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Ioannis
Stivachtis
Director, International Studies
Dr. Ioannis Stivachtis is
Associate Professor and Director of the International Studies Program. He
holds a Ph.D. in Politics & International Relations and an M.A. in
International Relations & Strategic Studies from Lancaster University
(UK); and a Postgraduate Certificate in International Law and a B.A. in
International & European Studies from Panteion University (Greece).
His research interests
include the expansion of international society, the expansion of regional
international societies, conditionality and international order,
international society and the civilizing process, EU enlargement, and EU
foreign, security and defense policy. He teaches in the areas of
international politics, global/international security, international
organization and global governance and has received teaching awards from
various academic institutions.
He is member of the
Academic Committee and Head of the Politics and International Affairs
Research Unit of ATINER (Athens Institute of Education and Research);
Senior Advisor of the Research Institute for European & American
Studies (RIEAS); Scientific Expert of the Research DG and Culture DG of
the European Commission; Vice-President of the Comparative and
Interdisciplinary Studies Section (CISS) of the International Studies
Association (ISA); member of the English School of International
Relations and Secretary of the English School (ES) section of the ISA;
and member of the Society for the Study of Difference (SSD). He also
serves as reviewer for many journals.
He is the author
of The ‘Standard of Civilization’
in the Contemporary International Society, forthcoming (Edwin Mellen
Press); Co-operative Security and
Non-Offensive Defense in the Zone of War (Frankfurt: Peter Lang,
2001); and The Enlargement of
International Society (London: Macmillan, 1998); co-author of Non-Offensive Defense in the Middle
East (New York: United Nations Publications 1998); editor of Global Issues: Perspectives and
Controversies (Athens: ATINER 2008), International Order in a Globalizing World (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2007), The State of
European Integration (Aldershot: Ashgate 2007), International Governance & International Security (Athens:
ATINER, 2005); and Current Issues
in European Integration (Athens: ATINER, 2004); and co-editor of The Economic Dimension of Turkey’s
Accession to the European Union, forthcoming, (Toronto: The
University of Toronto Press), EU-Turkish
Relations: Dilemmas, Opportunities and Constraints (Lanham: Lexington
Books, 2008), and European Union’s
Mediterranean Enlargement (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2002). He has
published several chapters in edited volumes and articles in various
journals.
His previous
academic and professional appointments include Professor, Academic Dean
and International Relations Program Head at IFM University (Switzerland);
Professor at Schiller International University (Switzerland); Visiting
Associate Professor at The International University-Vienna (Austria);
Visiting Professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy (Switzerland);
Research Associate and consultant with the Austrian Federal Ministries of
Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Culture & Education; Research Fellow at
the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR); and
Senior Researcher at ARIS Research & Consulting Office for Security
Studies (Austria). He has also taught in various diplomatic and military
academies.
Ilja A. Luciak
Professor
and Department Chair, Political Science
(J.D., University of Vienna, Austria, 1980; Ph.D., University of Iowa,
1987).
His
research interests include democratic theory and gender politics,
revolutionary movements, reproductive rights, and globalization. He
teaches in the areas of Latin American politics, development theory and
revolutionary change and has received teaching awards from the Department
of Political Science, the Political Science Honors Society and the
College of Arts and Sciences. For the past twenty-five years he has
conducted field research in Central America, Cuba and Colombia focusing
on gender equality and democratization. He has been a visiting professor
/fellow at the Universidad Centroamericana in Nicaragua, Stockholm
University, Sweden, Universität Innsbruck, Austria, and at The Society
for the Humanities, Cornell University. Professor Luciak has
written for Swedish, Austrian, British, Mexican, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran
and North American publications. He has worked as a consultant for the
United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the United Nations Women’s
Fund (UNIFEM), the Office of the Special Advisor to the Secretary General
on Gender Issues and the Advancement of Women (OSAGI) and the Swedish
International Development Authority (Sida). He has given numerous invited
lectures and organized several international conferences on Central
America. He has served as an invited election observer in El Salvador and
Nicaragua and has been an official delegate to several United Nations conferences.
Recent
publications include, “Party and State in Cuba: Gender Equality in
Political Decision-making.” Politics
& Gender, Volume 1, Issue 2 (2005) and “Joining Forces for Democratic Governance:
Women’s Alliance Building for Post-war Reconstruction in Central
America.” In Donna Pankhurst, ed. Gendered
Peace: Women's Search for Post-war Justice and Reconciliation. (New
York and London: Routledge, 2008). Professor
Luciak has completed a multi-year study on "Gender Equality and
Democratization in Central America and Cuba" for the European
Commission. Based on this study he published After the Revolution: Gender and Democracy in El Salvador,
Nicaragua and Guatemala (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), which
uses a gender lens to examine the transformation of the revolutionary
Left from armed guerrilla movements into political parties. The second part of
this research project was published by the University Press of Florida (2007,
Paperback 2009) and is entitled, Gender and Democracy in Cuba. He
is currently conducting field research for a book on The Politics of Axel Wenner-Gren, the founder of the
Electrolux company and major philanthropist.
