Annual Report 2009/2010

Laurence Whitehead (Official Fellow)

Over the past decade Laurence Whitehead has tried to promote academic collaboration on Mexican public policy, and this became a prominent theme in his work for 2009/10.  The highlight was a one-day workshop in College on June 2^nd 2010 that he organised around a visit to Oxford University by Marcelo Ebrard, the Mayor of Mexico City. There are plans to convert this into an ongoing programme of research on metropolitan policy issues which could become more institutionalised in future years. On a parallel track he is also co-organising a project on energy sector reform in Mexico, jointly with the Baker Institute at Rice University and the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies.  In March 2010 Rice convened a one-day workshop involving a number of Oxford researchers, with a follow-up in August and the final output planned for delivery at a Nuffield conference in November 2010 (also to include policy outreach in Mexico City the following year).  In conjunction with this he will deliver a fiftieth anniversary lecture at the Colegio de Mexico. He also used the university’s much improved videoconference facilities to open a bicentenary workshop at the Instituto Moro in Mexico City.

Other Latin American activities included the launch of his essay on ex-President Cardoso (in Portuguese and Spanish as well as English) and an overview of the (relative) recent success of Brazil’s democratization (a Fundacion Botín event in Madrid). In October 2009 he was a closing speaker at a Funglode conference in the Dominican Republic on the state of democracy in Latin America thirty years on; and represented Oxford as an organiser of the eighth Redgob conference in Salamanca, December 2009.  He also continued his work with the Brookings Institute on US/Latin American relations and organised a panel at the Sixth Conference of CEISAL in Toulouse in July 2010.  He is also co-organising a comparative project on sub-national authoritarianism, which was launched in the di Tella University in Buenos Aires, and will be completed in Nuffield in Michaelmas 2010.  In addition he carried out his normal teaching and examining duties (including a doctoral examination at Bergen University in Norway).

Another area of interest is the Institut des Ameriques in Paris, which is beginning to take a clearer shape. As President of its Conseil Scientifique he contributed to two colloques (one on the current “crisis” and the Americas, at the Sorbonne; and one on constitutionalism in the Ministry of Higher Education) and he also visited its Montevideo office, as well as chairing two council meetings (in Paris and Toulouse).

Since the foundation of the Taiwan Journal of Democracy he has been a regular contributor, and has taken part in its successive annual conferences.  This year he gave a paper on the MENA region at the Istanbul conference in October 2009, and on “immanent” democracies in Helsinki in May 2010 – both events structured around aspects of his recent research. 

He also joined a delegation of academics briefing Foreign Secretary Miliband on democracy promotion, a topic covered in greater depth in a conference to which he contributed at Aberystwyth University at the end of July 2010.  He continues working on his long term project on “the political animal”, and has posted a sample of this material on the Nuffield Politics website.

In the University his main activities this year concerned the Audit and Scrutiny Committee and the Nominations Committee.  But this will change in 2011 when he takes up a twelve month stint representing the College as the Senior Proctor. 

Within College, as Senior Fellow, he has begun organising the forthcoming election of the next Warden.

Publications

‘Europe's Democratization: ‘Three “Clusters” Compared’, Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Vol. 5, No 2, December 2009  pp 1/19.  

“The Crash of ‘08”, Journal of Democracy Vol. 21, No.1 January  2010) pp.45-56

“Citizen Insecurity and Democracy; Reflections on a Paradoxical Configuration” in Criminality, Public Security, and the Challenges to Democracy in Latin America M. Bergman and L. Whitehead (eds.) (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), pp.277-314.

“State Sovereignty and democracy : an awkward coupling” in Peter Burnell and Richard Youngs (eds.)  New Challenges to Democratization, (Routledge, 2010), pp.23-41.

“Varieties of Presidentialism, and the Quality of Democracy” in Andrew Ellis, J Jesús Orozco Henríquez and Daniel Zovatto (eds.).Cómo Hacer que Funcione El Sistema Presidencial, (IDEA, 2009) pp.477-506.

“Fernando Henrique Cardoso: The Astuzia Fortunata of Brazil’s Sociologist-President” in Journal of Politics in Latin America, (GIGA, March 2009), pp.111-130.

“Fernando Henrique Cardoso: A Astutia Fortunata do Presidente-Sociólogo do Brasil” in Maria Angela D’Incao and Hermínio Martins, (eds.) Democracia, Crise e Reforma, (Paz e Terra, 2010), pp.435-458.

“La Democracia en Brasil: una historia de éxito (comparativa)”, in Brasil ¿Una gran potencia latina?, Fundación Botín, (Madrid) Observatorio de Analysis de Tendencias, 15, 2010, pp.71-92.

A organização do estado na America Latina apos 1930, pp. 19-124 in Leslie Bethell (org.), Historia da America Latina, vol. VII A America Latina apos 1930: estado e politica, Sao Paulo, Edusp, 2009, cap. 1.

The Latin America section in Liberalisms in East and West,  Timothy Garten Ash (ed.) (The record of a conference held in Oxford in January 2009).  Medical Informatics Unit, Oxford, pp. 19/28.

“On Biology, Politics and Democracy”, Nuffield Politics Working Papers (Reference needed).