Young Initiative Annual Report, 2019-20 by Occidental College

GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

Annual Report 2019-2020

The Young Initiative The Young Initiative’s mission is to participate in envisioning alternatives to the status quo in the Global Political Economy (GPE). To that end, we have a vision of GPE as an interdisciplinary academic enterprise that takes as its focus both structures of exclusion and possibilities of political-economic transformation that are systematically overlooked in traditional academic approaches. We are advancing that mission by:

» Connecting the Young Initiative to Occidental students and faculty. This includes supporting impactful global research and stimulating campus intellectual conversation in order to give space for all members of our community to contribute to re-imagining our political-economic status quo. » Expanding our connections to Los Angeles. This is part of the Young Initiative’s commitment to showing how substate actors might improve local policies by engaging with international norms and academic partners. » Linking our theoretical/practical work to global academic and policy conversations across disciplines, across theoreticalpolicy divides, and across geographical spaces. A more expansively constituted GPE can more imaginatively approach global/local crises in governance around the world.

The John Parke Young Initiative on the Global Political Economy memorializes John Parke Young (Class of 1917), an international economist, and the son of Rev. William Stewart Young, one of the founders of Occidental College and a 50-year member of the Board of Trustees. This endowment allows faculty and students to engage in global research and brings experts to campus for lectures and conferences to promote national or international economic, social, financial, and political policies and actions of public and social benefit. The Young Initiative is central to Occidental’s campus and connects students and faculty to stimulating conversations about the local, national, and international sphere of global political economy.

Table of Contents The Young Initiative

Foreword from the Chair

Young-Sponsored Student Activities

SDGs in Los Angeles Project

Spring 2020 Task Force

Summer 2020 Task Forces

Young Student Grants

Young Grant Recipients

Young Student Committee

Young-Sponsored Campus Events

U.N. Week 2020: Climate Change and Economic/Environmental Justice

Young Conversations

Young-Sponsored Workshops

Panels

Faculty Research

Young Grants for the Economics Department

People

Foreword from the Chair This has been a year of global chaos: Everything from massive street protests in the United States and around the globe to the COVID-19 pandemic have laid bare how the political economic status quo is riven with inequalities and exclusions. This chaos will inevitably reset global political and economic arrangements, which only reaffirms and heightens the urgency of the Young Initiative’s mission of envisioning alternatives to the status quo in the global political economy. In the past year, we pursued this mission in all facets of our work. To give a few examples from the different domains in which the Young Initiative works: » Events with local and global impact. With the aim of linking the Young Initiative’s theoretical/practical work to global academic and policy conversations, we kicked off the academic year with a Cross-Cutting Approaches to Human Rights workshop. This brought together 24 leading scholars and practitioners from around the world to focus on how to best re-conceptualize human rights so they can better inform struggles against rising global/local nationalisms. Conversations had a particular focus on recognizing how violations of economic rights are an essential dimension to understanding the structural exclusions that underlie our current global tumult. » Partnerships across disciplines and divides. With the aim of connecting the Young Initiative to academic and policy partners across ingrained boundaries, we expanded our pathbreaking partnership with the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office in integrating the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into city policy. Task forces working with city clients during the spring and summer of 2020 were led by faculty from Occidental’s Biology, Diplomacy and World Affairs (DWA), and Politics Departments, showing the interdisciplinary dimensions of working on the global political economy (a fall 2020 task force led by a faculty member from the Urban and Environmental Policy Department will further extend our focus on connecting across disciplines). This academic policy partnership is helping Los Angeles expand the reach of how it integrates the SDGs into addressing a range of local issues that have global dimensions. » Academic work on global political economy. With the aim of furthering the Young Initiative’s academic impact on the Occidental campus and beyond, Associate Professor Madeline Baer joined the Young Initiative and the DWA Department this year. Baer’s impactful work on water policy and global governance as well as her expertise on economic and social human rights have already strengthened all dimensions of the Young Initiative’s work. We are equally thrilled that Igor Logvinenko will be joining the Young Initiative/DWA next year, bringing with him a track record of innovative academic research on how economic globalization impacts institutions, democratization processes, and rule of law practices in autocracies. In the upcoming academic year, Logvinenko is planning a workshop at Occidental on kleptocracy, focusing on the intersection of financial globalization with corruption, both in emerging market economies and in the United States. 5

