IR Honors Students

Thesis Title: The Impact of Sovereignty and Autonomy on Disaster Response and Resilience

Thesis Advisor: Professor Pedro Regalado

Abstract: Both sovereign and non-sovereign states alike have grappled with increasingly worsening natural disasters due to the effects of climate change in recent years. However, the difference in response and capacity could not be more different. This thesis centers on how sovereignty and autonomy influence disaster response. The thesis analyzes four historical cases of disaster response to a major Category 5 hurricane (Irma and Maria):  three non-sovereign overseas territories (Saint-Martin, Sint Maarten, and Puerto Rico) and one sovereign state (Dominica). I hypothesize that territories with stronger autonomy provisions are able to recover from disaster with greater speed and effectiveness. 

To assess this hypothesis, I first analyzed critical legal documents to understand the polities’ autonomy provisions and primary contemporary sources to the crisis to survey the outcomes in a uniform manner. I compared the territories’ and state’s five chosen autonomy provisions as independent variables–economic authority, legislative authority, executive authority, social services authority, and control over foreign affairs and defense. I also noted the seven metrics of recovery as dependent variables–pre-emptive preparation, essential goods and services, education, telecommunications, resilient rebuilding, economic recovery, and long-term funding schemes. 

This empirical research supports the main hypothesis.  The more autonomous territories (including the sovereign state) fared better in terms of disaster response. Other important factors included GDP per capita, the relationship between the sovereign state and the territory, and previous disaster management experience. This research project aims to fill the gap in literature that fails to recognize the plethora of overseas territories’ governance systems and diversities, and their implications for improved governance provisions, increased attention for territories on the international stage in times of crisis, and overall better education on their potential.

Thesis Title: By Executive Command: The Escalation of Conservative Administrative Strategy from Reagan’s Mandate to Project 2025

Thesis Advisor: Professor Jennifer Burns 

Abstract: Does the conservative movement of today represent a continuation or departure from that of the past? While some argue that a categorical shift has occurred, the precise nature and depth of that difference remains under-articulated. This thesis addresses that question by comparing two editions of Mandate for Leadership, comprehensive policy playbooks that have shaped Republican governance since the Reagan era. The comparative textual analysis that follows documents a dramatic escalation in the conservative movement’s willingness to enact its agenda by undermining the legal and institutional structure of the administrative state and expanding presidential authority. The 1981 Mandate treats constraints on presidential authority and bureaucratic neutrality as legitimate features of executive branch governance. The 2025 Mandate rejects that premise entirely, dismantling the existing bureaucratic architecture and constructing a blueprint for a federal bureaucracy run exclusively by presidential command. Since Republican administrations often translate Mandate for Leadership directly into policy, these findings offer more than reflective insight. They provide a predictive framework for anticipating the institutional changes, policy proposals, and constitutional challenges likely to define Republican governance and the future of the American state.

Thesis Title: Coverage Without Care? Negotiating Public–Private Care and Health System Legitimacy Under Universal Health Coverage in Cambodia

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Karen Eggleston

Abstract:  Despite major gains in access over the past three decades, Cambodia’s health system remains structurally pluralistic and heavily privatized, posing a central challenge to the country’s goal of achieving universal health coverage (UHC). While the government aims to expand equitable public provision, the private sector currently delivers the majority of care and dominates outpatient utilization through widespread clinics and pharmacies. Cambodia’s phased rollout of universal health coverage (2024–2035) represents a critical policy effort to expand financial protection, yet coverage alone does not guarantee utilization. This thesis asks: How do Cambodian patients and healthcare workers construct and negotiate trust in public versus private healthcare systems under conditions of partial UHC implementation? 

To answer this question, the study employs a mixed-methods design. First, I conducted 36 semi-structured interviews with Cambodian policymakers, patients, and providers in summer 2025, analyzing them thematically to identify how trust, belonging, and system legitimacy are constructed at the individual and institutional levels. Second, I analyze nationally representative USAID Demographic and Health Survey data to assess changes in healthcare utilization patterns across public and private sectors.

