Workshops
Theoretical Frontiers in Modeling Identity and Conflict, November 8-9, 2008, Kahili Suite, Kalia Executive Conference Center,
Hilton Hawaiian Village.
The past two decades have seen enormous expansion in the social science modeling of identity and conflict, and more specifically ethnic violence and warfare. This work has encompassed general theories, historical and statistical studies, as well as experimental work both in the lab and the field. In investigating the causes of conflict, theorists have inevitably also looked at the effect of identity, particularly ethnic identity, on cooperation. Despite (or because) of this flowering of investigation, we remain very far from a theoretical consensus on the basic causes of conflict and cooperation, as well as the influence of identity on these outcomes. It is time to take stock and see where we are - we need to identify the major schools of theory (beyond simple linear causation) on the causes of conflict and cooperation, as well as on how identity should be incorporated into such theories. We need to look at how empirical research can be incorporated back into theory in a systematic way that leads to cumulative theory development. This workshop seeks to begin the process of drawing a detailed map of the current landscape in modeling identity and conflict, to look at areas of agreement and disagreement, and to seek out potential for integration.
For the purpose of guiding and not constraining invitees, the workshop is divided into five major subtopics:
- Extensions and Alternatives to Rational Choice Models of Conflict and Cooperation
- Empirical Investigation of Culture and Identity
- Culture and Identity Formation and Change
- Integrating Structural, Institutional, Rational, and Cultural Causes of Conflict and Cooperation
- Theoretical Implications of Case Studies
Download the CCPV Workshop Schedule for November 8, 2008.
View Event Photographs from November 8, 2008.The conference is co-organized by Sun-Ki Chai and Michael Hechter. Together with some of the most prominent scholars in this field of study, the conference promises to be a truly exciting event. Confirmed partipants include:
| Name | Presents | Organization | Department or School |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kanchan Chandra | Does the Politicization of Ethnic Identities Threaten Democratic Stability? | New York University | Department of Politics |
| Yan Chen | Social Identity and Diversity | University of Michigan | School of Information |
| Rachel Croson | Trust and Reciprocity in the US and Internationally | University of Texas, Dallas | School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences |
| Catherine Eckel | The Online Trust Game: A Protocol for Measuring Inter-Ethnic Cooperation and Conflict | University of Texas, Dallas | Department of Economics and Political Economy |
| James Fearon | Fighting Rather than Bargaining | Stanford University | Department of Political Science |
| Herbert Gintis | Bayesian Rationality and Social Norms | Santa Fe Institute | Department of Economics |
| Yong-Hak Kim | The Diffusion of Beliefs and Network Dynamics | Yonsei University | Department of Sociology |
| Seok-Choon Lew | Confucian Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism in Korea: the Significance of Filial Piety | Yonsei University | Department of Sociology |
| James Montgomery | Intergenerational Cultural Transmission | University of Wisconsin | Department of Sociology |
| Dina Okamoto | Theorizing Panethnicity | University of California, Davis | Department of Sociology |
| Roger D. Petersen | Ethnic Stigma, Status Reversal, and the Residue of Violence: Integrating the Role of Emotions into the Study of Conflict | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | Department of Political Science |
| Daniel Posner | Why are Norms of Reciprocity Stronger among Co-ethnics? | University of California, Los Angeles | Department of Political Science |
| Rick K. Wilson | Ethnic Conflict in the Field: Using Economic Games to Measure Preferences | Rice University | Department of Political Science |
| Steven Wilkinson | Riots, Identity and Political Preferences in India | University of Chicago | Department of Political Science |
| Andreas Wimmer | Varieties of Nationalism: A Game-theoretic Exchange Model of Social Boundary Making | University of California, Los Angeles | Department of Sociology |
| Jason Wittenberg | Bridging the Micro-Macro Divide in the Study of Pogroms | University of California, Berkeley | Department of Political Science |
| Toshio Yamagishi | Male-specific Coalitional Psychology? | Hokkaido University | Department of Behavioral Science |
| Yoosik Youm | Network Modeling of Identity and Cultural Beliefs | Yonsei University | Department of Sociology |
Biographies
Sun-Ki Chai is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Hawai‘i. He is principal investigator and project director for the Coherence-Based Modeling of Cultural Change and Political Violence (CCPV) project.
He has a BS in Mathematical Sciences, an MS in Computer Science, and a PhD in Political Science, all from Stanford University. His main theoretical interests are the study of formal, computational models of culture, as well as their integration with choice-theoretic models of action and network models of structure. His main substantive interests are in international development, with more specific studies on the social construction of ethnic identity and its role in collective action and conflict, as well on the role of cultural institutions in the economic development of East Asian industrializing economies.
