Hans Peter Schmitz

Associate Professor, Political Science

Degree

Ph.D., European University Institute, Florence/Italy, 1999

Specialties

Non-state actors in world affairs, transnational relations, human rights, rights-based approaches to development, governance and accountability of NGOs

Personal Website

http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/hpschmitz/

Publications

"The New Transnationalism and Comparative Politics," Comparative Politics,(co-author Mitchell A. Orenstein), forthcoming 2006.

"Domestic and transnational perspectives on democratization", in International Studies Review 6 (4) December 2004.

"Being (Almost) Like a State: Challenges and Opportunites of Transnational Non-Governmental Activism", in: Margaret G. Hermann and Bengt Sundelius, eds., Comparative Foreign Policy Analysis. Theories and Methods, Prentice Hall 2003.

"International Relations", in: Adam and Jessica Kuper, eds., Social Science Encylopedia, 3rd edition, Routledge 2003.

 

 

Courses

PSC 124: International Relations
PSC 300: International Human Rights
PSC 350: Transnational Politics
PSC 400:Multicultural Europe in World Affairs
PSC 757: Non-State Actors in World Affairs   

Research Interests

Non-state actors in world affairs, transnational relations, comparative democratization (Eastern Africa as regional focus) and human rights.

Research Projects

Non-state actors in world affairs: The research explores the role of non-state activism in global politics. While non-state actors play an increasingly visible and important role in world affairs, their strategies and sources of influence are still poorly understood. Scholars have identified the internal resources of NGOs and movements, their external environment, and variation in the targets of activism as crucial to explaining success or failure. Beyond the question of specifying more clearly when and why non-state actors matter, the research program also asks normative questions about the desirability of an increasing role of non-state actors. Questions asked here relate to the potentially detrimental effects of such activism on state capacities, the failure of many transnational activists to understand local conditions, or the resource gap between Northern and Southern NGOs. The research program is carried out in close cooperation with the Moynihan Institute for Global Affairs, the Workshop on Contentious Politics at Cornell University (Sidney Tarrow), and SUNY-Binghamton (Benita Roth). Once a year, we organize a graduate workshop bringing together students and faculty from the three campuses.

Comparative democratization: The research seeks to identify the respective role and weight of domestic and international factors in determining the pace and direction of domestic political change. Neither international factors, nor domestic conditions alone are sufficient to explain successes and failures of democratic regime change. My previous research has shown that outside interventions for human rights and democracy have varying effects depending on the opportunities exploited by domestic allies and opponents. Additional research is necessary to identify more promising and subtle strategies of outside intervention. The research bridges the still prevalent gap between international relations scholarship and comparative politics. In particular, it brings together recent research on transnational activism and the more agency-centered field of democratization studies.