Parakh Hoon,
Assistant Professor,
(Ph.D., University of Florida, 2005).
His scholarly work and research interests center on the political
economy of development and environment, governance and local democracy,
and how emerging international environmental and development norms
articulate with local livelihoods and practices. He teaches in the area
of African Politics, Political Economy, International Development, and
Global Environmental Politics.
For the last decade Professor Hoon has conducted field research
in Botswana, Zambia, and India and has been working on southern African
politics and its environment, including the politics of wildlife
conservation and agricultural development, and its effects on rural
communities. He has been a visiting assistant professor at the School of
International Service, American University in Washington DC, and the
Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst. He has also worked as a research analyst with local NGOs in
India and at the United Nations Development Program in New York. He has
been a non-resident fellow with the Institutions and Governance Program
at World Resources Institute in Washington, DC where he was involved in
two comparative research projects on local democracy and natural resource
management, and commodity chain analysis as a policy tool.
Professor Hoon has published on the politics of community conservation,
the relationship between governance and sustainable livelihoods, and
local institutional innovation. His publications include,
"Impersonal Markets and Personal Communities? Wildlife,
Conservation, and Development in Botswana," Journal of International
Wildlife Law and Policy, 7:143-160, 2004; "Governance and
Sustainable Livelihoods: Pinning down two troublesome concepts,"
with Goran Hyden, in Hans Bressers and Walter Rosenbaum, eds., Achieving
Sustainable Development: The Challenge of Governance across Social Scales
(Praeger, 2004); and most recently "Working is Celebrating: The
Syncretic Politics of Labor Transformation in Rural Zambia," in
Dennis Galvan and Rudra Sil, eds., Reconfiguring Institutions Across
Time and Space: Syncretic Responses to Challenges of Political and
Economic Transformation (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007).
Professor Hoon is currently working on a comparative project in southern
Africa on bottom-up decentralized community-based and recent
trans-boundary/ transfrontier conservation approaches.
Scott G. Nelson
Assistant
Professor, Political Science
(Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2002)
His research interests include international relations theory and
political theory, international law and organization, and international
political economy. He teaches in these areas at the undergraduate
level and also in the department's MA and OLMA programs.
Scott’s first book is entitled Sovereignty and the Limits of the Liberal Imagination
(Routledge, 2009). The book examines several of the classical
theoretical foundations of domestic and international organization,
concentrating on the contestable conceptions of community, order,
justice, freedom, responsibility and wealth developed by the major
political theorists of the modern epoch. The book is in part a study
of the major liberal and enlightenment theories of the modern tradition,
and it provides students of international relations with a basic
grounding in the classic political theories of modernity. The
critical thrust of the argument is that the accepted discourses of world
politics are constructed by way of particular interpretive negotiations
of what sovereign power is and what it must be made to accomplish in
domestic and world politics. As
theorists have sought to legitimize and rationalize state power – the
essence of sovereignty – a practice of concealing these legitimations and
rationalizations must also be deployed to accommodate the groundless
basis for securing any claim to legitimate political authority: the tradition of political liberalism
is one such practice. More than a tradition, political liberalism
is a manner of self-activating strategies of concealing sovereignty's
intrinsically paradoxical, broken origins. An article that
elaborates these themes, entitled "Sovereignty, Ethics, Community,"
was published in the journal
Philosophy and Social Criticism (November 2004). An essay
of Scott’s on political legitimacy and global order appeared in Yannis A.
Stivachtis (ed.) International
Order in a Globalizing World (Ashgate, 2007). Scott is the co-editor (with Nevzat
Soguk) of the forthcoming Ashgate
Research Companion to Modern Theory, Modern Power, World Politics: Critical Investigations (Ashgate,
forthcoming 2010). Scott is currently at work on a book
about community, legitimacy, and democracy in world politics entitled Any Given We.
Edward Weisband
Princeton
University, B.A., 1961, Stanford University, M.A., the School of Advanced
International Studies (SAIS) of the Johns Hopkins University, Ph.D., 1969
Professsor Weisband holds the Edward S. Diggs Endowed Chair Professorship
in the Department of Political Science of the College of Liberal Arts and
Human Sciences. He is also a member of the faculty of the Government and
International Affairs Program of the Virginia Tech School of public and
International Affairs and a Senior Fellow of the Virginia Tech Institute
for Governance and Accountability.