Contrary to prevailing assumptions in much of Western literature that populations in low-and-middle-income countries inherently prefer private care, this study identifies a post-COVID shift toward increased engagement with public facilities. I argue this shift is driven by expanded financial protection under UHC-aligned programs, as well as pandemic-era policy responses, including cash transfer programs, that reoriented state–citizen relationships and enhanced perceptions of equity and reliability in public care. This study contributes to debates on health system strengthening by demonstrating that trust is not an exogenous cultural factor, but an outcome of policy design, historical experience, and lived interaction with institutions. This research aims to provide actionable insights for policymakers seeking to ensure that Cambodia’s UHC expansion translates into both increased utilization and more equitable health outcomes.

Thesis Title: Engineering a Muslim State: Administrative Practice, Constitutional Design, and Judicial Interpretation in the Production of Selective Citizenship in Malaysia

Thesis Advisor: Professor David Cohen

Abstract: Starting in the 1990s, the Malaysian government initiated a drastic effort to demographically engineer the state of Sabah through Project IC, an effort to selectively grant citizenship to Muslims while denying citizenship to Sabah-born non-Muslims. Within a few decades, the state’s Muslim population expanded at an extraordinary rate. Yet while citizenship was rapidly extended to newly arrived populations through irregular and often unlawful pathways, many individuals with deep historical and social ties to Malaysia had their citizenship applications rejected. Today, a substantial proportion of Sabah’s population, often cited as up to a quarter, remains stateless. 

This thesis investigates how constitutional design and judicial interpretation may enable executive abuse by the National Registration Department (NRD), as demonstrated by Project IC. It draws on a doctrinal analysis of six citizenship cases (2012–2022), examining how courts interpret constitutional provisions, construct evidentiary burdens, and respond to administrative discretion. The cases were selected to capture variation across judicial level, constitutional provisions invoked, evidentiary requirements, and styles of interpretation.

In doing so, I argue that the persistence of selective citizenship in Sabah is not simply a product of bureaucratic failure but also of legal structures and legal interpretation that enable such bureaucratic practices to allow for continued inclusion and exclusion. The findings reveal that Article 15A limits judicial oversight, deliberate administrative delay produces exclusion, and judicial philosophy shapes outcomes, together normalizing discrimination as legally permissible within the constitutional order.

Thesis Title: The Taken: A Comparative Study of Criminal Structures, Victimization, and Violence in Mexico's Kidnapping Crisis 

Thesis Advisor: Professor Robert Crews 

Abstract: Although abduction in Mexico is not a recent phenomenon, the criminal practice expanded in the late twentieth century and continues to function as a form of violence today, raising fundamental questions regarding its development over time. Therefore, this thesis asks: How have kidnappings in Mexico evolved between the 1990s–2000s and the 2010s in terms of victims, perpetrators, levels of violence, and purposes? 

To answer this question, I conducted a textual analysis using a thematic approach to identify recurring patterns, practices, and interpretations across various sources. The analysis draws on forty-six audio, visual, and written survivor and perpetrator testimonies, sixteen media articles, a human rights report, an investigative report, archival materials, two collections of intercepted communications, and two cultural artifacts. The findings suggest that kidnappings became increasingly systematic and integrated into organized crime networks, notably among specialized abduction gangs and drug cartels. As the financial incentives for kidnapping grew, state actors were frequently complicit through corruption, collusion, and institutional failure. Concurrently, accounts from survivors and perpetrators reveal the broader economic, political, and social factors that contribute to and sustain abductions in Mexico. 

While scholars widely discuss and argue about violence and crime, Mexico’s case is distinctive for the incorporation of kidnapping into organized crime economies and the continued presence of corrupt state institutions that facilitate the existence of this crime. These dynamics suggest that addressing abductions requires focusing on criminal groups and confronting systemic corruption within the state to reinforce justice and public safety.

