The Department of Government is proud to announce that two of our Ph.D. candidates in political theory, Abbie LeBlanc and Jan-Paul Sandmann, have been selected as 2025–26 Edmond J. Safra Graduate Fellows at Harvard’s Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics. Abbie LeBlanc, a fourth-year graduate student, focuses on the history of political thought, particularly…
Ph.D. Candidate Sophia Anastazievsky has published an article in Ethics & International Affairs, titled “What We Owe to Ukrainians: A Moral Perspective on Nuclear Coercion and Military Intervention”. The piece discusses the moral obligations to intervene militarily in Ukraine to stop Russian human rights abuses and ensure that Ukraine achieves a military victory. Sophia argues that “Ukraine’s…
María Ballesteros, Ph.D. candidate and a Minerva/USIP peace scholar fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, and Andrew O’Donohue, Ph.D. candidate and the Carl J. Friedrich fellow, have published a new article in Foreign Policy. On Sunday, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador signed into law a contentious slate of constitutional amendments aimed at overhauling the country’s…
Rochelle Sun has contributed to an article in The Lancet on how the provision of healthcare in Haiti has been integrally challenged by tumultuous socio-political conflict over the past five years. Background There is limited data on the effectiveness of differentiated service delivery (DSD) for HIV care during sociopolitical turmoil. We assessed outcomes with a…
Brian Highsmith Graduate Student, American Politics This forthcoming law journal article explores how the development of American antitrust law was shaped by popular concerns about the consequences of unregulated inter-jurisdictional competition for mobile corporate capital—focusing on (1) the lavish local subsidies demanded by private railroad companies during the late 19th century, and (2) tax competition…
George Yean Graduate Student, Comparative Politics & International Relations A working paper: What is the role of globalization for the rise of autocracies worldwide? We show that autocracies are better at exploiting the integrated global economic system. Compared to the pre-1990 period, on average, autocracies performed substantially better than democracies on all major economic indicators…
David Beavers Graduate Student, American Politics With Jennifer L. Hochschild Overview: Research generally finds that exposure to corrective information attenuates misperceptions, and that as the cost of acquiring information diminishes and the stakes for possessing accurate information increase, factual accuracy increases. In an ongoing project, Jennifer Hochschild and I examine a puzzling counterexample. Despite ample…
George Yean Graduate Student, International Relations Overview: Post-Cold War global economic order is in trouble. As a result of rising protectionism, mercantilism, security concerns, tensions between geopolitical rivals, and the current account and currency crisis, the order has been fundamentally undermined. There are losers and winners in the international order, as there are in the…
Noah Dasanaike, Graduate Student, Comparative Politics Overview: In my research article, I deconstruct the concept of peripherality into several dimensions and estimates the effect of these dimensions on support for the radical right. More specifically, I propose physical, social, and economic dimensions of peripherality, drawing heavily from Bourdieu’s types of capital, and outline measures through…
