Professional Affiliation

Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Brown University

Expert Bio

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

Wilson Center Project

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

Project Summary

What are the conditions determining today's global policies on health? To address this question, my research analyzes the contemporary history of international health policies, from the establishment of the World Health Organization in the 1940s to the present. I study the transformation from postwar health policies that focused on technical assistance, to a new set of policies in the 1970s that were concerned with primary health care and other redistributive initiatives, which were then replaced with often market-based solutions in the 1990s. These shifts have rarely been based on biomedical knowledge alone, and the book identifies the geopolitical and economic dynamics that have shaped current global strategies to fight HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases.

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.