Assistant Professor Anu Chakravarty
Ph.D., Cornell University (2009)
E-mail: chakrava [AT]
mailbox.sc.edu
Phone: 803-777-2207
Anu Chakravarty earned her doctoral degree from the department of Government at Cornell University (January 2009). Her dissertation titled “Surrendering Consent: The Politics of Transitional Justice in post-genocide Rwanda” shows how legal processes with the goal of dispensing reconciliatory justice lead people to concede to state elites the ‘right to rule’ despite believing that current state elites lack the moral authority to govern. Thus citizens do not enforce limits on the state, enabling elites in power to deprive them of political rights and still survive on citizen support. Based on 18 months of fieldwork in Rwanda, the primary data collected includes prison and community-based surveys, a detailed ethnography of local state-society dynamics and community-based genocide trials in their hearing, judgment and sentencing stages.
This year, she is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Advanced Study of International Development (CASID) at Michigan State University. She is working on a collaborative project titled “(De) mobilizing Violence: Social Capital, group based violence and prospects for social reconstruction”. She is also working on a number of other projects, including a study of ongoing prosecution efforts at the International Criminal Court and a comparative project to explore if the choice of various transitional justice mechanisms, such as truth commissions versus trials in transition countries, has a causal effect on different democratization outcomes.
Her research interests also include genocide studies, human rights, nationalism, social movements, and contentious politics broadly defined. At USC, she has taught a doctoral seminar on the comparative politics of sub-Saharan Africa (POLI 792A) as well as undergraduate courses on Comparative Genocide (POLI 391K), Comparative Politics (POLI 316) and African politics (POLI 103A). In the spring semester 2010, she will teach a new doctoral seminar on Transitional Justice in post-conflict societies (POLI 792J).
Her research has been supported by the Joan B. Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame, the Ford Foundation-funded Workshop on Transnational Contention, the Mellon Foundation, the Sage and Bluestone Peace Studies Fellowships and grants from the Mario Einaudi Center at Cornell University. She has presented her work at invited talks as well as at conferences, including the American Political Science Association and African Studies Association annual meetings. Her publications include a co-authored chapter in a book edited by Raka Ray and Mary Katzenstein and articles in peer-reviewed journals. Her dissertation committee comprised Professors Sidney Tarrow (Chair), Nicolas van de Walle, Mary Katzenstein and Devra Moehler.