Research
Glocalizing the Climate: Structural Barriers to integrating Ecological Research from the Global South into Mainstream Climate Science and Policy
Dissertation
My dissertation investigates the politics of knowledge production in climate science. Misunderstanding the nature of climate change can lead to us implementing policies that exacerbate global warming. For example, it is often presumed that planting trees can cool down our global temperature. Yet, this is not always the case. As ecologists point out, in some geographical contexts, trees emit gases that later form aerosols that indeed further cause global warming. In other words, planting an enormous number of inappropriate species of trees can even hurt rather than help the earth. Despite crucial insights like these, ecologists and other scientists from the Global South struggle to have their research taken seriously in climate science. Why, then, given the interdisciplinary and global nature of climate change and the espoused scientific commitment to openness, are ecologists and other scientists from the Global South significantly underrepresented in mainstream climate science?
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My dissertation addresses this puzzle. I argue that there are structural impediments to incorporating certain kinds of knowledge – such as ecologists from the Global South – through “credibility capital.” I find a prevalent source of credibility capital in climate science is the claim to universal knowledge (the dominant type of knowledge in physics) as opposed to particular knowledge (the dominant type of knowledge in ecology). Climate science has been dominated by physicists in the Global North, who aspire to study the earth as a universal system from a bird’s eye view. By contrast, ecologists in the Global South have traditionally focused on local ecosystems, each of which has its own particularities and cannot easily be generalized. As such, mainstream climate scientists often struggle to incorporate findings from ecologists into their earth-systems models.
The Curse of Centrality
work in progress with Eric Grynaviski
In the last two decades, IR scholars have increasingly turned to network-based theories to explain important outcomes in international politics. The most consistent finding of this scholarship is that centrality to networks produces advantages to agents, usually in the form of power or influence. This centrality finding spans issue areas and has been used to explain imperial, organizational, security, and trade networks. This paper questions this conventional wisdom. Building on balance and social ledger theorists, this paper argues that IR scholars have a positive tie bias. By this, we mean that IR scholars neglect to study negative ties that link agents together in social networks. Negative ties, defined as negative relationships or enduring, recurring sets of negative judgments, feelings, and behavioral intentions toward another, are common in international politics. By incorporating negative ties into IR scholarship on social networks, we show that centrality can be as much of a curse as a blessing. We explore this argument by examining dyadic level and system level effects of negative ties in the international system.
The Anti-Escalation Logic of Strategic Ambiguity
work in progress with Amoz JY Hor
This paper theorizes a novel theorization of strategic ambiguity. We argue that two parties can prevent bargaining crises by keeping their information about the other’s resolve private. We illustrate this argument by considering the possibility that the US and China may both be aware that neither party has commitments to wage war over Taiwan. However, when either party makes public declarations about their commitment to Taiwan, the other party is forced to reciprocate or otherwise risk domestic costs at home. In such instances, the policy of “strategic ambiguity” – not only being ambiguous about their own commitments to Taiwan but also being quiet about their private knowledge of the other side’s commitment to Taiwan – can allow the other party not need to make public declarations of their commitment to Taiwan, thus avoiding cycles of escalation. Comparing the Taiwan Straits Crisis with the Cuban Missile Crisis, we show that strategic ambiguity can be a preferable strategy when the alternative – mutual certainty about the other’s resolve – can lead to bargaining crises.
Local Visions of Expert Authority: Why the IMF was Received as Experts in Thailand, but Shunned in Malaysia
work in progress
Why do some countries adopt advice or knowledge from some experts, but not from the others? Constructivist research argues that experts in international organizations can exert their power over states due to their technical knowledge and legitimacy. However, not all experts are always accepted as “legitimate experts” by all countries as people who have an authoritative claim on expertise. While the majority of the literature tends to treat expertise as a resource of experts, this paper conceptualizes expertise relationally. Borrowing from Jim Scott and Social Epistemology, I conceptualize two types of expert knowledge as constituted by different relationships with other knowledges: a universalist episteme (or techne) where one has a faith in the ability of technical knowledge to apply regardless of context; on the other, one might have a localist episteme (or metis) where one privileges the practical knowledge that is developed to solve problems of a given context. I argue that the IMF's expertise was recieved in Thailand because Thailand understood the economy in the realm of techne, whereas the IMF's expertise was rejected in Malaysia because Malaysia understood the economy in the real of metis.