2003–2004 IGCC Dissertation Fellows
Progress Reports

Policy implications: In the current debate over women’s roles in the military, and in particular over whether women should participate in combat, advocates for the inclusion of women have scoured the history books for role models. A detailed examination of one historical time and place—northern France during the high and late middle ages—reveals a large number of hitherto unknown, or at least unstudied, such cases; Joan of Arc was not alone. Although discovering these examples is important in its own right, we must realize that these women have more to offer than service as historical precedents. We need to go beyond merely searching for the existence of such women to ask in what ways they participated, how their actions compared to those of their male counterparts, and how their contemporaries reacted to them.

Before IGCC generously supported my research in France, I relied mainly on stories of female commanders found in medieval chronicles and literature. This evidence suggested that medieval writers believed women capable of military command and depicted them in the same activities as male commanders. For the chroniclers, at least, social status was a better indicator of military capability than was gender. Normative and descriptive sources, however, provide only a partial understanding of female participants in warfare. IGCC support enabled research trips to several French archives that furnished diplomatic documents left behind by the women themselves. These sources both broadened my evidence base and led me to refine my findings. In northern France during the middle ages, noblewomen took up military command on more than just an emergency basis, the conclusion one might draw from reading only chronicle accounts. Founding their authority on their domestic spheres of influence, noblewomen both displayed a constant concern for military preparedness and maneuvered in decidedly non-domestic spheres.

The documents found in the archives—account books, letters, charters, and treaties—show that noblewomen used their positions as household managers to marshal resources for military ends. They built and maintained fortifications, issued tax exemptions to reward towns for their defensive actions, granted monetary gifts to exceptional soldiers, bankrolled the work of spies, provisioned armies and towns, appointed captains of defense-works and provided for their living when on duty, and negotiated the use of their vassals’ strongholds and soldiers. Contrary to earlier belief, noblewomen’s duties in the domestic sphere did not hinder them from conducting business with leaders from other regions. They requested help from kings and popes, sealed alliances, and negotiated treaties.

During the middle ages, noblewomen were perceived as performing the same activities as their male counterparts. They used their own spheres of influence to allow them to attain the same ends as their male colleagues, and they were not confined to their own spheres of influence. Beyond showing that women can participate in warfare, even in combat roles, the lives of these medieval noblewomen necessitate two conclusions: First, gender was not always the focus of whether a person could fight (social status was the prime factor in the middle ages). Second, people will find a way to participate constructively in warfare despite the seeming limitations on their actions.

Policy implications: In a world of sovereign nation-states, when and why do countries comply with the treaties they sign? My dissertation examines this critical but understudied question. Much of the existing literature demonstrates that states generally abide by the treaties they sign. One cannot conclude from this, however, that international legal commitments constrain signatories' behavior in meaningful ways. States might comply because the international legal obligation constrains them; but equally they might comply because they sign treaties that require little departure from what they would have done in the absence of the treaty. To understand what impact international law has on state behavior, one must also answer an equally important question: Why do states initially make international legal commitments? My dissertation seeks to answer these questions, examining commitment and compliance in international economic, human rights, and environmental law.

In addition to contributing to the study of international relations, my research has two fundamental policy implications. First, it will provide one of the first systematic and methodologically rigorous assessments of treaty compliance. Given the amount of time and resources leaders spend on the negotiation of treaties, it is vital that we know whether and why countries actually abide by those agreements. Second, it will provide insight into what types of policies and treaty designs best ensure compliant behavior. This knowledge, I hope, will help policymakers to make existing international law and institutions more effective, and will guide them in designing successful new international institutions in the future.

Policy implications and progress to date: Human-centered biological invasions are a major, and yet largely overlooked, component of global environmental change. While the past few decades have witnessed a paradigm shift in scientific understanding of the bioinvasions problem, revealing a phenomenon of much greater scale and global consequences than previously suspected, policy responses have yet to reflect such new understanding. In spite of now clear knowledge of the profound and irreversible ecological and social impacts of bioinvasions, adequate actions to stem practices responsible for the growing flow of species transfer and biological invasion remain conspicuously lacking.

My research investigates the disconnect between knowledge and action suggested by both deficient national policies and the lack of international regimes aiming to prevent further gaps by focusing on a particular problem facet: marine bioinvasions. Specifically, I use the lens of marine bioinvasions to trace the gradual evolution of bioinvasions as a scientific and policy issue in three countries regarded as leaders in national bioinvasions policy, and which are influential in shaping problem perceptions and policy agendas on the international level—the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. I specifically focus on the factors affecting problem perceptions and policy decisions in each national context over time. The IGCC grant enabled me to conduct my Australian field work.