More details about 2019-20 Young Initiative events, interdisciplinary partnerships, and academic work follow in this report. COVID-19’s impact on scheduling live events raised (and raises) a challenge to the Young Initiative’s work in both form and substance. In form, we will be taking this as an opportunity to conduct and communicate our work through innovative media. In substance, the pandemic has exposed how the global political economy status quo systematically makes some populations more or less vulnerable to ill-health, disease, and death. This systematic vulnerability is superficially distinct, but actually intimately connected to the political economy of the murders of George Floyd, Nina Pop, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and too many other AfricanAmericans in the United States. For the Young Initiative, thus, the challenge is to query how we will rebuild our societies in the wake of these linked crises: Will it be in their old images, or will we have the courage to imagine new, more connective forms of society? Anthony Tirado Chase Professor, Diplomacy and World Affairs Chair, Young Initiative on the Global Political Economy

The following three sections of this report detail the Young Initiative’s work in the domains on which our mission focuses: » Young-sponsored student activities » Young-sponsored campus events » Young-sponsored workshops and faculty research 6

Young-Sponsored Student Activities The Young Initiative’s first priority is supporting student engagement with research in global political economy. This section on student activities details how we organize students into Task Forces working with the L.A. Mayor’s Office; how we support independent student research on the global political economy; and how the Young Student Committee works toward student ownership of the Young Initiative.

Young Grant recipients and Catherine Selleck ’55 at the 2020 Young Student Dinner.

SDGs in Los Angeles Project Student Task Forces The SDGs in L.A. Project is a Young Initiative partnership with the L.A. Mayor’s Office. We create student task forces that work under city leadership with faculty guidance. The task forces are empowered to use the SDGs as a tool to help envision fresh policy approaches to seemingly intractable local problems.

Spring 2020 Task Force SDG 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions: Eight Occidental students under the leadership of Associate Professor Thalia González (Politics) worked in close coordination with the L.A. Mayor’s Office to analyze, disaggregate, and visualize the relationship between YouthSource Centers and transportation accessibility in Los Angeles.

Amirah Al-Sagr ’22 Ramon Pereira Bonilla ’23 Skylar Cummings ’20 Caroline Diamond ’22 Jack Fernandes ’20 Emma Harwood ’21 Micah Kirscher ’20 Kyler Parris ’22

Summer 2020 Task Forces Seventeen Occidental students worked on six task forces with joint faculty-city leadership on the following issues.

Disaggregating LGBTQIA+ Data: Draw on the best practices of other cities and new data sources to improve measures of impact, inclusion, and representation of LGBTQIA+ Angelenos in city services. John Hammer ’21 Alejo Maggini ’22 Intergenerational Poverty through the Lens of Student Homelessness: Conduct a macroanalysis of the determinants of intergenerational poverty with a focus on the relationship between homeless students’ environment and their educational outcomes.

Life on Land: Help enhance the LA City Biodiversity Index to determine current industry benchmarks, create key recommendations for the next report revision, and provide insights for further research. Jackson Caudle ’21, Hope Hendry ’21, McClaran Shirley ’22, Maggie SmartMcCabe ’20, and Snigdha Suvarna ’20 Healthy Indoor Environments to Live, Work, and Play: Analyze types of indoor air quality and energy efficiency solutions that can be supported by city programs with strong ROI and effective reduction of pollutants and emissions.

Wafa Abedin ’21, Caroline Diamond ’22, Jack Fernandes ’20, Micah Kirscher ’20, and Kyler Parris ’22

Julia Eubanks ’22, Oli Vorster ’22, and Nancy Zhou ’22

Community Development Block Grant: Map the past seven years’ worth of projects funded by the Community Development Block Grant Entitlement Program.

SDG Community Index and Storytelling: Build up the current database of SDG activities by sourcing organizations, projects, and people that are advancing the SDGs in Los Angeles.

Stephanie Oyolu ’22

Zachary Goodwin ’21

Young Student Grants The Young Initiative on the Global Political Economy is committed to funding student research, internships, and conference attendance. The 2019-20 Selection Committee managed a competitive process, awarding grants to 14 students from a range of majors to enable them to further their academic engagement with issues in the global political economy (due to COVID-19, someÂ projects were notÂ completed).

The Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, is dedicated to preserving the legacy of enslaved Black communities living under Jim Crow laws. Each steel monument, picture above, observes the memory of a victim of racial terror and the county, and state, where the crime occurred. The Young Initiative funded Alejo Magginiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s conference attendance at this memorial. 10

Young Grant Recipients 2019-20 Otto Martin Altman ’20 Research: A Template for Our Urban Future—Infrastructure in Nairobi Nairobi, Kenya Samuel L. Berger ’22 Research: Self-organized Interview and Documentation at Several Organizations/Establishments, Starting with the Azienda Agricola Orsini Florence, Italy Seth E. Davis ’20 Research: Moroccan Journalist Jailed for Abortion Freed After Royal Pardon Marrakesh, Morocco Andrea Nichole DeVries ’20 Independent Research Paris, France Nora Grace Healy ’20 Research: Independent Research to Analyze How Hungarian National Identity and History is Manifested in Budapest Budapest, Hungary Tala Ismail ’20 Tania El Khoury Garden Speaks Exhibit at brut Wien in Vienna Vienna, Austria Youngeun Kang ’21 Conference: Public Policy & International Affairs (PPIA) Public Service Weekend Washington, D.C.

Alejo Maggini ’22 Latin American Leadership Academy Meets Alabama: Racial Segregation and Community Empowerment in the Memorial for Peace and Justice Montgomery, Alabama Aerex Narvasa ’22 Conference: Warwick Economics Summit Coventry, United Kingdom Thomas J. Robertson ’20 Fellowship: Collaboration on ICT Policy for Central and Southern Africa (CIPESA) Kampala, Uganda Evan G. Sarafian ’20 Research: Exploring the Historical Origin of Abkhaz Secession Tbilisi, Georgia Joseph Michael Sortino ’20 Research: Italian Slow Food in a FastHeating World Panzano in Chianti, Italy Jade Siew Thurnham ’20 Conference: American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting 2020 Communicating Science Seminar Seattle, Washington Troy Van Buskirk Barter ’20 Research: Connecting the Paris Agreement with Beef in Argentina Buenos Aires, Argentina

Young Student Committee The Young Student Committee works to engage Occidental students in connecting their academics to work on the global political economy, organizing student-only sessions with guest speakers and writing blog posts covering those events, and developing ways to enable greater student ownership of the Young Initiative.

Beyond engaging students from across campus in Young Initiative events, the Student Committee also takes the lead in developing student-run events, including the following project.

Right to the City Student Conference The Young Student Committee developed “The Right to the City” conference (to be held in April 2020), per the Young Initiative’s encouragement of and support for independent student work. With help from Oxy Arts, support from Occidental Students United Against Gentrification, and community members, the spring 2020 conference was planned as a multifaceted event to center the voices, causes, and impact of gentrification in Highland Park and Eagle Rock. Due to COVID-19, the first Young Student Initiative Summit is postponed to the 2020-21 academic year.

Ambassador Derek Shearer in conversation with Joseph Nye

Young-Sponsored Campus Events The Young Initiative is based on the idea that the field of Global Political Economy must connect to all academic disciplines. This section on campus events shows how we initiate events that create connections, engaging faculty and students from across campus in conversations on key issues, from climate change and economic/environmental justice to the representation of marginalized communities in the United States and in countries worldwide. These events were co-sponsored and included the participation of faculty and students from 15 departments and eight entities.

Faculty and Trustee Hector De La Torre ’89 in the Climate Change for Future Presidents Panel

U.N. Week 2020: Climate Change and Economic/Environmental Justice Climate Change and Economic/Environmental Justice was the theme of this year’s Kahane U.N. Week. We organized the week’s events to underscore that addressing climate change must be taken as an environmental and economic challenge. It is imperative to envision a just, equitable economic transition to clean energy. In line with the Young Initiative’s commitment to interdisciplinary approaches, we used the week to show how this concern intersects with work being done in disciplines across campus, from the arts, social sciences, and sciences. This was evidenced from our kickoff event of Adam Schoenberg’s Losing Earth concerto to panels and events that included the participation of professors from the Art and Art History, Biology, Diplomacy and World Affairs, Geology, Economics, Music, Physics, and Urban and Environmental Policy Departments. Specific events were co-sponsored by academic departments and by the Center for Research and Scholarship, the FEAST Garden, Food Studies Program, and KOXY Radio.