While at SAIS, he was a four-year recipient of the
congressionally funded National Defense Foreign Language Act (NDFL)
grant. This permitted him to develop advanced language proficiency in
both French and Turkish as well as to complete his dissertation field
work in Turkey. At this time, he conducted extensive interviews with the
second founding President of the Turkish Republic, Ismet Inonu, and with
a generation of Turkish foreign policy leaders who had influenced Turkish
foreign policy during the interwar and wartime period. This research led
in 1973 to publication of Turkish
Foreign Policy: Small State Diplomacy and Great Power Politics,
Princeton University Press. This book was subsequently translated into
Turkish and published in book and newspaper serialized form by MILLIYET
Press. It has attained a near classic status in Turkish historiography
and is considered to be a major study of modern Turkish political
history. In 1998, Professor
Weisband, at the behest of the Inonu Foundation, delivered the keynote
address at a conference held where the original meeting occurred on the
55th anniversary of the November 1943 Cairo meeting between
Inonu, Roosevelt and Churchill.
His recent chapter, “Freedom of Association Rights in Turkey,”
written with Sera Oner, a former Virginia Tech Political Science graduate
student, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2007 in
a volume entitled, Human Rights in
Turkey: Policy and Prospects, edited by Zehra Kabasakal Arat.
Professor Weisband has completed several studies focusing on
accountability and transparency in U.S. foreign policy. In 1969, he
co-edited a study of regionalism and free trade, The Politics and Economics of Cooperation: A Free Trade
Association Among Canada, Britain and the United States, New York
University Press. In 1971, he coauthored, Word Politics: Verbal Strategy Between the Superpowers,
Oxford University Press, that contrasted American and Russian interventions
in Latin American and Eastern Europe. In 1973, he wrote, A Paradigm of Lockean Liberalism: The
Ideology of American Foreign Policy, Sage Publications, a critical
examination of U.S. justification for military interventions in
Indochina.
His 1975 study, Resignation-In-Protest:
Loyalty to Team versus Loyalty to Conscience, that compared
resignation policies and practices at Cabinet and sub-Cabinet levels in
U.S. and British governments, was published in the aftermath of Watergate
and U.S. engagement in Indochina. Widely reviewed in the American and
British press, it was selected by The
New York Times Book Review as the “Editor’s Choice” and among the
“Most Noteworthy Books” published in 1975. During the same year, the Christopher Society bestowed its National
Literary Award on this study citing its contribution to ethical discourse
in American public life. Originally published in hardback by the Viking
Press, Penguin published it in soft cover for distribution in the U.K. as
well as the United States. In
1974, Professor Weisband co-edited a comparative study of secrecy and
freedom of information policies, Secrecy
and Foreign Policy, Oxford University Pres. In 1979, he also
co-authored, Foreign Policy By
Congress, Oxford University Press, a study of the 93rd
Congress and its attempt to transform U.S. foreign policy decision-making
in ways designed to make foreign policy more accountable to Congress.
Professor Weisband has edited two books oriented to pedagogy and
teaching, both published by Westview Press. The first, Teaching World Politics: Contending
Pedagogies for a New World Order, and the second, Poverty Amidst Plenty: World Political
Economy and Distributive Justice received a wide audience in Europe
as well as the United States, the former as a guide to national academic
evaluation in several European educational systems, the latter as a
widely adopted text with respect to equality and development. Major
portions of Poverty Amidst Plenty
are included in the customized text assigned in Harvard University’s core
curricular course on Ethics and International Relations.
Since coming to Virginia Tech in 1990, Professor Weisband has
focused his research on international monitoring regimes, global
accountabilities, the International Labor Organization (ILO), and core
international labor standards. In 1991, Professor Weisband was the first
American to have been invited to participate as a Scholar-in-Residence by the ILO International Institute of
Labor Studies in its International Labor Studies Program. In 1995, the
ILO commissioned him to examine Industrial and Sectoral Committees, its
largest multilateral program dealing with international labor issues on a
sectoral or industry-to-industry basis. The ILO subsequently published
his analysis that, in turn, generated a series of sectoral committee
reform proposals. These proposals were subsequently included in an ILO
working document submitted to the ILO Governing Body. During 1996-1997,
this document, that included several proposals initiated by the Weisband report,
was debated, amended and in some instances adopted by delegations
representing over 160 ILO member states.
