The goal of our research group is to examine the changing context of procedural, representative and liberal democracy in Latin America, analyze the contesting modes of democracy that have crystallized in the region, and evaluate their implications for a redefinition of citizenship models and alliances.

Latin America has long been a laboratory for comparative research. With its 20 independent polities, it provides a shared ground for systematic analysis into the resilience or breakdown of formal democracy against the background of contesting models of citizenship.

While in the days of the Cold War these models were relatively clear-cut and impacted on the region, generating the contrasting projects of reform and revolution, in the last two decades Latin America has witnessed both a renewal of democracy and the diversification of democratic experiments. The international presence of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, the election of an indigenous president in Bolivia and female presidents in Chile and Argentina, and recent policy decisions in Cuba, reflect the profound changes these countries have undergone, raising questions that are of far more than just regional interest.

Our research group brings together experts on various dimensions of citizenship in Latin America with a record in comparative research to reflect on the challenges affeting liberal democracies, as derived from the shift from corporatist to neo-liberal citizenship regimes; the increasing recognition of group rights and multiculturalism, evident with the potent rise of new indigenous movements; the emergence of participatory forms of anti-politics in situations of policy ineffectiveness and institutional collapse; the increasing use of plebiscitary democracy as a means of attaining political legitimacy; and the persistent challenge of mass citizen mobilization to existing forms of limited democracy.

 

 

RG size is flexible, ranging from 5-8 core fellows, and each RG can include one postdoctoral fellow. Scholars spend their residency at the IIAS, located at the Edmond J. Safra Campus in Givat Ram, Jerusalem. The IIAS provides its fellows and visiting scholars with a nurturing and stimulating academic environment, as well as administrative support. Fellows from abroad receive a generous fellowship and family accommodation.

 What is a Research Group?

Each RG brings together a diverse group of scholars to engage in research questions of common interest. The group fellows benefit from integrative thinking and rich dialogue, while expanding individual fellows’ research. Our expectation is that the RG’s period of residence will result in creative and original research that will be shared with the international research community.

Former fellows may apply once 10 years have elapsed from the end of their previous term to the beginning of the academic year of their Fellowship.

 

Period of Residence

The IIAS academic year runs from September 1 to June 30. Proposals should include a request for a five- or ten-month residency period. Exceptions may be granted to Research Groups to be in residence for a three-month period (e.g. for experimental sciences). These are the possible options:

• The ten-month residencies begin September 1

• The five-month residencies begin September 1 or February 7

• The three-month residencies begin September 1, February 7, or May 1

Application Deadline and Notification

The online system will open for submission on September 1, 2024.
The deadline for application submission is December 1, 2024 (midnight).

Initiators are welcome to consult with the IIAS Director prior to submitting the proposal. To schedule a meeting please fill in the form HERE.

The IIAS Academic Committee announces its decisions regarding the selected proposals within seven months of the submission deadline. Rejected proposals may be resubmitted.

Application Information >

Back to Research Groups >

 

Fellows spend their residency at the IIAS, located at the Edmond J. Safra Givat Ram campus of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The IIAS provides fellows with a nurturing and stimulating academic environment, as well as administrative support. Fellows from abroad receive a generous fellowship and subsidized accommodation.

Our expectation is that the fellow’s residency will result in creative and original research that can be shared with the international research community.

Eligibility to Apply

Scholars may be from Israel or abroad and must have a tenured position with an academic research institution. 
Former fellows may apply for an individual fellowship once 10 years have elapsed from the end of their previous term by the beginning of the academic year of their fellowship. This fellowship is not open to postdoctoral researchers.

Period of Residence

The IIAS academic year runs from September 1 to June 30. Residencies are open for either 10 months or 5 months and the proposal should contain the requested period of residency according to the following options:

10-month residencies beginning September 1

5-month residencies beginning September 1 or February 7

Application and Notification Timeline

Applications are to be submitted online between September 1 - December 1 (midnight).

