People

TOSCA BRUNO-VAN VIJFEIJKEN
Tosca Bruno-van Vijfeijken is Director for Education and Practitioner Engagement of the Transnational NGO Initiative at the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs. She also teaches a graduate level course on Governance and Global Civil Society at the Maxwell School. Recently, she has advised Proliteracy, the largest adult literacy promotion NGO, based in Syracuse, and she currently serves on its board. As a former practitioner, Tosca worked at the European Center for Development Policy Management (ECDPM) in the Netherlands from 1987-1992. She worked on grassroots democracy and human rights issues when serving as UN District Electoral Supervisor in Cambodia during the UNTAC peacekeeping operation (1992-1993). This experience was supplemented with assignments for UNDP and the US NGO PACT, both in Cambodia (1993-1994). Later, Tosca worked for six years at the World Bank (1995-2001). At the World Bank’s headquarters in Washington DC she was responsible for overseeing the ‘mainstreaming’ of public participation approaches (including the involvement of civil society organizations) throughout the World Bank’s operations and policy work in East Asia. From 1997-2001, she was based in Vietnam, where she spearheaded the World Bank’s social development agenda, coordinated the Bank’s dialogue and collaboration with NGOs, and led the Bank’s policy dialogue with the Government of Vietnam on civil society matters.  

MARGARET HERMANN
Margaret (Peg) Hermann is Gerald B. and Daphna Cramer Professor of Global Affairs and Director of the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs at the Maxwell School. Her research focuses on political leadership, foreign policy decision making, and the comparative study of foreign policy. Hermann has worked to develop techniques for assessing the leadership styles of heads of government at a distance and has such data on over 150 leaders. She is currently involved in exploring the effects of different types of leaders and decision processes on the management of crises that cross borders and boundaries as well as in a large interview study of the governance challenges facing the leaders of transnational non-governmental organizations. She has been president of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP) and the International Studies Association (ISA) as well as editor of the journal, Political Psychology. At present she is editor of the International Studies Review, a journal of the ISA, and Advances in Political Psychology, an annual sponsored by ISPP. She developed the Summer Institute in Political Psychology and was its director for nine years. Her books include The Psychological Examination of Political Leaders; Describing Foreign Policy Behavior; Political Psychology: Issues and Problems; and Leaders, Groups, and Coalitions: Understanding the People and Processes in Foreign Policymaking. Among her journal articles are “Presidents, Advisers, and Foreign Policy,” “Leadership Styles of Prime Ministers,” “Rethinking Democracy and International Peace: Perspectives from Political Psychology,” “International Decision Making: Leadership Matters,” “Ballots, a Barrier Against the Use of Bullets and Bombs,” and “The US Use of Military Intervention to Promote Democracy: Evaluating the Record.” Hermann received her Ph.D. in psychology from Northwestern University.  

JESSE LECY
Jesse Lecy (personal website) is an assistant professor at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies of Georgia State and a research fellow with the Transnational NGO Initiative at Syracuse University. His research focuses on understanding how nonprofits compete for resources and the effects of competition on organizational survival and performance. He takes a governance perspective while emphasizing contract theory and organizational ecology in order to understand the mechanics of the “marketplace for grants.” He has also worked on empirical issues of poverty measurement and statistical modeling of community well-being. Prior to graduate school Jesse worked in the field of humanitarian relief in Kosovo and with a social service nonprofit in the Twin Cities. He earned masters degrees in Public Policy and Management from Carnegie Mellon and applied statistics from Syracuse University.  

INES MERGEL
Ines Mergel (personal website) is an Assistant Professor of Public Administration at the Maxwell School. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Program on Networked Governance, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. She received a Doctor of Business Administration (D.B.A.) from the University of St. Gallen Institute of Management in Switzerland, where she studied Information Management. Ines studied Business Economics at the University of Kassel, Germany and the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, with a focus on Knowledge Management. Ines' research focuses on informal social networks among public managers as well as the diffusion and adoption of new media, especially Web 2.0 and social networking applications in the public sector as mechanisms for information sharing. In the TNGO project, she works with Hans Peter Schmitz to understand how TNGOs are using their networks and partnerships and with Paloma Raggo on the use of social media to increase TNGO accountability.  

GEORGE E. MITCHELL
George E. Mitchell (personal website) received his PhD in political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, where he is a research fellow with the Transnational NGO Initiative in the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs. He holds MAs in economics and political science from Syracuse University, a BS in economics from West Virginia University and a certificate in political psychology from Stanford University. He has been a research analyst in Dubai, UAE, a consultant in Washington, DC, and a teaching associate, research assistant and Goekjian scholar in Syracuse, NY. His current research, based on data from the Transnational NGO Interview Project, combines exploratory statistics and computer-aided qualitative analysis to understand how transnational NGO leaders conceptualize their organizations' roles in world affairs.  

CHRISTIANE PAGÉ
Christiane Pagé is a PhD candidate in Maxwell's interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Social Sciences. Her research applies political psychology leadership assessment methods to explore NGO leadership styles for dealing with constraints in order to link decision-making to political behavior in civil society governance. She has published in the area of domestic and transnational policy and advocacy networks in communication-information policy and communication rights. She is a research associate for the Transnational NGO Initiative of the Moynihan Institute, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Civil Society and Social Transformation, and a research fellow for the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Initiative of the Institute of National Security and Counterterrorism (joint Moynihan Institute, Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts and Collaboration and Law School). Christiane holds a BA in political science and history from Ottawa University, Canada and a masters degree in communication management from Syracuse University. Prior to her PhD studies, Christiane was a visiting professor of Public Relations at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, and prior to that, the Director of Public and International Affairs for the National Research Council of Canada. 

PALOMA RAGGO
Originally from Montreal, Paloma is a PhD candidate in political science and has been involved in the Transnational NGO initiative since 2007. Her research lies at the intersection of international relations, public administration and management studies. Her dissertation focuses on the accountability practices across 152 U.S based transnational NGOs and their accountability performance. Part of this research was described in the paper “Whose Accountability Is It Anyway?”, which was awarded the 2009 Best Student Paper Award by the Johnson Institute for Responsible Leadership at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. She is involved in several projects related to accountability, NGO governance, standard-setting and labeling initiatives and the use of social media in nonprofit organizations. She is also a graduate student associate of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute at the Maxwell School. Feel free to contact her at pgraggo@maxwell.syr.edu.  

HANS PETER SCHMITZ
Hans Peter Schmitz is Director for Research of the Transnational NGO Initiative (personal website). He is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He received his PhD from the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence/Italy and is the author of Transnational Mobilization and Domestic Regime Change. Africa in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2006). His articles have appeared in Comparative Politics, Human Rights Quarterly, International Studies Review, the International Journal of Human Rights, and the Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen. His current research focuses on the accountability and effectiveness of transnational non-governmental actors in global affairs. He is also part of the Global Health Advocacy and Policy Project (GHAPP) which investigates the significance of global health policy communities in disseminating effective policies and interventions designed to address the most important health challenges faced by the global community today.