Spotlight - Emilie M. Hafner-Burton
(2009) Q&A with Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, Associate Professor; Director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation
Professor Emilie Hafner-Burton joins IR/PS from Princeton University, where she served as a professor of public policy and politics, and from Stanford University, where she served as research fellow at the law school and also associate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation. In addition to designing courses on human rights and international law, Hafner-Burton will implement and direct the new Laboratory on International Law and Regulation with her husband, Professor David Victor, who has also recently joined the faculty of IR/PS
What brought you to San Diego?
UCSD is an excellent university and an ideal place to conduct my research. There's an extraordinary group of faculty here, and for us, the number one criterion in making this choice was the intellectual environment.
We were also looking for a place where we could start our research laboratory on International Law and Regulation (ILAR). The lab is cross-disciplinary, and we are confident that IR/PS is the right place to conduct this work. We hope to build strong connections to political science and economics, as well as to link our research to the ongoing work at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, engineering and other units on campus.
Tell us about your educational background before coming to San Diego.
Though I began in math and physics, I completed an undergraduate degree in political science, philosophy, and women's studies. In the five years off between undergraduate and graduate school, I had two different careers: I was a professional blacksmith and I worked at the United Nations in Geneva in non-proliferation and disarmament.
Later, I completed a Ph.D. in political science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and Stanford, where I specialized in international relations and methodology. My dissertation examined how governments use preferential trade agreements to regulate human rights. In grad school, I was completely drawn in to the academic and intellectual life – I absolutely love my job, and I love the research and intellectual challenges. After completing my Ph.D., I had a wonderful position as postdoctoral prize research fellow at Oxford University for three years before I became a professor at Princeton.
What are some of your research interests, and what are you currently working on?
My main interests are international law and regulation. Right now I'm working on a variety of projects focused on human rights. I'm writing a book looking at the efficacy of international human rights laws, and explaining why those laws are useful for setting global standards for governments to follow but not particularly effective in getting governments to follow through on those promises. The book lays out a variety of solutions and policy strategies that are particularly well-suited for the big liberal democracies that can most do something about this problem.
I'm leading research teams on a few other human rights projects as well. One team is working on institutional flexibility – from UCSD, we're collaborating with Vanderbilt and Duke law schools and also with my previous team at Princeton. The part of the project we're working on now looks at treaty derogations to understand why governments sometimes choose to opt out of their treaty commitments for a particular period of time. It's never before been studied empirically, so we have a very large project ahead of us that should produce some new insights into the role flexibility mechanisms play in the international legal process.
Another team is working on elections in authoritarian countries – we have a great group of students already working here at UCSD, in collaboration with Yale political science. We're studying when leaders use repression to manipulate electoral outcomes. Leaders – like Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, for example – can use a variety of tools to keep themselves in power, and human rights violations are one of those. Our intuition is that pushing for liberal democracy through elections sometimes creates perverse incentives for leaders to engage in “illiberal democracy” – to hold elections but cheat and manipulate the results. This means that pushing for elections in particular locations leads to violence. Our goal is to map out this process and establish a theory of election manipulation backed up by systematic data. The results should inform scholarship and policy.
Still another team is working to explain when the media cover human rights violations – their coverage not only shapes global intervention strategies but also is quite biased. And I also have an entirely different research project on social network analysis.
What are you looking forward to the most about your new position at IR/PS?
I'm really looking forward to starting the International Law and Regulation lab. It's going to be a fabulous way to get to know people in IR/PS and on campus, and for me it's intellectually exciting to start a project so large in scope, one that involves so many different issue areas and so many different areas of expertise. It will require collaboration with students and faculty in many departments, as well as with the business and policy communities.
It's also going to allow David and me to collaborate – it's great fun to combine expertise, because you can produce things that you can never produce on your own. It is our hope that the lab will help the students by providing training and mentoring outside of the classroom. But it will be hard work for everyone involved.
What classes are you teaching at IR/PS? I'll be teaching one class this spring on the politics of human rights, which is going to focus on the major problem that human rights abuses are rampant. They happen everywhere in the world. There are many institutions designed to stop them, and yet the abuses continue. This means that the institutions, if they're working at all, aren't working well enough. The question we'll grapple with in this course is what can be done to solve this problem? We'll begin by learning to understand why human rights abuses happen and how to spot them. We'll learn to understand what tools have been created to stop them and how to analyze the effectiveness of those tools. And we'll end by learning to analyze the efficacy of alternative strategies.
Next year, David and I will launch our course on international law and regulation, which will be a core component of our lab.
What do you like about teaching?
I enjoy teaching different audiences. Teaching undergraduates is rewarding because you have an opportunity to shape the way they think about the world – they come to you with very big questions that are hard to answer, and you work on teaching them to break those questions down into smaller pieces and try to provide answers.
Master's-degree students are among my favorite students to teach, because they generally come to the table with real-world knowledge; they've often had jobs outside of the academy. They often know more than I do about a particular subject: I come to class and lecture broadly about institutional design, and I might have a student in the class who sat on the committee that designed the institution I'm talking about – they know more detailed information about the subject and can enrich the course for everyone. They're also the students who are most likely to go back out in the world to run companies and governments and shape policy. Giving them analytical skills is extremely important.
I absolutely love the Ph.D. students as well – I could not do my research without them and enjoy collaborating and watching them develop. Teaching graduate students is extremely challenging and all-consuming in a lot of ways, but if I do it right I learn a lot about my own research. I line up courses with projects that I'm working on, then I teach students who are interested. Some come work for me, and eventually they teach me to come up with new solutions and new ways of thinking about problems. That's when teaching is at its best.
Why did you decide to become a professor?
I became a professor because there is an enormous amount of intellectual freedom that is totally unprecedented in any of my other work experiences. I engage with the questions that I think are important – morally, personally, politically. I wake up in the morning and I more or less get to decide, “what is the problem today that I'm going to try to solve?” And once you experience that freedom, it's very hard to walk away.
The research is also something I could never give up. I have the opportunity to ask not only “what's the problem I'm going to solve today,” but also “what's the next really big problem that I'm going to spend five years of my life thinking about?” Every day I still have to solve a small problem or do a simple task, but in the end they add up and I combine these small steps into something big – how to push for democracy, or how to stop human rights abuses. These are huge problems. And it's a privilege to think about these types of questions as a career.
Is there life outside of academia for you?
Yes! David and I travel. Every year we go someplace different. This year, we go to Costa Rica. We recently went to New Zealand. The year before we went to Borneo, and the year before that we went to Madagascar. We do a lot of trekking in places without cell phone reception or stable infrastructure, places where we are hard to find. We chase birds and mammals and lizards. We love to hike, and we love collecting wine, tasting wine, and touring wine country. We've spent a lot of time over the years in Sonoma and Napa, and now we're looking forward to getting to know the local vineyards.
I'd say we have pretty full lives outside of academia. We work extremely hard, and when we're not working, we have a wonderful life.
For more information about Emilie Hafner-Burton's work and areas of expertise, please visit her website.