In the online form, the applicant is required to submit the following details:

1. Personal information
2. A list of 4 international experts in the candidate’s field and their contact information

In addition to the above, the applicant should provide the following documents:

1. Letter of Intent (up to 1000 words): description of the project and justification
2. Professional CV and a full list of publications

Incomplete applications will not be considered.

The deadline to submit applications is December 1, 2024 (midnight).

The IIAS Academic Committee announces its decisions regarding
the selected proposals within seven months of the submission deadline.

 

Application Information >

 

Arabia (the Arabian Peninsula) may no longer be terra incognita, but many aspects of its history remain unknown. The study of the history and culture of this territory is still in its infancy. One of the difficulties in properly evaluating the historical evidence about the ancient Near East is that modern Europeans or westerners approaching it inevitably do it with a host of confused and half-formed preconceptions about the "Orient", as Fergus Millar has noted in his book The Roman Near East 31 BC - AD 337.

In the last three decades an ever growing amount of new archaeological data, including a wealth of new inscriptions in many languages and scripts (Akkadian, Aramaic, Nabataean and South Arabian) has been gathered from sites in Saudi Arabia, the Yemen, the Persian Gulf, Sinai, the Negev, Jordan and Syria, as well as from sites of the cultures bordering with Arabia. Moreover, many texts in classical Arabic are now more accessible than ever before through various electronic media.

The group will evaluate the state of our knowledge about Arabia and the prospects for future research.

 

 

Contemporary critical theory, which highlights the creative dimension of the reading process, is increasingly reorienting the study of the history of scriptural interpretation, situating it within the flux of literary and cultural movements at large. This international research group brings together scholars of Jewish, Christian and Muslim interpretation to conduct a close comparative analysis of shifting encounters with Scripture in three overlapping cultures. Drawing upon diverse yet complimentary perspectives, the participants in this group will investigate five fundamental subjects:

a. The critical role that interpretation played in the formation of Sacred Scripture;

b. Changing conceptions of the "plain sense" of Scripture;

c. The ways in which classical rhetoric and poetics informed scriptural interpretation;

d. Tensions created by the need to transplant Scripture into new linguistic media;

e. The ways in which the Bible has been reconfigured in literature, art and scholarship.

 

 

This research group will explore new and important developments in Category theory, Topology, Representation theory and Physics.

 

The last decade has seen the emergence and growth of a new interdisciplinary field of research often termed "Algorithmic Game Theory". This field lies at the crossroads of computer science, game theory, and economics; a combination which is necessary for addressing many of the challenges posed by the Internet. Not only is this field full of intellectual excitement internally, and not only has it already begun to intellectually influence the three parent disciplines, but it also has significant implications for the Internet, as evidenced by the large number of researchers in the field hired by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

At the approximate age of ten years, it seems that the field of Algorithmic Game Theory is maturing. The goal of this group is to elucidate the main challenges of the field and attempt to chart the future course of the field for the next decade.

Some research topics that will be explored:

- Networks with contagious risk, the different aspects of how the evaluation of the Generalized Second Price mechanisms are used for selling ads on the Internet, and the understanding of the performance of simple auctions and modeling auctions used in practice (Eva Tardos)

- Interviewing in stable matching problems and cost-sharing mechanisms (Nicole Immorlica)

- Sketching valuation functions, the equilibria of simple market mechanisms, and optimal multi-item auctions (Noam Nisan)

- Auction design for agents with uncertain, private values (Anna Karlin)

- A general framework for computing optimal correlated equilibria in compact games, computing Nash equilibria of action-graph games via support enumeration, mechanical design and auctions, and computational equilibrium analysis of voting games (Kevin Leyton-Brown)

- Envy-free mechanisms for multiunit auctions with budgets, cost sharing games with capacitated network links, and game theoretic perspectives of the facility location problem (Michal Feldman)

- Bargaining in networks (Amos Fiat)

 

The concept of computation plays a major role in the current research of brain function. As Peter Stern and John Travis wrote in "Of Bytes and Brains" in Science (2006:75), "Computational neuroscience is now a mature field of research. In areas ranging from molecules to the highest brain functions, scientists use mathematical models and computer simulations to study and predict the behaviour of the nervous system". Another typical statement of the centrality of computation to the study of the brain can be found in Christof Koch's introduction to his book, The Biophysics of Computation: "The brain computes! This is accepted as a truism by the majority of neuroscientists engaged in discovering the principles employed in the design and operation of nervous systems".