In addition to his focus on ILO sectoral activities, Professor
Weisband has examined core international labor standards by applying quantitative
as well as qualitative methodologies in the evaluation of the ILO
monitoring or supervisory machinery. He authored a now often cited
empirical analysis of core labor standards and state behavior using his
own data set to assess state behaviors against world averages and
standard deviations, “Discursive Multilateralism: Global Benchmarks,
Shame and Learning in the ILO Labor Standards Monitoring Regime,” International Studies Quarterly,
Vol.44, No. 4, (2000); he co-authored, with a former Virginia Tech
undergraduate, a companion study, “Freedom of Association Violations: An
Empirical Analysis of the Annual Reports of the International
Confederation of Free Trade Unions,” Human
Rights Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 1, (2000). In 2004, he completed a
quantitatively grounded discourse analysis using performative speech act
theory to investigate over 2000 cases of complaints brought before the
ILO Committee on Freedom of Association, “Verdictive Discourses, Shame
and Judicialization in Pursuit of Freedom of Rights.”
Professor Weisband (with Alnoor Ebrahim) recently completed an
edited volume, Forging Global
Accountabilities: Participation, Pluralism, and Public Ethics,
Cambridge University Press 2007, that aims to bring analytical framing
and coherence to the diverse debates on accountability in three sectors
of society--civil society and nonprofit organizations, public and
intergovernmental agencies, and private corporations.
Currently Professor Weisband is completing a project on genocide,
crimes against humanity, and political evil. This study focuses on human psychology
and emotionality as well as culture and ideology as factors that help to
explain how and why intense and widespread suffering occurs at certain periods
in modern political history. His
chapter (with Courtney I. P. Thomas) “The Biocorporeality of Evil: A
Taxonomy” will be published in a forthcoming e-Book on Evil, Law, and the State under the
auspices of InterDisciplinary.Net.
His paper “Nationality, Catastrophic Annihilation, and Political
Evil” was presented at the 8th Biennial Conference for the
International Society of Genocide Scholars in June 2009.
Throughout his career, Professor Weisband has devoted primary
attention to teaching and pedagogy and is nationally recognized for contributions
to distinguished teaching, especially of introductory subjects. In 1983,
he was promoted to Distinguished
Teaching Professor, a rank above full professor, by the State
University of New York (SUNY), having received numerous citations for
teaching excellence including the Danforth Foundation Associateship for
Excellence in Teaching and the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Teaching
Excellence in 1979. His reputation as a teaching scholar was further
enhanced in 1987 when the Council for the Advancement and Support of
Education (CASE) in cooperation with the Carnegie Foundation, selected
him as the Gold Medal Finalist
in its National Professor of the Year competition. Professor Weisband
also was named by CASE as the New
York State Professor of the Year during the same year. In 1990,
Professor Weisband inaugurated the Edward
Singleton Diggs Endowed Chair at Virginia Tech. In 1992, he received the Philip and Sadie Sporn Award for
Outstanding Teaching of Introductory Subjects and has also been cited
twice by the Pi Sigma Alpha Political Science Honors Society as the
outstanding professor of the year. Upon coming to Virginia Tech,
Professor Weisband initiated the proposal to establish at Virginia Tech
the Diggs Teaching Roundtable and
Teaching Scholar Award, a program that has now emerged as a form of
major recognition of teaching excellence and as an important Virginia
Tech faculty forum to explore pedagogical approaches and instructional
methods. Professor Weisband has served as the academic director of the Virginia
Tech summer Washington Semester program seven times and has conducted the
Virginia Tech academic program at the Virginia Tech Center for European
Studies and Architecture in Riva San Vitale, Switzerland, during three
separate semesters. In 1996, Professor Weisband introduced, “Nations and Nationalities: Cultural
Constructions of Collective Identity,” the first undergraduate and
core curricular offering officially sponsored by the Virginia Tech School
of Public and International Affairs.
Professor Weisband has also recently contributed a chapter,
"Celebration of Teaching and of the Pedagogical Calling: The
Plenitude of Learning in Large Lectures," to an edited collection on
teaching sponsored by the Virginia Tech Academy for Teaching Excellence
that will be published by Pearson Publications in 2007.
Professor Weisband has served in various consultantships and
visiting scholarly capacities throughout his career. He has been a
project evaluator for the U.S. Agency for International Development in
connection with its Title IX program designed to encourage capacity
building in developing and newly industrializing countries with respect
to human rights and civic participation. As a result, he worked in Kenya,
Uganda, Turkey as well as Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Professor Weisband has also been
invited to act as a Scholar-in-Residence
in a program sponsored by the Rene Cassin International Institute of
Human Rights, Faculty of Law and Political Science of the University of
Strasbourg, France.
