ECU Department of Political Science: News

The Political Science Department is launching its first Study Abroad Program to Prague, Czech Republic, led by Dr. Giurcanu, “Prague in Context: Politics in East Central Europe” (June 16-July 28, 2018).

Why choose this program?

• Spend six weeks in a marvelous city — “Magic Prague” has something for everyone!
• Gain 6 credits that fulfill degree requirements in Political Science majors and minors, and in Russian Studies minor.
• Join us to Radio Free Europe, the Museum of Communism, Czech Parliament, the US Embassy, and many more.
• Enjoy affordable prices and student discounts in the heart of Europe!

Financial aid can be applied towards the cost of this program. ECU scholarships available @ piratesabroad.ecu.edu

Application deadline: January 1st

Program cost: $3,925.

Marie Olson Lounsberry will be serving as guest co-editor of a special issue of Peace and Change, with Karl DeRouen of the University of Alabama, on civil war mediation. The issue will be published in 2018. They will also be contributing an article on peace agreement provisions for that issue.

Dr. Olson Lounsberry has also been invited to submit an article on the effectiveness partial peace agreements, or those that do not include all rebel factions, for a special section of the International Peacekeeping journal. Karl DeRouen is special editor of that section.

Armin Krishnan has received a book contract from Palgrave Macmillan for a book titled Why Paramilitary Operations Fail. The book analyzes 25 pro-insurgency paramilitary operations (PMOs) that have been undertaken by the U.S. government from 1948 to the present in view of finding patterns in the way they were approached and the way they turned out.

The main finding is that only eight out of 25 PMOs succeeded in overthrowing a targeted government or carving out a separatist state and that in only three cases a PMO succeeded without direct U.S. military intervention. Furthermore, it is argued that in most cases PMOs have produced severe ‘blowback’ that has undermined U.S. national security or harmed U.S. interests, which suggests that PMOs are not a worthwhile instrument of U.S. foreign policy unless they are approached in a very different manner.

Krishnan is currently editing the manuscript for final submission sometime in October 2017.

The Master of Public Administration program proudly announces that Mariana Rolinsky is the 2017 – 2018 winner of the Donald B. Hayman Scholarship from the North Carolina City and County Management Association. This award carries a $2,000 stipend to support her MPA studies at ECU. Ms Rolinksy was born in Moldova and holds Bachelor’s and Master degrees from Moldovan State University. She has worked as a College and Career Readiness Instructor at Beaufort Community College and as an Instructor Administrator for the Boys and Girls Club in Washington, NC where she lives.

Mariana will be honored for this award at the winter meeting of the Association in Durham in February. Students selected for this award have shown they are interested in working in local government in North Carolina after complete of their Public Administration studies. Previous ECU winners of this award are working in local governments throughout the state of North Carolina.

Congratulations to Dr. Morris, who has recently been added to the editorial board of the Journal of Political Marketing. The journal “aims to be the leading scholarly journal examining the latest developments in the application of marketing methods to politics” and “is highly selective in publishing only the most advanced conceptual, strategic and quantitative oriented work from academics around the world. It is vital reading for politicians, candidates, political party officials, consultants, corporate lobbyists, pollsters, media specialists, journalists, business executives, managers, and academics in democracies around the world.”

Two of Magda Giurcanu’s research papers were published during summer 2017. The first was a book review of “Trouble on the far right. Contemporary right-wing strategies and practices in Europe” published in East European Politics. A second was a co-authored paper (with Juliana Fernandes and Ji Young Kim) titled “Documenting the Emergence of Grassroots Politics on Facebook: The Florida Case,” published in Journal of Social Media in Society, 6(1): 5-41.

The Department of Political Science’s Magda Giurcanu traveled extensively over the summer to Germany, Czechia, the UK, and Romania. In Germany, she spent about a month as a Visiting Scholar at the GESIS Eurolab Institute, where she delivered a talk on “The Emergence of New Anti-EU Parties in EP Elections: Strategic Elite Calculations and European Union Debates”.

In the UK, she participated in the Council for Europe (CES) 2017 conference at the University of Glasgow, where she presented two papers on 1) “New Party Politics in European Parliament Elections” and 2) the electoral linkages in European elections, “In Search for an Electoral Link Between the EU Electorate(s) and the EU Proposals: Reality or Wishful Thinking?” (Co-authored with Petia Kostadinova, University of Illinois at Chicago).

In Glasgow, she also served as discussant for two panels on European Union politics and Party Systems in Europe. In Romania, she spent one week in the National Archives in Bucharest to collect data on new party manifestos. In Czechia, Magda met with faculty from the Charles University to coordinate visits of Czech scholars at ECU under the Visegrad in the 21 Century grant. She also met with faculty from the Anglo-American University to set up a new Study Abroad program for ECU students, which is currently under review at the Office of Global Affairs.

Although many developments surrounding the Internet campaign are now considered to be standard fare, there were a number of new developments in 2016. Drawing on original research conducted by leading experts, The Internet and the 2016 Presidential Campaign attempts to cover these developments in a comprehensive fashion. How are campaigns making use of the Internet to organize and mobilize their ground game? To communicate their message? The book also examines how citizens made use of online sources to become informed, follow campaigns, and participate. Contributions also explore how the Internet affected developments in media reporting, both traditional and non-traditional, about the campaign. What other messages were available online, and what effects did these messages have had on citizen’s attitudes and vote choice? The book examines these questions in an attempt to summarize the 2016 online campaign.

Dr. Jody Baumgartner, East Carolina University professor of political science, was named Distinguished Professor at the Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences 54th annual convocation on Aug. 18. Baumgartner is the 19th member of the faculty to be honored with the title of Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor.

“This is quite an honor; an unexpected honor, at that. It is truly humbling,” said Baumgartner.

The THCAS Distinguished Professorship is the highest honor within the college and is conferred upon a professor whose career exemplifies a commitment to and a love for knowledge and academic life, as demonstrated by outstanding teaching and advising, research and creative productivity, and professional service.

Alethia Cook and Marie Olson Lounsbery, of ECU’s Department of Political Science and the Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences, are pleased to announce the release of their book, Conflict Dynamics: Civil Wars, Armed Actors, and Their Tactics by University of Georgia Press.

Conflict Dynamics presents case studies of six nation-states: Sierra Leone, the Republic of Congo, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Indonesia, and Peru. In the book, Alethia H. Cook and Marie Olson Lounsbery examine the evolving nature of violence in intrastate conflicts, as well as the governments and groups involved, by focusing on the context of the relationships involved, the capacities of the conflict’s participants, and the actors’ goals. The authors first present a theoretical framework through which the changeable mix of relative group capacities and the resulting tactical decisions can be examined systematically and as conflicts evolve over time. They then apply that framework to the six case studies to show its usefulness in better understanding conflicts individually and in comparison.