Political Science Faculty and Staff
Edward Weisband
Edward S. Diggs Endowed Chair Professorship
Princeton University, B.A., 1961, Stanford University, M.A., the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of the Johns Hopkins University, Ph.D., 1969
Princeton University, B.A., 1961, Stanford University, M.A., the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of the Johns Hopkins University, Ph.D., 1969
Edward 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 an associated faculty affiliated with 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 Policy and Governance. In the course of his career he has authored, co-authored, edited, and co-edited a total of 11 books or monographs, published 19 authored or co-authored book chapters, authored or co-authored 17 peer reviewed journal articles, given 53 disciplinary conference paper presentations, organized, chaired, or served as discussant on 16 disciplinary conference panels, delivered 115 guest lectures and public addresses locally, nationally, and internationally, and lectured, consulted, or taught in 10 countries including: Britain, Canada, Egypt, France, Italy, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, and Turkey.
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 Inönü, 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 Inönü 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 Inönü, Roosevelt and Churchill.
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 Soviet doctrinal justifications for interventions in Latin American and Eastern Europe by contrasting the Brehznev and Johnson Doctrines. 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 coauthored 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 annually 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 (2000), Vol.44, No. 4, 643-666; 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, 167-186. 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,” published in Saladin Meckled-Garcia and Basak Cali, The Legalization of Human Rights: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Human Rights and Human Rights Law, London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
His chapter on Freedom of Association Rights in Turkey written with Sera Oner, a former Virginia Tech Political Science graduate student, was published in Zehra Kabasakal Arat, ed., Human Rights in Turkey: Policy and Prospects, University of Pennsylvania Press in 2007. Professor Weisband has also recently contributed a chapter, "Celebration of Teaching and of the Pedagogical Calling: The Plenitude of Learning in Large Lectures," to E. Scott Geller and Philip K. Lehman, eds., Teaching Excellence At a Research—Centered University, Boston, MA: Pearson Publishing, 2006, an edited collection on teaching sponsored by the Virginia Tech Academy for Teaching Excellence.
Professor Weisband (with Alnoor Ebrahim) completed an edited volume, Global Accountabilities: Participation, Pluralism, and Pubic Ethics, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 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. Professor Weisband’s contribution include two chapters, “Tripartite Multilateralism: Why Corporate Social Responsibility is Not Accountability” as well as “Prolegomena to a Postmodern Public Ethics: Images of Accountability in Global Frames.”
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-wide 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 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 during numerous sessions 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 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.
Email: Edward Weisband