Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: State Authority and Land Rights in the Americas

在一个国家领土上建立权威是稳定与安全的关键组成部分。本项目探讨美洲各州如何处理土地权问题。对国家领土控制的内部威胁和有针对性的国际压力刺激了行政行动，而国家战略利益是解释这种模式的关键中介因素。本研究计划旨在透过仔细检视巴西、宏都拉斯和尼加拉瓜的案例，解释为何少数民族土地权利的执行情况各不相同。本研究涉及到实地考察，包括建立民族土地主张和由此产生的政府决策的全国性数据库、政治精英对实施问题态度的原始实验数据、档案文件、对民族土地主张的国家精英和非精英、专家和实践者的深入访谈。该项目在研究国家对领土的控制方面取得了理论和经验上的进步，这在智力上具有优势。由于民族集体往往是少数民族，他们拥有大量人口稀少、能源、矿产和自然资源丰富的土地，学者和政策制定者指出，经济利益竞争、国家行政能力低下或国家精英社会化不足是影响民族土地权实施的因素。本项目通过认真考虑国家利益和权力在塑造美洲多元文化法律原则实施中的中介作用，推进了这一讨论。这些项目的更广泛影响有两个：为国际和国家决策者提供有用的见解，以改进政策实施战略，并产生有关少数民族土地权利实施的原始观察和实验数据。所收集的数据将有助于评估族裔土地权在一段时间内实施的地理格局，以及关键政策决定对当地的影响。研究结果应该通过阐明各国如何发展安全的边界和领土来加强国家安全。

The establishment of authority over a country's territory is a critical component of stability and security. This project addresses how states in the Americas have approached the issue of land rights. Internal threats to the state's territorial control and targeted international pressure stimulate executive action with state strategic interests being the crucial mediating factor to explain the patterns. This research project is designed to explain why the implementation of ethnic land rights varies by examining closely the cases of Brazil, Honduras, and Nicaragua. The research involves fieldwork on-site, including the construction of nation-wide databases for ethnic land claims and resulting government decisions, original experimental data on political elites' attitudes on the implementation question, archival documentation, and in-depth interviews of state elites and non-elites, experts, and practitioners in ethnic land claims. The intellectual merits are associated with the project's theoretical and empirical advances in the study of state control over territory. Because ethnic collectivities are often minorities that claim vast tracts of sparsely populated lands rich in energy, mineral, and natural resources, scholars and policy makers have pointed to competing economic interests, low administrative capacity of the state, or insufficient socialization of state elites as factors that impinge on the implementation of ethnic land rights. This project advances this discussion by seriously considering the mediating effect of state interest and power in shaping the implementation of multicultural legal principles in the Americas. The broader impacts of the projects are two: providing insights useful to international and national policymakers to improve policy implementation strategies and producing original observational and experimental data on ethnic land rights implementation. The data collected will help assess the geographic patterns of ethnic land rights implementation over time and the effects of key policy decisions on the ground. The findings should enhance national security by clarifying how states can develop secure borders and territories.