Gunboat Capitalism
Professor Graham
Team Lead: Ryan Barr
THE SPEC LAB
Affiliated Scholars
Kelebogile Zvobgo
Kelebogile (Kelly) Zvobgo is Provost's Fellow in the Social Sciences and a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science and International Relations (POIR). Her research interests include quasi-judicial institutions – such as truth commissions – human rights, international law and courts. She is also a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. From 2017 to 2019, Kelly served as Lab Director. Together with the Principal Investigators, she recruited, advised and managed SPEC undergraduate and graduate research assistants. In addition she directed the Truth, Justice, Reparations project and co-directed the World Bank & Human Rights project. To view Kelly's work, please visit her website. You can email her at zvobgo@usc.edu.
Lynn Ta
Lynn Ta is a social justice attorney whose work focuses on human rights and constitutional law. Her current research examines the effectiveness of the World Bank’s accountability mechanism in redressing human rights violations. Dr. Ta was a judicial law clerk to the Honorable Harry Pregerson on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She has worked to enforce workers’ rights as a civil prosecutor with the National Labor Relations Board and the California Department of Industrial Relations. She has also served as court-appointed counsel to indigent defendants in their criminal appeals, and was an attorney fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial Counties. While at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, Dr. Ta was part of the litigation team that drafted a successful appeal on behalf of genocide survivors at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, a United Nations hybrid tribunal prosecuting the war crimes of Khmer Rouge officials. Dr. Ta has a Ph.D. in literature from the University of California, San Diego.
Cesi Cruz
Cesi Cruz is an assistant professor at the Institute of Asian Research and the Department of Political Science at UBC. She studies political economy, focusing on the interplay between electoral incentives and development outcomes in consolidating democracies. Her research uses quantitative and qualitative methods, social network analysis, surveys, and field experiments.
Christopher Fariss
Christopher Fariss is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Prior to beginning this appointment, he was the Jeffrey L. Hyde and Sharon D. Hyde and Political Science Board of Visitors Early Career Professor in Political Science in the Department of Political Science at Penn State University. With the other members of the Security and Political Economy Lab, Professor Fariss is helping to develop new measurement models of important political and economic concepts that are difficult to directly observe. All of his projects cover a broad array of themes but they each share a focus on computationally intensive methods, research design, and measurement.
Allison Kingsley
Allison Kingsley is an assistant professor of Strategy at the University of Vermont's Grossman School of Business. Professor Kingsley's research examines political risk and how it affects firms' investment location decisions, strategies, and performance. She aims to advance understanding in the fields of political economy, strategy, and international business.
Erik Gartzke
Erik Gartzke is a professor at the Department of Political Science and Director of cPASS at University of California, San Diego. His primary area of study involves the impact of information and institutions on war and peace. He applies bargaining theory, rational choice institutional theory, concepts of power and social identity, and statistical analysis to four substantive areas of interest: The Liberal Peace, International Institutions, Diplomacy, and The System.
Rex W. Douglass
Rex W. Douglass is an assistant project scientist at the Department of Political Science, and the Director of the Machine-learning for Social Science Lab (MSSL), Center for Peace and Security Studies at University of California, San Diego. His primary research interests include International Security, Intelligence, Insurgency and Civil War, Quantitative Methods, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Vision.
Neil Narang
Neil Narang is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California Santa Barbara. His research focuses on international security, conflict management and peacebuilding, and the relationship between international institutions and conflict. He is working with the SPEC Lab on a research project related to economic interdependence and conflict, with an emphasis on strategic competition between the U.S., China, and Russia.
Jack Zhang
Jack Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Kansas (KU). Professor Zhang’s research explores the political economy of trade and conflict in East Asia and he is working with the SPEC Lab on a research project related to economic interdependence and conflict, with an emphasis on strategic competition between the U.S. and China. Dr. Zhang is bilingual in English and Chinese, and he has worked as a political risk consultant (specializing in China) for both private sector and government clients.
Nan Jia
Nan Jia is an Associate Professor of Management and Organization at the USC Marshall School of Business. Her current research interests include corporate political strategy, business-governance relationships, and corporate governance in international business. She has collaborated with the SPEC Lab on several projects related to foreign investment and political risk.