Arrangement

The Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) has the pleasure of inviting you to a theory seminar with Elizabeth Kier:

War and Democracy: Mobilizing labor and its consequences for peace
Although wars build strong states and democracies often abandon their principles during wars, this familiar narrative does not capture war’s diverse and contradictory effects. The experience of war sometimes leads to important political, social, and economic reforms. This project explores this link between war and democracy. It suggests that how states mobilize the home front is critical to unraveling when war advances democracy and when it destroys it. 

Kier uses research in organizational theory and on social justice to evaluate the different strategies states use to gain labor’s compliance with the war effort. She argues that these varied strategies influence labor’s wartime development (and so the prospects for postwar democracy). Kier uses case studies of Britain and Italy in World War I to test her argument and to reveal problems with prior scholarship on the link between war, reform, and democracy.

Elizabeth Kier (Ph.D., Cornell) is an associate professor of political science at the University of Washington and is a visiting scholar at the Centre for International Studies at the London School of Economics. She specializes in International Relations with an emphasis on international security and civil-military relations.