PhD Candidate, Political Science
Faculty advisor: Erica Simmons
Ned is a PhD candidate in Political Science focused on Latin American Politics. His research analyzes the militarization of law enforcement, a trend throughout Latin America of governments equipping and operating police forces like they do their military forces and deploying their militaries within national borders alongside police forces. This militarization is usually a response to high levels of crime and violence.
“I am interested in how citizens outside the security forces attempt to control this process, given how Latin American Politics scholarship suggests that militarization risks negative consequences like undermining democratic governance, exacerbating violence, and fueling human rights violations,” Ned said.
Ned’s dissertation explores a 2018 policy that gave the Brazilian Army control of Rio de Janeiro state’s police forces. He specifically seeks to understand how ad-hoc civilian efforts emerged to monitor this policy and to what extent this monitoring helped reduce the state’s level of law enforcement militarization. He finds that the civilian efforts often provided information about security operations and human rights violations to the media to inform their critical coverage, and thus contributed somewhat to post-2018 demilitarization by intensifying Army officials’ concerns with performing police work. However, these efforts were less impactful in contributing to the demilitarization of state police forces because local law enforcement agencies were more insulated from such political pressures.
Ned’s dissertation work aims to help build knowledge about how civilians react to law enforcement militarization in Brazil and throughout Latin America. “While Latin American Politics scholars have a strong understanding of how the region’s security forces and their members carry out and perceive militarization, there is less knowledge of how the region’s civil society organizations, civilian government agencies, and legislative institutions respond to this phenomenon,” Ned said.
Ned received a University Fellowship during his first year of graduate school, which he said allowed him to take more courses and experiment with independent research. “These additional opportunities for learning and exploration led me to a very transformative, ‘ah-ha’ moment during my second semester in Madison when I realized how I wanted to spend my time here and what type of scholar I wanted to be,” he said.
One of the paths to which this reflection led was pursuing a 2021-22 graduate research fellowship with the Wisconsin Policy Forum. Ned contributed to a report on racial equity and homeownership in Milwaukee. He said this helped him to develop his experience with and commitment to public policy issues in Wisconsin.
The second year of Ned’s University Fellowship support comes during his final year of graduate school. It will allow him to focus exclusively on finishing his dissertation. “The Graduate School-supported fellowship, in these ways, has been invaluable and highly impactful during my time in Madison,” he added.
Ned also said that the University Fellowship helped him to secure further funding through his department, including a dissertation writing grant. He has separately received federal funding for his research, including the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship to learn Brazilian Portuguese and the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship to collect data in Brazil during the 2022-23 academic year.