Professor Weisband has been interviewed on National Public Radio,
NBC’s Today Show, on CBS National Radio, “Cross Talk,” on the Canadian
Broadcasting System, and other similar programs. He regularly lectures
abroad and in 1997 was invited by Khulamani,
a South African organization seeking compensation for the victims of
Apartheid, to conduct lectures in townships throughout the Capetown area
regarding human rights and workers rights. He has been an editorial
reviewer for a wide range of publishers and professional organizations,
including Oxford University Press, St. Martin’s Press, Prentice-Hall,
Longman & Son, Westview Press, American Political Science
Association, International Studies
Quarterly, the Peace Science Society, etc. He is actively engaged in
numerous disciplinary and professional organizations and in 1997 was
inducted into the Phi Beta Delta Honorary Society for International
Scholars.
Laura Zanotti
Associate
Professor
(Ph.D., Florida International University 2004).
Her research includes critical and postmodernist inquiries on
international politics, international organization, security, peacekeeping
and democratization. Zanotti has published in Alternatives, International Peacekeeping, Security Dialogue,
the Journal of International
Relations and Development as well as in the European University Working Papers Series. Her book entitled Governing Disorder: United Nations Peacekeeping, International
Security, and Democratization in the Post-Cold War Era is forthcoming
with Penn State University Press.
Prior to joining VT, Dr. Zanotti worked for ten years at the
United Nations, where she served both in administration and as a
political advisor for Peacekeeping Operations. In 1999 she represented
the Department of Peacekeeping Operations in a “Needs Assessment Mission”
deployed in Haiti by the United Nations Secretary General to devise the shift
of the UN mandate from peacekeeping to peace building. In 2001-2003 she performed the function
of Deputy to the Head of the United Nations Liaison Office in Zagreb,
Croatia.
In 2005-2006 Dr. Zanotti was a Jean Monet Fellow at the European
University Institute in San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy. She also teaches as Visiting Professor
at the PhD and Master programs at the School of International Relations,
Trento University, Italy.
Previously her research was funded by the Latin America and
Caribbean Institute at Florida International University, and by the
Mellons’ Foundation. She has
presented numerous papers at international meetings, and has been
frequently invited to lecture abroad on peacekeeping, democratization and
the United Nations reform.
Kenly Fenio
Assistant
Visiting Professor
(Ph.D., University of Florida, 2009).
Dr.
Kenly Greer Fenio teaches courses
on African Politics, Comparative Politics, International Relations, and
Global Conflict in the Department of Political Science at VT. Coming to Blacksburg from the
University
of Florida under
the direction of Goran Hyden, her dissertation, Between Bedrooms and
Ballots: The Politics of HIV’s ‘Economy of Infection’ in Mozambique,
focused on the positive effects of HIV/AIDS on mobilization and democracy
within the public arena. Prior to
beginning her PhD work in 2002, she worked professionally in South Florida theatres and spent several years
traveling around the world. Since 2000, she has worked, lived and
conducted research in several African countries including Swaziland,
South Africa,
Ethiopia
and Mozambique.
Some of the organizations with which she has worked in Africa
are Rotary International, the World Health Organization, the South
African Red Cross, the International Orthodox Christian Charities, and
several local NGOs such as Muleide, Kindlimuka and Matram, all of which
focus on women and/or health and access to resources. Dr. Fenio’s
research interests in Africa include the collective mobilization of
communities; women in the public sphere; governance in the public sector;
security studies (both human and national); infectious disease and democratic
practices; and post-conflict state-society relations. Along with
assisting graduate students in the U.S. and Europe in setting up research
projects on the continent, she has served as consultant for a number of
Africa-related research projects, including the collection of baseline
community data for PEPFAR, and Duke University’s Democratic Linkages project
(in 80 countries). In Spring 2010
she will be in Mali
to present research on decentralized health systems in Mozambique,
and in Summer 2010 she will be in South Africa and Mozambique
to conduct research on the use of theatre by HIV associations to promote
human rights and gender equality.
Jennifer Hanratty
International
Studies Undergraduate Advisor and University Pre-Law Advisor
BA, International Studies, Virginia Tech, 2003
Jennifer Hanratty began her
career at Virginia Tech in 2006 in the Registrar's Office and later moved
to the College of Engineering Academic Affairs office in 2007. She joined
the International Studies Department in May 2008. Jennifer serves as the
Undergraduate Advisor for the International Studies program as well as
one of the University Pre-Law Advisors. Jennifer is here to answer any
questions you may have concerning the curriculum, graduation
requirements, advising issues, etc. If you need to contact Jennifer,
please feel free to email her at or call her at 540-231-5874.
Email: Jennifer Hanratty
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