Dr. Chai is the author of the book Choosing an Identity: A General Model of Preference and Belief Formation (University of Michigan Press, 2001), characterized as "an incredibly ambitious book" and "an exciting and sophisticated view of decisions" by the American Journal of Sociology, and the co-editor of the book Culture and Social Theory (Transaction Publishers, 1998). He has published articles in journals in the disciplines of sociology, political science, and economics. He has received several extramural grants totalling about $2 million in the area of cultural and behavioral modeling. His website may be found at http://www2.hawaii.edu/~sunki/.
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Kanchan Chandra is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at NYU. Her current research includes a book titled Ethnic Diversity and Democracy, which proposes and tests a theory of the relationship between ethnic diversity and democracy and uses it to generate institutional prescriptions for multi-ethnic democracies. The argument is based on constructivist assumptions about the mutually constitutive nature of ethnic identity and democracy. Her other current work includes (in collaboration) Ethnicity, Politics and Economics, and Measuring Ethnicity, book manuscripts which incorporate constructivist assumptions about ethnic identity more broadly into theories of political and economic outcomes including war, democracy, party politics, economic growth and riots, and into strategies for data collection, measurement and the design of empirical models. This research has been supported most recently by the National Science Foundation, a Carnegie Foundation Fellowship, and the Russell Sage Foundation.
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Yan Chen received her PhD from Caltech in 1995. She is Professor of Information at the University of Michigan. She is the director of the interdisciplinary doctoral program, STIET. Her research ranges from mechanism design, voting theory to experimental studies of learning in games, public goods, and the effects of social identity on equilibrium selection and contract design.
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Rachel Croson earned her Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 1994. She does research in bargaining and negotiation, experimental economics and judgment and decision making. Her work has been published in Management (Management Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes), Marketing (Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research) Sociology (American Journal of Sociology), Political Science (Journal of Theoretical Politics), and Psychology (Judgment and Decision Making) as well as in leading journals in economics. She has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and numerous other agencies. She serves as Director of The Negotiations Center, an interdisciplinary research center which promotes research on the boundaries of economics, psychology, and business. Before joining UT Dallas in 2007, Professor Croson spent thirteen years at The Wharton School of The University of Pennsylvania.
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Catherine C. Eckel (Ph.D. in Economics, University of Virginia, 1983) is Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Behavioral and Experimental Economic Science (CBEES) at the University of Texas at Dallas. She has research interests that bridge economics, psychology and sociology. Using experimental methods, she has investigated differences in the behavior of women and men, gender- and race-based discrimination, charitable giving, and attitudes toward risk, among other topics. She is past president of the Southern Economic Association. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and various private foundations and she has published more than 50 journal articles. She also co-directs a teaching technology project promoting interactive learning in large classes using wireless handheld computers, which has earned her two university-level teaching awards. She co-edits the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. Before joining UTDallas, she was Professor of Economics at Virginia Tech, where she directed the Lab for the Study of Human Thought and Action (LSHTA). She also served as a program officer for the Economics Program at the National Science Foundation (1996-8)
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James D. Fearon is Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. His research has focused on democracy and international disputes, explanations for interstate wars, and the causes of civil and especially ethnic violence. Recent publications include “Iraq’s Civil War” (Foreign Affairs, March/April 2007), “Neotrusteeship and the Problem of Weak States” (International Security, Spring 2004), and “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” (APSR, February 2003).
Fearon won the 1999 Karl Deutsch Award, which is “presented annually to a scholar under the age of forty, or within ten years of the acquisition of his or her Doctoral Degree, who is judged to have made, through a body publications, the most significant contribution to the study of International Relations and Peace Research.” Fearon was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences in 2002.
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Herbert Gintis (Ph.D. in Economics, Harvard University, 1969) is External Professor, Santa Fe Institute (Santa Fe, NM, USA), and Professor of Economics, Central European University (Budapest, Hungary). He heads a multidisciplinary research project, funded by the European Science Foundation (ESF). The project is part of the European Collaborative Research Scheme’s (EUROCORES), research area The Evolution of Cooperation and Trading (TECT), that studies human strategic interaction and social organization from a transdisciplinary perspective. His research group includes economists, computer scientists, biologists, cognitive psychologists, behavioral ecologists, linguists, geneticists, and behavioral game theorists. His web site, http://people.umass.edu/gintis, contains pertinent information.
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Michael Hechter is Director of the School of Global Studies and Foundation Professor of Global Studies, Political Science, History and Social Dynamics and Complexity at Arizona State University. He has previously been on the faculties of the Universities of Washington, Arizona and Oxford. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Hechter is the author of Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1966 (1975; new edition, 1999), Principles of Group Solidarity (1987), and Containing Nationalism (2000). He is the editor of The Microfoundations of Macrosociology (1983), and co-editor of Social Institutions: Their Emergence, Maintenance and Effects (1990), The Origin of Values (1993), Social Norms (2001, 2005), and Theories of Social Order (2003). His current research focuses on nationalism, the politics of culture, the problem of social order, and the measurement of individual values.