For more information, see https://www.oxy.edu/events/2020/02/kahane-un-week-2020-climate-changeeconomicenvironmental-justice

Young Conversations The Young Initiative annually hosts a remarkable range of experts in global political economy and related international relations fields. These events give our campus community a chance to directly engage with those at the cutting edge of research and activism, per the following list of 2019-20 guests.

Alison Brysk September 3, 2019 Reproductive Rights Regression Alison Brysk is the Mellichamp Professor of Global Governance at UC Santa Barbara. Her research draws from global theory as well as fieldwork on human rights in Latin America and Asia. Brysk’s two most recent books are The Future of Human Rights (2018) and The Struggle for Freedom from Fear: Contesting Violence Against Women at the Frontiers of Globalization (2018).

Steven Jensen September 9, 2019 An Alternate History of Human Rights: A Global South Project? Steven Jensen is a lead researcher at the Danish Institute for Human Rights. Jensen focuses on the agency of the global south and its role in advancing human rights around the world. Jensen’s The Making of International Human Rights: The 1960s, Decolonization, and the Reconstruction of Global Values won the 2017 Best Book on Human Rights for his paradigm-shifting research.

Huss Banai September 25, 2019 A Game of Rogues: Trump vs. Iran Huss Banai is a noted expert on Iran, a professor at Indiana University at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, and a research affiliate at the Center for International Studies at MIT.

Momin Rahman September 26, 2019 Queer Muslim Challenges to the Internationalization of LGBT Rights Momin Rahman is a professor of sociology at Trent University. His scholarship focuses on LGBTQ citizenship and its role in Muslim culture, politics, and identity. Rahman was invited as part of the LGBTQIA+ Speaker Series.

Miry Whitehill September 27, 2019 Welcome, Neighbor at Oxy: A Conversation in Support of Families Resettling in California as Refuge Miry Whitehill is the founder and executive director of Miry’s List. Whitehill started Miry’s List in Eagle Rock in July 2016 when a friend introduced her to a family of newly arrived Syrian refugees resettling in Los Angeles with kids the same age as her own.

Erin Lockwood October 3, 2019 The Politics of Global Economic Inequality Erin Lockwood is an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine. Her research areas include international political economy, global financial politics, risk and uncertainty, power, authority, and legitimacy in international politics, and global inequality.

Robert Edelman October 4, 2019 The Whole World Was Watching: Sport and the Cold War Robert Edelman is a professor in the History Department at the University of California, San Diego. He is an expert in Soviet and Cold War-era sports history. His writing focuses on spectator sports in the USSR, the history of the popular soccer club Spartak Moscow, and sport in the Cold War.Â

Yuriko RomerÂ October 17, 2019 Diamond Diplomacy: U.S.-Japan Relations Through Baseball Yuriko Romer is an award-winning film director based in San Francisco. Her current documentary project, Diamond Diplomacy, explores the relationship between the United States and Japan through a shared love of baseball. Romer also directed and produced Mrs. Judo: Be Strong, Be Gentle, Be Beautiful, the only biographical documentary about Keiko Fukuda (1913-2013), the first woman to attain the 10th-degree black belt in judo.

Alfred Madain October 21, 2019 A History of Musical Politics in the Arab World: From Umm Kalthoum to Contemporary Arab Artists Alfred Madain is the founding director of Bedouin X, the desert blues band, and an educator and ethnomusicologist in Los Angeles. He grew up in Jordan, listening to an eclectic selection of music from the Arab world, the United States, and Europe.

Andrew Zimbalist October 24, 2019 Circus Maximus: The Political Economy of Global Sporting Events Andrew Zimbalist is a professor in the Economics Department at Smith College. He has acted as a consultant in Latin America for the United Nations Development Program and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Toby Dalton November 20, 2019 Trump and Nukes Toby Dalton is a senior fellow of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He works on regional security challenges and the evolution of the global nuclear order, with a focus on South and East Asia.

