Mapping Sovereignty

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This Faculty Scholar award will allow Dr. Yarimar Bonilla of Rutgers University to spend a semester in residence at Harvard University as a faculty fellow at the History Design Studio at the W.E.B. Dubois Institute of African and African American Research where she can also participate in the activities of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Center for Geographic Analysis. This training will allow Dr. Bonilla to develop skills in quantitative research, geospatial analysis, and data visualization in order to develop a new long-term research project with the following goals: (1) to develop a series of indicators of sovereignty that build on both quantitative and qualitative research that will allow us to conceptualize sovereignty in more complex and sophisticated ways; (2) to gather information on these indicators across different societies in order to create an alternative archive of sovereign relationships; (3) to experiment with new modes of data visualization that will better represent sovereignty as partial, fluctuating, and contested. These visualizations will serve as a counter to current cartographies that represent the world through the fixed boundaries of putatively sovereign nations. They will also serve as tools of inquiry about the nature of sovereignty, its patterns, its negotiations, and its shifts over time. The results of this project will have potential implications for public policy regarding international assistance, humanitarianism, and international aid by adding new dimensions to existing criteria for determining measures of political sovereignty, state capacity, and a re-evaluation of the goals of "good governance."