Thesis Title: Re-Negotiating Self-Determination: Karen Political Imagination Across Homeland, Borderland, and Diaspora

Thesis Advisor: Professor James Fearon

Abstract: The Karen struggle for self-determination represents one of Southeast Asia's longest-running armed conflicts, yet the movement has long been marked by internal divisions along religious, regional, and ideological lines. The 2021 military coup in Burma has intensified debates over political strategy, reopening questions about whether federalism remains a viable path to ethnic equality or whether the time has come to renew calls for an independent “Kawthoolei.” This thesis examines how Karen people across the homeland, refugee camps along the Thailand-Burma border, and the global diaspora conceptualize self-determination and navigate preferences for federalism versus full independence. This study employs a mixed-methods approach, including surveys (targeting 80 respondents), semi-structured interviews (27 participants—nine from each perspective group), and text analysis of organizational statements and diaspora media. 

The findings reveal that while the ideal of independence endures, safety and security outweigh ideology across all groups. Survey data show 40% prefer federal autonomy, 30% prefer full independence, and 53% shifted their views after the 2021 coup. Qualitatively, borderland refugees experience the camp as both sanctuary and prison with deepening abandonment due to U.S. funding cuts. Homeland participants pragmatically lean toward federalism while viewing internal divisions as the greatest threat. Diaspora participants reconfigure Karen identity around shared values and fear Karen-on-Karen divisions  And across all groups, participants warn that continued disunity will ruin the Karen community.

This project contributes to underexplored scholarship on ethnic nationalism in Burma by centering Karen voices rather than state-centric or military-focused narratives. By analyzing how displacement, memory, and generational change shape political aspiration, this thesis offers a community-grounded perspective on one of Burma's most enduring conflicts and the futures Karen people imagine for themselves.

Thesis Title: Ink and Influence: Comparing Sentiment in Murdoch versus Non-Murdoch Election Coverage in the United States and Australia

Thesis Advisor: Professor Anna Grzymala-Busse

Abstract: Does sharing a single proprietor leave a measurable signature in the way newspapers cover elections, even when those newspapers operate in different countries? This thesis investigates that question by applying computational sentiment analysis to a corpus of 50,910 articles and 107,705 candidate-mentioning sentences drawn from The Australian, the Wall Street Journal, the Sydney Morning Herald, and The New York Times, across two distinct time periods (2007/2008 and 2024/2025). Sentence-level sentiment is measured through a triangulated approach combining VADER, TextBlob, and ProQuest TDM Studio's BERT-based affect classifier, with statistical inference drawn from Mann-Whitney U tests.

The analysis reveals a consistent, asymmetric ownership effect. All four newspapers cover left-leaning candidates with more positive sentiment than right-leaning candidates, but Murdoch outlets attenuate this baseline gap, producing a left-right asymmetry roughly one-third the size of their non-Murdoch counterparts. This attenuation is driven specifically by more favorable coverage of right-leaning candidates, while coverage of left-leaning candidates is largely indistinguishable across ownership types. The Murdoch boost for conservative candidates operates primarily through emotional tone rather than semantic vocabulary, and intensifies across the seventeen-year period under study, reaching its largest and most statistically significant magnitude in the 2024 and 2025 elections. These findings confirm the directional claims of the qualitative Murdoch literature at a quantitative scale not previously achieved, while situating the ownership effect within a broader pattern of intensifying media heterogeneity in the post-platform era.

Thesis Title: The “Nowhere People” of Assam: A Critical Institutionalist Theory of Citizenship Adjudication in India

