacts of climate change without the ability to move and that I think (it) will be a global effect.” Shaikh says that globally, climate refugees, which is a term used for describing climate-induced migrants, range from people being displaced by a large one-time event to people migrating after cumulative events like  hurricanes, flooding, and wildfires.

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