This session of the Graduate Student Workshop explores how justice and autonomy should be structured within and across political communities. Collectively, the papers examine when political and market-based decisions enhance or undermine democratic equality, and what normative constraints should guide such forms of autonomy.

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Papers and abstracts:

"Political Uses of Market Power: In Defense of Consumer Activism"
Alessio Salviato, Department of Ethics and Legal Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Consumer activism—boycotts and buycotts undertaken partly for moral or political ends—has been criticized on procedural-democratic grounds. Even when activists pursue the common good, the worry is that markets allocate influence in proportion to purchasing power and thus enable some citizens to steer social change outside egalitarian political procedures. This paper defends a more permissive alternative. Its central claim is a parity thesis: much ordinary consumer behavior, guided largely by price and quality rather than political aims, can nonetheless produce the very same procedurally relevant effects that critics take to motivate special constraints on activism. By predictably reshaping others’ feasible option sets, entrenching inequalities in effective influence, and shifting the site of contestation from democratic forums to market arenas, ordinary consumerism can be no less “agenda-setting” than its explicitly political counterpart. I then argue that three putative differences—activists’ intentions, the alleged Pareto-efficiency of ordinary market choices, and regulability—fail to support the conclusion that consumer activism must satisfy demanding proto-legislative conditions while ordinary consumerism may proceed largely unchecked. If the two practices are procedurally on a par, they should be assessed under the same baseline moral constraints that govern market participation generally. The paper concludes by sketching such a permissive framework, including a revised and evidence-sensitive constraint of respect for basic liberties.

"Strong Secessionist Permissivism"
Elijah Parish, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley

Secession occurs when a region of a state breaks away to form an independent political community, leaving a "rump state" behind. This paper defends a strong permissivist theory of secession, according to which political subunits enjoy a moral liberty to unilaterally secede, even absent grave injustice or an antecedent (cultural, ethnic, religious) identity. Against the prevailing orthodoxy—which treats secession as permissible only in extreme cases—I argue that recognizing a general right to secede is both morally justifiable and politically salutary. First, I contend that permissivism strengthens federalism, enhances trust in political institutions, and protects minority rights. Second, I argue that smaller polities tend to exhibit improved democratic responsiveness and reduced principal-agent problems. Third, after giving a broad defense of permissivism towards secession, I turn towards major objections. Drawing on analogies from just war theory, I claim that forcibly retaining a region whose people express a clear and sustained desire to exit demands a heavy justificatory burden—morally akin to military occupation for humanitarian intervention. Where no such burden can be met, resistance to secession may license self-defense by the separatists. I also address a neglected question in secession ethics: how are separatist groups licensed to claim territory which is already being legitimately governed? I argue that the territorial claims of a legitimate breakaway region outweigh those of even a legitimate state. I conclude with speculative reflections on contemporary secessionist undercurrents—both in established democracies and in emerging experiments like charter cities and seasteading—and explore the implications of a permissivist framework for constitutional design, minority rights, and the ethics of political exit.

Speaker Bios:

Alessio Salviato is a PhD student in Legal Studies and Business Ethics at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His research centers on how we should understand corporate agency and allocate responsibility within firms, the role of multinationals in international politics, and corporate and consumer activism.

Elijah Parish is a Ph.D. philosophy student at the University of California, Berkeley. His primary interests are in ethics and political philosophy. In particular, he’s curious about partiality and interpersonal relationships as well as self-determination and political community.

This session examines how political upheavals reshape the rights and recognition of minorities. By tracing how states, international organizations, and revolutionary leaders redefine who counts as a protected subject, the two papers show how marginalized groups invoke and contest legal categories to secure mobility, political voice, and substantive equality.

