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International Studies Faculty

 

 

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