Gabriele Magni February 12, 2020 Lesbian, Gay, and Transgender Candidates in Advanced Democracies Gabriele Magni is an assistant professor of political science at Loyola Marymount University. Magni’s research looks at how minority groups have long been underrepresented in politics. Magni is passionate about understanding the barriers to the election of LGBTQ people in U.S. government positions as a way to improve the representation of marginalized communities. Invited as part of the LGBTQIA+ Speaker Series.

Joseph Nye March 3, 2020 Morality in U.S. Foreign Policy Professor Joseph Nye was the former Dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Nye co-created the international relations concepts of neoliberalism and smart power and has consistently been named one of the most influential American political scientists in history. His last book, Do Morals Matter? Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump, draws from the United States’ political history and his experience on the Foreign Policy Board.

Young-Sponsored Workshops and Faculty Research Academic production is the heart of the Young Initiative, hence our commitment to supporting faculty workshops and research. Details of the fruits of this support follow.

Young-Sponsored Workshops Workshops allow our faculty to bring experts to the Occidental campus to engage with students and faculty colleagues on topics of mutual research interest.

CROSS-CUTTING GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS ON HUMAN RIGHTS: INTERDISCIPLINARITY, INTERSECTIONALITY, AND INDIVISIBILITY September 26-27, 2019 Co-sponsored by Occidental College, University of Southern California, Arizona State University, and Indiana University. The “Cross-Cutting Global Conversations on Human Rights: Interdisciplinarity, Intersectionality, and Indivisibility” workshop featured leading human rights scholars and practitioners from a remarkably broad range of disciplines, geographic positions, and points of view. This diversity brought new insights to controversial issues in human rights scholarship, and will pave the way for upcoming publications from workshop participants. Panel topics and participants are listed on the following page. 22

Panels Gender and Intersectionality Chaired by Pardis Mahdavi. Pascale Allotey, Kate Hunt, William Paul Simmons, and Lara Stemple (participants); Dolores Trevizo (discussant); Avery Everhart (student commentator).

Crisis of Cosmopolitanism Chaired by Huss Banai. Pablo Abitbol, Joe Hoover, Camilo Sanchez, and Heidi Haddad (participants); Madeline Baer (discussant).

Sexuality and Identity Chaired by Sofia Gruskin. Phillip Ayoub, Rajat Khosla, Vera Paiva, and Momin Rahman (participants); Laura Ferguson (discussant).

Local Ownership of Human Rights Chaired by Anthony Tirado Chase. Cochair: Erin Bromaghin (L.A. Mayor’s Office). Michael Goodhart, LaDawn Hoglund, Shareen Hertl, and Kristi Kenyon (participants); Thalia González (discussant); Gaea Morales (student commentator).

Faculty Research A review of faculty research enabled by Young Initiative support during the 2019-20 academic year.

Phillip Ayoub The Young Initiative supported Associate Professor Phillip Ayoub’s teaching, research, and professional activities in 2019-20 in a number of ways, including funding the research support of two student assistants to assist with several ongoing research projects on LGBT rights in Europe and the United States, as well as a pedagogical piece on research design. It also partially supported Ayoub’s participation and research talks at the University of Amsterdam and Humboldt University, as well as work editing a special issue on gender policy during the Angela Merkel era. Unfortunately, five other talks and conferences were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to research activities, the Young Initiative provided funds for guest speakers and course materials relevant to the teaching of Ayoub’s courses on international relations, LGBTQIA+ rights, global social movements, and comparative European politics.

Madeline Baer The John Parke Young Initiative on the Global Political Economy supported Associate Professor Madeline Baer’s research and teaching in a multitude of ways during the 2019-20 academic year. Young Initiative funds provided research materials to help her complete a chapter titled “The Human Right to Water” in Human Rights: Politics and Practice, a textbook published by Oxford University Press. Baer planned to use Young Initiative funds to present several papers at international conferences and workshops during the spring and summer of 2020. These papers are part of her ongoing research agenda on human rights-based approaches to development, the politics of water provision in urban centers, and changes in international law on economic and social human rights. Her paper, “Contesting Rights: Champions and Challengers of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights,” was accepted for presentation at the International Studies Association annual meeting. Another paper, “State Foreign Policy and Socioeconomic Rights,” was accepted to the Joint Human Rights Conference hosted by the University of London’s Human Rights Consortium. Baer was invited by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland to participate in an authors’ workshop for a special issue of the European Journal of International Law. While in Geneva, Baer planned to use Young Initiative funds to conduct field research for her book project on the champions and challengers of socioeconomic human rights. This book manuscript analyzes states’ foreign policy on socioeconomic rights including the rights to food, water, education, health, and housing. The Young Initiative also provided funds for teaching materials and a number of guest speakers for Baer’s courses on global political economy, water policy, and human rights in Latin America. 25