Thesis Advisor: Professor David Cohen

Abstract: What is the ‘right to have rights’? In Assam, India, this provocation has acquired salience under the ethnonationalist governance of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which has sought to reconfigure the legal architecture of citizenship along identitarian axes. The National-Register-of-Citizens excluding nearly 2,000,000 residents, disproportionately Muslim and rural; the religionization of nationality through the Citizenship-Amendment-Act, 2019; and the proliferation of quasi-judicial Foreigners'-Tribunals adjudicating foreignness en masse have together transformed the boundary conditions of political membership, generating a population of precarious subjects who are neither citizen nor alien. This thesis empirically interrogates these illiberal transformations, integrating (i) discourse analysis of citizenship legislation and policy from 1955-2019; (ii) mixed-methods analysis of an original large-N dataset of Gauhati-High-Court citizenship appeals between 2013-2025, complemented by a close doctrinal reading of key Foreigners’-Tribunal and Supreme-Court determinations; and (iii) a descriptive typology through which I estimate intra-institutional variation in adjudicative independence across political periods. The findings reveal systematic violations of fundamental rights. Foreigners’-Tribunals are shown to operate within a constrained incentive structure, comprising short-term contractual tenure, executive-controlled reappointment, and performance metrics tied to case disposal, that biases adjudicative output toward declarations of foreignness. This institutional design interacts with litigants’ ascriptive and socioeconomic characteristics to produce procedurally unequal outcomes stratified along gendered, religionized, classed, and spatialized axes. Moreover, the High Court, in aggregate, exhibits responsiveness to executive preferences, systematically reproducing the procedural reasoning and narrative framings of first-instance Tribunal determinations; individual benches, however, at times defect in defense of constitutional rights. The cumulative effect is a judiciary that functions as a heterogeneous ecology of strategic agents, whose decision-making is shaped by a panoply of institutional and political incentives. These dynamics necessitate structural reforms to judicial appointment, tenure, and accountability, alongside a fundamental reorientation toward victim-centered justice.

Thesis Title:  A Comparative Analysis of Housing Policy, Displacement, and Gentrification in London and Los Angeles (1990s-2020s)

Thesis Advisor: Professor Jackleyn Hwang

Abstract: Cities like London and Los Angeles have faced escalating housing unaffordability, displacement, and homelessness since the 1990s. To what extent can politicians mitigate these effects?  In this study, I analyze London and Los Angeles’ housing policies between the 1990s and 2020s to evaluate the efficacy of urban governance in mitigating these crises. This study conducts a systematic review of 301 housing policies from the 1993 Los Angeles Housing Element to the 2021 Housing Element, and the London Plan 2004 up to the most current London Plan of 2021. This research employs a multi-tiered coding framework to categorize policies by their ideological orientation– ranging from de-commodified ‘social goods’ to market-led neoliberal strategies– and their specific anti-displacement mechanisms. By mapping these policy instruments against stages and city-wide analyses of gentrification, the study identifies where socially-oriented rhetoric fails to provide the legal protections necessary to prevent resident removal. Empirical findings suggest that while both cities have adopted ‘hybrid’ models that leverage market density for social objectives, displacement risks remain highest during active stages of gentrification where preservation mandates are weakest. The results underscore the necessity of moving beyond market-dependent incentives and equipping preservation policies with strict stay-put protections to achieve equitable urban renewal. 

In the last century, the people of Taiwan have faced threat and oppression from two entities claiming to be “China”: first Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang dictatorship, which imposed almost 40 years of martial law on Taiwan, and now the People’s Republic of China, which has declared increasingly expansionist territorial ambitions for “reclaiming” Taiwan. Throughout this period, Taiwanese migrants who settled in the United States have passed on intergenerational stories, shaped by both their past in Taiwan and their new life in the United States, about the “China threat”. 

This thesis seeks to answer two major questions. Firstly, how is threat perception of China and Taiwanese identity interconnected for Taiwanese Americans? Secondly, how do Taiwanese American families remember and pass on stories of China from one generation to the next in an American context? This paper proposes a theoretical model in which intergenerational storytelling about China increases threat perception of China, which subsequently increases both attachment to the Taiwanese identity and expression of anti-China behaviors.  

I conducted an original survey (N=452), which provides empirical evidence for each claim in the theoretical model. Additionally, 15 in-depth interviews with selected survey respondents provided supplementary narrative detail about how both intergenerational stories from Taiwan’s Martial Law Period and living in an American cultural and political landscape shape the way Taiwanese Americans perceive China as a threat.

Thesis Advisor: Professor Gi-Wook Shin

Thesis:

Cheng, Carissa. (2025). Taiwanese American Storytelling and the "China Threat". 

Stanford Digital Repository. Available HERE.