Paper Abstracts:

Jewish Refugees in the Age of the Jewish Nation: Soviet Jews as "Cold War Refugees" or "Israeli Repatriates" 1971-1991Alexandra (Sasha) Zborovsky

In 1951 members of the United Nations gathered to draft the modern definition of “refugee.” There they distinguished Jewish survivors of the Holocaust as the ultimate archetype. But as the Cold War intensified, the term “refugee” expanded to include millions of new victims of displacement, ranging from Hungarian to Indochinese migrants. By the 1970s, as hundreds of thousands of the Soviet Union’s Jewish citizens—targets of de facto antisemitism—began emigrating from the world’s first socialist state, the world was once again forced to contend with Jews as refugees. In the decades to follow, European states and Jewish philanthropic agencies administrated the departure of over one million Jews from the USSR, many of whom were denaturalized by the Soviet state. This time, however, Western humanitarian organizations found themselves at odds with Israeli diplomats and Jewish nationalists. An agreement could not be reached: with the existence of a Jewish nation, could a Jew be a refugee? Few dared argue that Soviet Jews met the criteria of demonstrating a “well-founded fear of persecution.” It was the issue of statelessness that sowed discord. While the Israeli government argued that all stateless Soviet Jews were automatically Israeli citizens and did not qualify as refugees, Western states and NGOs campaigned for a freedom of movement that rejected this model of national repatriation. My work reveals not only how states and world leaders manipulated concepts of citizenship, refugeehood, and repatriation in order to direct and control the mobility of Soviet Jews, but how Soviet Jews also engaged these terms to retain agency over their transit and resettlement processes. Their experiences unveil the inherent contradictions of refugeehood. Designed to augment individual human rights, the political category remained tethered to the nation-state.


Between Elite Strategy and Mass Mobilization: Women’s Political Empowerment in Anti-Colonial Social Revolutions
Johanna Reyes Ortega

Why do some social revolutions advance women’s rights while others do not? Although scholars agree that conflict can open windows of opportunity for gender equality, existing explanations overlook how the type of revolution shapes these outcomes. I argue that anticolonial social revolutions are more likely to expand women’s rights than revolutions aimed solely at domestic redistribution or regime change. Because anticolonial struggles require broad-based mobilization against a foreign power, revolutionary leaders must articulate inclusive visions of liberation that transcend class and gender divisions. These ideological appeals become institutionalized through mass organizations that link women to the new state, embedding equality within the regime’s legitimacy and state-building project. By contrast, revolutions confronting domestic elites can rely on narrower, class-based coalitions and pragmatic appeals, resulting in symbolic rather than substantive gender reforms. Consistent with this theory, cross-national evidence since 1900 shows that women’s political empowerment increases most sharply following social anticolonial revolutions. A complementary case study of the 1959 Cuban Revolution demonstrates how the regime expanded women’s citizenship to consolidate revolutionary authority—equating women’s liberation with the revolution’s success and suppressing resistance to egalitarian reform. The findings underscore how bottom-up mobilization can generate new channels of accountability and democratic bargaining, even under authoritarian regimes.


Speaker bios:

Alexandra (Sasha) Zborovsky is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Pennsylvania and a Visiting Instructor at Bryn Mawr College. She is a historian of the former Soviet Union with a focus on Jewish experience and twentieth century mobility regimes. Her work has been supported by the Association for Slavic East European and Euriasian Studies, the Center for Jewish History, and Penn's Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration. Her research investigates the departure of more than one million Jews from the former Soviet Union throughout the mid-to-late twentieth century and the diplomatic, ideological, and social circumstances at the foundation of this great emigration.

Johanna Reyes Ortega is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, with a focus on comparative politics, gender, and the political economy of development. Her research examines the long-term effects of conflict and social movements on gender dynamics in Latin America, with a focus on Mexico, Cuba, and Central America. In her dissertation, she examines the determinants of gender inequality in post-WWII revolutionary contexts. Her work applies mixed causal inference and machine learning methods that employ large-scale administrative, survey, and archival data.

This session examines how elites adapt to significant sociopolitical changes. The two presenters will interrogate how elites shape state-building and social reform focusing on the role of power and ideology.

Lunch provided.