Lan Chu This past academic year, the Young Initiative supported Associate Professor Lan Chu’s continued research on the Catholic Church’s role in international relations. Funding from the Young Initiative allowed her to hire a research assistant, who helped her gather materials on the Church’s efforts to improve the conditions of migrants and refugees, specifically at the U.S.-Mexico border. She then presented a portion of this project at the 2020 Western Political Science Association’s annual conference, held online. Her focus this year on refugees and migration builds upon last year’s focus on the Catholic Church’s stance on climate change and environmental policy. Both issue areas fit into her broader research agenda, which is meant to identify the Catholic Church’s foreign policy and further clarify its political position within the international community.

Juve Cortés The Young Initiative supported Juve J. Cortés in various ways during his second year as an assistant professor. On the research end, Cortés undertook field research in the Patzcuaro region of Mexico for a project which looks at the history and contemporary role of the Purepecha people. The Young Initiative also helped continue several research projects— including several based in Los Angeles—which look at how a global political economy affects marginalized communities. With Young support, Cortés also attended a meeting of the American Political Science Association; the fund also helped with membership to various scholarly associations. Important for Cortés was to incorporate students in his research, which he continues to do in several ways. On the teaching end, Cortés invited several speakers to his classes and organized a college-wide film viewing event with director Michelle E. Aguilar.

Sophal Ear The Young Initiative’s faculty funding allowed Associate Professor Sophal Ear to update with Coronavirus (COVID-19) material his third book manuscript, Viral Sovereignty and the Political Economy of Pandemics: What Explains How Countries Handle Outbreaks? The book argues that improving disease surveillance will require advancing more basic healthcare concerns in the developing world and that rich countries cannot simply force, through technology, demands on resource-poor countries. Thanks to the Young Initiative, Ear has been able to travel the United States and the world to share his research at the State Department, the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy, and numerous other venues to help policymakers and change leaders. While the focus has typically been on China’s influence in countries like Cambodia, on which Ear is a global expert, topics have also included how to end orphanages worldwide and deinstitutionalize child care towards family-centered care. Finally, Ear has been able to increase the scope of his engagement with the National Association of Corporate Directors by becoming a member of NACD with the support of the Young Initiative, becoming an NACD Governance Fellow and an NACD Certified Director in 2020 by taking the inaugural examination in 2019. This has meant advocating for a double-bottom-line: not just profit maximization or shareholder value, but for all stakeholders, such as labor and the environment, and improving standards for all. In that same spirit, in August 2019, the Business Roundtable redefined the purpose of a corporation from shareholder primacy to promote “an economy that serves all Americans.”

Laura Hebert Hebertâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s teaching, research, and professional activities were once again substantially supported by the Young Initiative during the 2019-20 academic year. The Young Initiative provided funds for annual memberships to the American Political Science Association and International Studies Association, and the purchase of computer technology, software, and office supplies necessary for her teaching and research. It supported the purchase of books, films, and other materials related to her courses and the writing of her book manuscript, Gender and Human Rights in a Global, Mobile Era. Most importantly, it allowed for the hiring of two students to conduct research for the conclusion of the book project, specifically involving the documentation of funding allocations by the U.S. government and European Union members for anti-trafficking interventions.

