Research & Projects

Abstract: Experts increasingly agree that the impacts of climate change are likely to create new violent conflict risks and exacerbate existing ones. However, the extent of this link and the specific causal pathways are much less clear, and the role of gender in this process is under-examined. This paper theorizes that gendered norms, especially the expectations of how men perform their masculinities, are an intervening variable that might explain some of this relationship. In doing so, it engages with the emerging debate around the extent to which climate change influences the evolution of violent conflict, theorizing with an illustrative observation of the events of the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Syria. I find that there are plausible explanations for climate–conflict links involving gendered expectations of men’s behaviour serving as an intervening variable between climate change and violent conflict and discuss the implications of this for moving away from securitized approaches, future study and peacebuilding work.

Francis, B. (2024). Be a man: A theory of climate change, masculinities and violence. Environment and Security, 2(1), 121-144. https://doi-org.proxy.library.nd.edu/10.1177/275387962412305844

This piece examines how gender and caste quotas implemented at the hyper-local level of electoral politics have or have not created impact in the years since the promulgation of Nepal's 2015 constitution.  We examine how local opinion is formed and how women relate to both the quotas and their elected representatives in the urban settings of the Kathmandu Valley.  With Nepal's nascent democracy emerging from a brutal civil war this study allows us to better understand the causal mechanisms through which representation occurs, especially in new democracies.  We employ a mixed methods approach that combines interview data collected with both citizens and local elites and a GIS-based analysis to understanding spatial components of these effects.

This research project was generously supported by a research grant from The Liu Institute at the University of Notre Dame

Abstract: A substantial body of work finds that politicians in the United States are polarized on climate

policy. In this paper, we examine the conditions under which U.S. politicians might break with

their party’s position about the climate and discuss climate policy in a way that is more similar

to the other party. To do this, we employ a word embeddings approach for measuring the

context surrounding discussions of climate. We train our embeddings on an original corpus of

nearly 5,000 campaign platforms collected from the web pages of candidates running in the

2018, 2020, and 2022 U.S. House elections. We demonstrate that Republican candidates adopt

rhetorical strategies more similar to Democrats when their district is more vulnerable to natural

disasters and constituency opinion favors government action on climate change. Democrats do

not stray from party messages about climate change—even if their district relies heavily on the

production or utilization of fossil fuels.

Abstract: This paper traces the rise and fall of a surprising and ill-fated collaboration between George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and Bertrand Russell on a Manifesto for a new international “League” of writers and NGOs that would band together to protect and promote the “Rights of Man” and “Democracy” in the wake of the end of the Nazi regime after World War II, in order to combat the threat of a new Soviet, totalitarian, nuclear-armed, imperial superpower to replace it. We explain why their internationalist Manifesto, and a related national-level Petition to the British government on peace, intellectual freedom, and cultural exchange, failed in their intended forms in late April 1946, around the time that the earliest committee for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—led by Eleanor Roosevelt—took off. The driving reason for the failure of Orwell, Koestler, and Russell’s Manifesto and the related Petition was that these leading men of the postwar British Left did not treat women as equals in theory or practice in their attempts at crafting utopias of human rights, democracy, and peace. Through archival research, we have uncovered how a culture of “indecent assault” (now called sexual assault) and disregard of women’s rights tainted the Manifesto’s drafting and dissemination, and then halted the national-level Petition to the British government on the pressing foreign policy issues of nuclear disarmament, freedom of information, and cultural exchange with communist societies. Ironically, however, women intellectuals played crucial roles in keeping the Manifesto’s influence alive in the postwar era. A series of largely forgotten Socialist and liberal women writers, editors, and political leaders—including Mamaine Paget Koestler, Patricia “Peter” Russell, Katharine Stewart-Murray, Duchess of Atholl, and Ruth Fischer—enabled the most hopeful and egalitarian of Orwell, Koestler, and Russell’s overlapping visions of peace, human rights, democracy, and cultural exchange to shape other significant human rights and anti-war Manifestos of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Our paper concludes with two appendices. Appendix A documents and annotates, for the first time in scholarship, complete transcripts of the extant manuscript versions of the Manifesto and the Petition, including the handwritten additions and corrections on the typed pages and fragments. Appendix B provides, for the first time in scholarship, a systematic analysis of the handwriting on the extant versions of the Manifesto and the Petition, distinguishing some of Orwell and Koestler’s specific contributions to the drafting and early revisions of the Manifesto, and revealing Patricia “Peter” Russell’s distinctive, substantial, yet understudied contributions to the Petition. Our analyses of the original documents and the handwriting on them confirm the pivotal role of women in the development, dissemination, and afterlives of the core ideas of the 1946 Orwell-Koestler-Russell Manifesto and related Petition, and shine more light on the complex and conflicted gender and sexual dynamics and attitudes toward liberalism, Socialism, and feminism on the British Left during the immediate postwar era. 

Abstract:  In the pursuit of environmental justice and local autonomy it is important to understand how communities and social movements are able to achieve success in pursuing their aims. The Island of Vieques off the Eastern coast of Puerto Rico has had cause to consider these paths to success or failure over recent years given the prevailing environmental impact and ongoing cleanup mission associated with the United States Navy’s decades long occupation of the island. This occupation came to an end in 2003, following a successful campaign of resistance by Vieques residents. Contemporary efforts to improve this cleanup process, ensure environmental protections, and demand accountability from the US military continue. Given the success of the earlier campaign and the slow movement of the current one, this paper explores competing explanations for this divergence of outcomes in an identical geographic location and a relatively small temporal window. This article attempts to identify and articulate the potential explanations and, using a formal Bayesian process tracing approach, assesses a range of evidence gathered on a mixed methods basis, including novel survey data and relevant remote sensor (satellite) data.