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Nitsan Chorev

Former Fellow

    Term

    September 1, 2008 — May 1, 2009

    Professional affiliation

    Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Brown University

    Wilson Center Projects

    "From Smallpox to HIV/AIDS: On the Global Governance of Health"

    Full Biography

    I received my Ph.D. in sociology from New York University, and I am now an assistant professor at Brown University, where I teach sociological theory and global political economy. My work so far has been focused on the politics of globalization, with a particular interest on how these politics are manifested at the international level.My book, Remaking U.S. Trade Policy: From Protectionism to Globalization, offers an inquiry into the political conditions that have allowed economic globalization to emerge, focusing in particular on the liberalization of trade policies in the United States from the 1930s to the present. I argue that the U.S. government's support of trade liberalization was the outcome of bitter political struggles between economic actors advocating free trade on the one hand and protectionist industries and workers on the other. I show that advocates of free trade prevailed in that struggle by manipulating the institutional arrangements governing trade policy formation and implementation, replacing institutional arrangements that favored protectionism with new institutions that favored a more internationalist orientation. Concretely, I show how internationalist business managed to shift authority from a protectionist-oriented Congress to agencies in the executive supporting free trade; and how they later managed to shift authority from the executive to the World Trade Organization (WTO).It is the analysis of the diplomatic negotiations and legal disputes at the WTO that made me interested in international organizations and inter-state relations and that led me to my current book project, on the global governance of health. The book will describe various global health programs from the postwar period to the present, including malaria and smallpox in the 1960s; Primary Health Care and essential drug programme in the 1970s; and HIV/ AIDS and malaria programs, and well as anti-smoking and anti-obesity initiatives, since the 1990s.The book will also describe fundamental organizational changes, including the recent establishment of new international health entities, such as UNAIDS and the Global Fund. Analyzing global health policies and their renegotiation over time provides a look into the fundamental transformations that make the current global governance structure unique, including a shift in North-South relations, a change in the organization and roles of inter-governmental organizations, and a change in the position and functions of multinational corporations and of international non-governmental organizations. By describing and explaining the transformations in international health policies, the book will contribute to current policy debates over global health.
     

    Education

    B.A. (1995) Economics, Tel Aviv University (Israel); LL.B. (1995) Law, Tel Aviv University; Ph.D. (2003) Sociology, New York University;
     

    Experience

    • Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Brown University, 2006–present
    • Global Fellow, International Institute, University of California-Los Angeles, 2005–06
    • Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University (Budapest, Hungary), 2003–05

     

     

    Expertise

     

     

    International political economy, international trade, international health, globalization, global governance

    Major Publications

    • Remaking U.S. Trade Policy: From Protectionism to Globalization. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007.
    • "A Fluid Divide: Domestic and International Factors in U.S.Trade Policy Formation," Review of International Political Economy 14(4): 653-689, 2007.
    • "The Institutional Project of Neo-Liberal Globalism: The Case of the WTO," Theory and
      Society
      34(3): 317-355, 2005.