Presenters

Anju Parvathy Biju

Bio: Anju Parvathy Biju is a PhD student in the Comparative Literature and Literary Theory program at the University of Pennsylvania. She is working towards a dissertation on the cultural and literary conceptions of childhood and their relation to the form of the postcolonial nation-state during the early decades after Independence. Her broader fields of interest include postcolonial literature, childhood studies, and theories of the state.

Title: Between Service and the State: The Indian Women’s Movement and the Question of Childhood, 1940-1948

Abstract: This paper offers an analysis of the complex relationship between women’s organizations and child welfare in the transitional moment between colonialism and postcolonial nation-building through a study of the All-India Women’s Conference’s (founded in 1927) approach towards questions of children and their care. Using archival material on the activities of the AIWC when it comes to child welfare as well as the memoirs of prominent figures (Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, 1978, and Hansa Mehta, 1981) associated with it, I trace ideas about children generated by the organization in the crucial period of the 40s and the 50s where the child emerges as a simultaneously public and private concern for an imagined and, later, realized free state. A fledgling rights and welfare based framework surrounding the child that emerged during this period was activated not by an imagination of state-centric planning that sought to actively intervene. Instead, as crucial scholarship by Geraldine Forbes (1996) and Taylor Sherman (2021) show, it is a complex relationship between the Indian state and “state feminism” that imagines this child-subject. Such activations of public and private divisions of childbirth and rearing, I argue, are also crucial to understand the emergence of certain public roles for women during this transitional period. I elaborate upon one such role: that of women as wielders of professional expertise in public regarding their seemingly private affinity for child-rearing as mothers. My contention, building on the work of Rosalind Parr (2022), is that child welfare allows complex mobilizations of domestic knowledge by bourgeois Indian women activists who activated intra-national and international networks that gave new meaning to the amalgamation of ‘women and children’. What does an attention towards childhood allow for our own understanding of women’s histories during the crucial period of decolonization?

Igor Kolesnikov

Bio: Igor Kolesnikov is a PhD candidate in political science at UC Berkeley studying fiscal development in weak and authoritarian states. My dissertation examines three cases: France's 18th-century salt tax enforcement overhaul, Russia's 1864 zemstvo reform that created elected assemblies empowered to tax elites, and the Russian Empire's imposition of communal land tenure after emancipation. Using archival data, formal theory, and causal inference methods, I analyze how governments design extractive institutions in response to fiscal shocks and their consequences for state-society relations

Title: Capturing the State: Decentralization and Elite Representation in the Russian Bureaucracy

Abstract: At face value, decentralization brings governance closer to the people, increasing the efficiency and quality of public goods and services by reducing monitoring costs, increasing oversight, and leveraging accountability by empowering local communities . However, the close examination of decentralization reforms reveals a surprising gap between the theoretical benefits of local policymaking and the attained results. We hypothesize that private groups most affected by the capacity gains of decentralized local government will invest more to capture administrative positions or bypass them altogether by taking over other local enforcement agencies. To support this theoretical claim and develop it further, we explore the effects of the 1864 local self-government reform in the Russian Empire, which affected the lives of more than 40 million people and enfranchised locally hundreds of thousands.

Drawing on a comprehensive list of wealthy serf owners (socioeconomic elites) and the first ever large-N sample of individual members of local (district-level) officialdom, we are able to identify members of the socioeconomic elite within the local bureaucracy. We hypothesize that local self-government reform in the Russian Empire made the bureaucracy less representative of local society by giving landowning elites the incentive to capture local offices to defend their traditional privileges. This undermined the ability of the newly created local assemblies to redistribute power and resources in the interests of the median voter but shifts the costs of governance away from the central government to the localities. By leveraging the adoption of the reform and variation between administrative, coercive, judicial, and rural institutions within the local bureaucracy, we demonstrate how powerful socioeconomic actors respond to decentralization reforms and quantify the resulting policy bias of direct state capture by socioeconomic elites.