Movindri Reddy Governor Newsom announced the shelter-in-place order for California on March 19—smack in the middle of Professor Movindri Reddy’s sabbatical. Having returned from fieldwork in southern Africa in January and preparing for two international trips for spring 2020, Reddy had to rework her research agenda quickly. At the International Studies Association annual convention in Hawaii in March, Reddy was to present a paper titled “Shadow States, Ungovernable Spaces, and Shatter Zones: Will States Persist in Southern Africa.” While the article was written, the conference was canceled. The World Indian Diaspora Conference 2020, scheduled in Trinidad at the end of May, was also canceled. The paper for this conference titled “India’s Political Influence in South Africa” focused on “state capture” by President Jacob Zuma and his cadre of supporters. Key players in these moves included the Gupta brothers who immigrated to the country after the democratic transition in the early 1990s. Needless to say, the pandemic derailed a potentially research-intensive sabbatical; however, Reddy continued to work on her book manuscript and is transforming the conference papers into publishable journal articles.

Young Grants for the Economics Department In the 2019-20 academic year, the Young Initiative expanded its supportive role in advancing high quality research on global political economy at Occidental by funding the research of faculty in the Economics Department for the first time. Faculty members Kirsten Wandschneider and Diana Ngo were the first recipients of Young Grants, allowing for more impactful research on the global political economy, and encouraging collaboration between the Economics and Diplomacy and World Affairs Departments.

Diana Ngo The Young Initiative supported Assistant Professor Diana Ngo’s ongoing research in development economics, focused on meaningfully monitoring and understanding global poverty. In joint work with Abhilasha Sahay at George Washington University, Ngo has been developing her project, “Chronic Multidimensional Poverty: A Multi-Country Study.” In it, they document the similarities and differences in the dynamics of monetary poverty and deprivations in health, living standards, and education in India, Peru, Ethiopia, and Vietnam. They also highlight the disparities between urban and rural areas and discuss how the narrative on poverty reduction and inequality differs by measure. With the Young Initiative’s support, much of this work was done by Oxy students Jordan Walker ’21 and Wafa Abedin ’21, culminating in separate research on the effects of road-building in Vietnam and the effects of violent protests in Ethiopia. The funds also supported Ngo’s participation in the Liberal Arts Colleges Development Economics Conference at Colby College in fall 2019. 31

Kirsten Wandschneider The John Parke Young Initiative on the Global Political Economy supported Professor Kirsten Wandschneider’s project titled “The SmootHawley Trade War” (in collaboration with Kris Mitchener of Santa Clara University and Kevin Hjortshøj O’Rourke of NYU Abu Dhabi). In light of the growing trade war between the United States and China, this project draws on extensive data collection of bilateral trade flows for the interwar period, and new research on the SmootHawley Tariff Act of 1930, to answer the following questions: Did Smoot-Hawley lead to a wave of retaliation? And if so, what impact did this retaliation have on U.S. exports? The authors found that several countries protested the Smoot-Hawley tariff while others went further and retaliated: U.S. exports to these retaliating countries fell by between 12 percent and 22 percent. This effect generated substantial welfare losses and presents a cautionary tale for contemporary U.S. trade policy. The Young Initiative enabled the hiring of a student research assistant for the 2019-20 academic year to support the data collection. Wandschneider also received travel funding to present the results of this research at the LACDev-Econ History Conference in Waterville, Maine, and the Mountain West Economic History Conference in Logan, Utah.

PEOPLE Young Initiative Leadership

Anthony Tirado Chase Chair, Young Initiative on the Global Political Economy Professor, Diplomacy and World Affairs

Chamnan Lim Assistant Director, Administration and Programs McKinnon Center for Global Affairs Young Initiative on the Global Political Economy

Gaea Morales Program Coordinator, Young Initiative on the Global Political Economy McKinnon Center for Global Affairs

PEOPLE Young Student Program Assistants Selasi Amoani ’20 Diplomacy and World Affairs Houston, Texas Henry Butenschoen ’20 Diplomacy and World Affairs Portland, Oregon Anne Lise Delgado ’20 Diplomacy and World Affairs Ashland, Oregon Caroline Diamond ’22 Diplomacy and World Affairs and Economics Portland, Oregon

Stephanie Oyolu ’22 Diplomacy and World Affairs and Economics Houston, Texas Kyler Parris ’22 Diplomacy and World Affairs Bothell, Washington Snigdha Suvarna ’20 Economics Troy, Michigan Hannah Trautwein ’21 Diplomacy and World Affairs and Economics Peterborough, New Hampshire

Alejo Maggini ’22 Diplomacy and World Affairs and Economics Minors in Education and Linguistics Mendoza, Argentina