STATES AT REGIONAL RISK (SAAR)

Overview

In early 2008, the Carnegie Corporation of New York awarded ICIS major funding to develop a comprehensive program from January 2008 to August 2011 regarding the global issue “States at Regional Risk.”

Emory’s "States at Regional Risk" (SARR) project brings together scholars, policy makers, practitioners, and students with the aim of increasing practical understanding concerning the reduction of state risk and the increase of effective public governance and services in four key world regions:

1. West Africa (including one or more of the coastal countries from Senegal to Cameroon)
2. Central-East Africa
3. South Asia
4. Northern Andean countries of Latin America

A primary objective of SARR is to cultivate and expand networks of practical influence within these four regions. To this end, ICIS has already initiated collaborations and projects in both West Africa and East Africa, and has recently begun organizing local networks in the Northern Andes and South Asia. Over the next three years, the SARR project will hold major conferences or workshops in these four world regions as well as complementary events on the Emory campus.  Each forum will be developed in collaboration with local experts from scholarly, governmental, and civil-society sectors, and will bring together policy makers, practitioners, and academics (from the region and elsewhere) for discussions that emphasize pragmatic outcomes.

The underlying premise of SARR is that in each of these world regions under consideration, different dynamics shape the types and degrees of state fragility, the relation between weaker and stronger states, the impact of regional and international influence, and prospects for security and peace. Therefore, the project emphasizes place-based knowledge in relation to regional and comparative dynamics, and foregrounds critical questions such as “How do international interventions and national responses ameliorate or reinforce state fragility?”

Project Director:

Bruce Knauft, Executive Director of ICIS and Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology: bruce.knauft@emory.edu

SARR Steering Committee:

Gyanendra Pandey, Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History; Visiting Professor at the Institute of Asian Studies, Amsterdam

Joanna Davidson, SARR Post-doctoral Fellow

Patience Kabamba, ICIS Visiting Lecturer

Bruce Knauft, Project Director

Christopher Krupa, ICIS Visiting Lecturer

David Nugent, Professor, Department of Anthropology; Director, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program

Sita Ranchod-Nilsson, Director, Institute for Developing Nations

Pamela Scully, Associate Professor, Women’s Studies; Director, African Studies Program

ICIS Staff Members: Kate Bennett, Corina Domozick, Art Linton

For additional information, please see the SARR Executive Summary.