Dr. Melissa Lee - "From Pluribus to Unum? The Civil War and Imagined Sovereignty"

Wednesdays with SSP

In this Wednesday Seminar presented by MIT SSP, Dr. Melissa Lee talks about recent research into grammatical shifts in the Unites States following the American Civil War. Specifically, how those shifts relate to conceptions of nationhood and sovereignty. "Contestation over the structure and location of final sovereign authority – the right to make and enforce binding rules – occupies a central role in political development. Historically, war often settled these debates and institutionalized the victor’s vision. Yet sovereign authority requires more than institutions; it ultimately rests on the recognition of the governed. How does war shape imagined sovereignty? We explore the effect of warfare in the United States, where the debate over two competing visions of sovereignty erupted into the American Civil War." Dr. Melissa M. Lee is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. She studies the international and domestic politics of state-building and state development. Professor Lee is the author of Crippling Leviathan: How Foreign Subversion Weakens the State (Cornell University Press, 2020). Her research has also been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, International Organization, and the Annual Review of Political Science, and her policy writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs. Transcripts for all of our podcasts can be found here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ljYId5Ju4ro4B2v8DNmRStYm63q9zcpP?usp=sharing