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Yong-Hak Kim is Professor of Sociology at Yonsei University. His specialty areas are social organization and social science methodology. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1986. He has been the Dean of the University College and Chair of the Sociology Deptartment at Yonsei University.. He has been on the editorial committees of a number of journals including Rationality and Society and Korean Social Science Journal. Dr. Kim's website may be found at http://web.yonsei.ac.kr/yhakim/index.htm.
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Seok-Choon Lew is Professor of Sociology at Yonsei University. He received his PhD from the University of Illinois in 1986, and has served as Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Yonsei University, and Chair of the Graduate Area Studies program, as well as Chair of the Sociology Department. His main interests are in Confucianism and Korean Development, and Social Capital. Besides his academic research, he has written many editorial articles for newspapers and has been Secretary General of the Asia Research Fund. Dr. Lew's website is http://sclew.yonsei.ac.kr/e_index.html.
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James Montgomery is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Originally trained as an economist, he holds a PhD from MIT. He has subsequently taught at Northwestern (economics), the London School of Economics (management), and Wisconsin (joint between sociology and economics). He is a formal theorist whose research has addressed a wide variety of topics including social networks, labor markets, urban poverty, religion, and the dynamics of the self-concept.
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Dina Okamoto is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. She received her PhD from the University of Arizona in 2001 and in 2004-05, she was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York. This past year, she received two major grants- one from the William T. Grant Foundation to study the adaptation of immigrant and second-generation youth, and another from the Russell Sage Foundation to study immigrant collective action in new destinations across the U.S. Dina has published her work in refereed journals such as American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, and Social Science Research. Her current research on Asian American panethnicity develops a new theory of group formation and contributes to the literature on immigration, race and ethnicity, and social movements. Her work provides an understanding of how group boundaries and identities shift and change, which has implications for group cooperation and conflict.
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Roger D. Petersen is an Associate Professor of Political Science. Professor Petersen studies comparative politics with a special focus on conflict and violence. He has written two books: Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons from Eastern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Understanding Ethnic Violence: Fear, Hatred, Resentment in Twentieth Century Eastern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2002). He also has an interest in comparative methods and has co-edited, with John Bowen, Critical Comparisons in Politics and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1999). He is currently researching war and violence in the Balkans, especially in Kosovo.
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Daniel Posner is Associate Professor of Political Science at UCLA, where he writes and teaches about ethnic politics and the political economy of development in Africa. He is the author of Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa (Cambridge 2005) as well as articles in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and other journals. He is the co-founder of the Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE).
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Rick K. Wilson is the Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Political Science at Rice University. He is interested in problems of cooperation in human societies. Much of his recent work focuses on in-group and out-group competition, the role of emotion on social decisions and how stereotypes are used in negotiation and bargaining. The bulk of his work uses techniques derived from experimental economics.
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Steven Wilkinson (Ph.D, MIT) is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He has research interests in ethnicity, ethnic violence, and the institutional legacies of colonialism. His book, Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India (Cambridge University Press, 2004) explores the ways in which electoral competition drives and constrains ethnic violence in India. The book was co-winner of the American Political Science Association's 2005 Woodrow Wilson prize for the best book in government, politics or international relations published in the previous year. He has also co-edited a book Patrons, Clients, and Policies (CUP, 2007) with Herbert Kitschelt, his former colleague at Duke University, on patterns of patron-client party competition throughout the world. His current book project is on Colonization, Democracy and Conflict. It examines, among other issues, how colonial patterns of political decentralization and ethnic favoritism in the military and administration have influenced post-independence patterns of democratic consolidation and ethnic conflict.
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Andreas Wimmer's research aims to understand the dynamics of nation-state formation, ethnic boundary making and political conflict from a comparative perspective. His writings show how nation-building politicizes ethnic difference, and under which conditions various forms of exclusion and conflict along ethnic, national or racial lines result. He has pursued this theme across several disciplinary fields, focusing on examples from both the developing and the developed world, and using various methodological and analytical strategies
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Jason Wittenberg teaches comparative and East European politics at the University of California, Berkeley. A former Academy Scholar, he is the author of Crucibles of Political Loyalty: Church Institutions and Electoral Continuity in Hungary (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and author and co-author of numerous articles on East European politics and statistical methodology. His current, collaborative research project focuses on why pogroms occur. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Toshio Yamagishi is Professor of Social Psychology in the Graduate School of Letters, and Director of the Center for Experimental Research in Social Sciences, at Hokkaido University, Japan. He received his Ph.D in sociology from the University of Washington in 1980. He has published in both sociology and psychology on trust, cooperation, reciprocity, groups, and culture. He is currently trying to establish an institutional analysis to culture—an approach to analyze a culture as a self-sustaining system of belief-based behavior.
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Yooshik Youm is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Yonsei University. He is also an Affiliated Professor at University of Illinois at Chicago, where he taught from 2000-2005. His methodological areas are log-linear modeling, network methods, and mathematical modeling, while his substantive areas are health, organizations, gender, and family. Dr. Youm's website may be found at http://web.yonsei.ac.kr/yoosik/intro.htm.
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