We are happy to announce four SMU faculty members have been awarded this year’s Colin Powell Global Order and Foreign Policy Fellowship for 2018-2019. Funding has been awarded to Karisa Cloward, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Jeffrey A. Engel, Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Presidential History, and to a joint project led by Luigi Manzetti, Associate Professor of Political Science, and Thomas Osang, Associate Professor of Economics. The award, designed to increase research and scholarship and to enhance teaching effectiveness, gives SMU faculty members up to $5,000 for their research, which contributes to what President Bush referred to as the New World Order.
Dr. Karisa Cloward will use her award to finish a survey of candidates in Kenya’s August 2017 election. The survey is aimed at understanding if, how, and why civil society workers are running for political office in the region. Her survey will explore what new techniques and resources civil society workers may be using to beat out their traditional competitors.
Additionally, Cloward will study how civil society workers respond differently to governmental problems by analyzing the campaigns and in-office-priorities of political aspirants. A civil workers’ response to the region’s problems could possibly benefit the area more than the actions of traditional candidates.
Jeffrey A. Engel will use the award to finish his book Seeking Monsters to Destroy: How America Goes to War from Jefferson to Trump. The United States has been engaged in a war for over a decade now, a war which began with President George W. Bush’s quest for Osama bin Laden, but which has continued through ever changing targets with no end in sight. Engel looks back into American history to explain this and other American wars, exploring how Americans have traditionally viewed armed conflicts through rhetorical and figurative lenses aimed at individuals, not populaces. He argues that this tradition can be traced all the way back to Jefferson’s rhetoric during the American Revolution, rhetoric that demonized George III and painted the war not as a civil war, but instead as a heroic escape from a tyrant.
Luigi Manzetti and Thomas Osang are undertaking a project together with their award in order to study how corruption impacts foreign direct investments (FDIs). They hypothesize that corruption deters FDI, even in our current heavily globalized and generally market-friendly world. They will use cross-sectional panel data analysis to test their hypothesis, adding to the current deficit in literature on the subject. They hope to present their research at the European Consortium for Political Research and the American Political Science Association meetings in 2019, as well as to seek publication in a political science journal.
Each of the above funded projects will be presented at the Tower Center in the fall of 2019.