Dr. Sana Jaffrey, a UChicago political science PhD graduate and a CISSR 2017-18 Dissertation Fellow, published an article in Carnegie Endowment for International Peace about the upcoming Indonesian elections. The current President, Joko Widado, holds the title of the first ever president not chosen from the ranks of the country’s military elite, and he represents a populist front, however, his party, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), has a less than a stellar record when it comes to human rights. As part of the party’s agenda of being “tough on crime”, the President Widado approved a number of unwarranted capital punishments which drew serious backlash from the international political community. Throughout her piece, Dr. Jaffrey notes that the upcoming election, which is going to be held on Feb. 14, will be one that will see a struggle between the country’s military cadre and a populist leader prone to bend the law to his will. According to the Indonesian electoral law, Mr. Widodo is actually banned from seeking a third term, however, he insists on entering the elections, and the public largely seems to be on his side. Dr. Jaffrey notes that the election may test the limits of institutional norms and the rule of law in Indonesia.

Steven Pincus, a Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of British History and the College at the University of Chicago and a CISSR Faculty Board Member, published an article in The Journal of British Studies. In the article, Dr. Pincus aims to answer the question of why British politicians on both sides of the Atlantic proposed a confederal rather than incorporating a union when attempting to form a new government in 1754. Dr. Pincus addresses that many of the widely held beliefs of why the Albany Plan of the Union was proposed are evaluated outside of its imperial context, with many scholars viewing the plan as either evidence of nascent American nationalism, a point of divergence between American and British conceptions of empire, or a missed moment to establish parliamentary supremacy over America. In his research, Dr. Pincus shows the British and American plans for confederal union in 1754 formed part of an intensely partisan and pan-imperial debate about the nature of the British imperial constitution, and the failure to adopt a confederal imperial constitution in 1754 had more to do with the contingency of the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War than with diverging British and American visions of empire or nascent American nationalism.