Handley named ‘World Politics’ Fellow at Princeton

February 11, 2016

Professor of Political Science Antoinette Handley has been chosen as the World Politics Visiting Fellow at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS) for 2016 – 2017. PIIRS is Princeton University’s main centre for international and regional studies promoting research, learning and dialogue on world cultures and issues of global importance. The Institute provides funding and support for a wide range of programs and activities aimed at advancing understanding of international issues in global, comparative, societal and cultural perspectives.

For Professor Handley, applying for the fellowship itself gave her the impetus to focus on ideas that she had been thinking about for some time like the role that economic elites and their interests play in the process of state formation.”I was attracted by the opportunity to spend a year at Princeton with some of the smartest people in the field working on these issues. For some years now, I have been part of an ongoing series of global discussions about state formation as it has played out around the developing world, centred on a core group of people at Princeton, including Atul Kohli, Deborah Yashar and Miguel Centeno – so the fellowship offered me a wonderful opportunity to continue and deepen those discussions.”

Her plans for the year away include lots of reading and writing but in particular she hopes to focus on the nature and structure of African economies and how they’ve interacted historically with attempts to centralise and construct political power in the form of the modern nation-state. Looking forward, she said the fellowship is immensely important to her “because it means I can take some time out from ‘ordinary life’ to think and read deeply, to reconnect with some of the fundamental questions at the heart of political science and to work in a much more focused way on my research. I love teaching, but it can be all consuming and we can also get very stuck in established ways of thinking about a problem. This opportunity provides some breathing room, space for a different kind of learning.”