However, the instrumental and explanatory role of the notion of computation in neuroscience is still in need of analysis and clarification. There are various different ways in which computational models and the notion of computation are applied in the study of the brain, and it is important for these to be distinguished and assessed. For example, as attested by the two quotations in the previous paragraph, the term "computational neuroscience" may refer to two different enterprises: Stern and Travis talk of the extensive use of computer models and simulations in the study of brain functions, while Koch gives expression to the view that the modelled system itself, i.e. the brain, computes. Both perspectives are part of what is one of the major scientific projects of our time -- the effort to explain how the brain, as a physical systme, works. However, together these two perspectives manifest a duality that is not found in other sciences, where e.g. stomachs, planetary systems, and tornadoes are studied through the use of computational models and simulations, but are not perceived as computing systems.

Thus what is called for is a systematic, philosophical analysis of the role of computation in neuroscience. What is the exact role of computer models and simulations in brain research? What is the explanatory role of the view that the brain itself performs computations? How are the two enterprises (of using computer models in brain research, and of viewing the brain as a computer) related: Do they employ the same concept of computation? Are they components of a wider exaplanatory framework? These are the questions that our research group set out to consider, discuss, and offer answers to.

 

The aim of the group is to bring together historians, philogists and scholars of comparative religion to help bring down disciplinary barriers and to show how the Slavic and the Jewish cultures can be revealed, each one of them respectively, as unique repositories of the lost texts, sensibilities, and traditions of the other's culture. It seeks to examine, on the one hand, unique data which Slavic cultures preserve on Medieval and Early Modern East European Jews, and on the other hand, key elements of Slavic cultural traditions preserved by Medieval and Early Modern East European Jews.

We will explore cultural exchange within the Khazarian-Slavic, Judeo-Greek-Church Slavonic, Old Russian-Jewish, early modern Polish-Jewish, and other cultural realms from the late 9th - early 10th celturies to late 17th - ealry 18th centuries. The topics are not limited to direct Judeo-Slavic contacts, but include, inter alia, issues such as Slavic reception of ancient Jewish sources, Slavonic Bible and pseudepigrapha, Slavonic Josephus, Biblical iconography, etc.

 

In an era of globalization and massive institutional change in the international community, developing a workable set of ideas about global or international justice is one of the most important tasks facing philosophers, political theorists, lawyers and economics. Current events raise imperative political and moral questios concerning the moral standing of states and ethnocultural communities, states' rights against interventional in their internal affairs, their right to use force to protect their territorial integrity, and their right to protect their citizens or to protect citizens of other states.

Similarly, the growing interdependence among states introduces an entire set of concerns regarding global distributive justice, whereas the histories of relationships among states (colonialism, wars, secessions, etc.) suggest concerns regarding global corrective justice. These questions focus on the duties of affluent states to aid poor countries and refugees, the duties of colonial states to compensate their former colonies, the just treatment of statelessness and the just distribution of cultural rights, citizenship, residency, wealth, and the world's natural resources. These ample practical applications of global justice are what make it one of the most viable and increasingly important subfields of political philosophy.

Some of the most fundamental themes of global justice have been widely discussed in the context of just war theory. 

The research group will study three areas:

(1) The morality of the laws of war, with special attention to the institutional arrangements recommended by the statist and the cosmopolitan competing theories of just wars

(2) The statist and cosmopolitan theories of global justice, mainly distributive, but also corrective

(3) How debates between statists and cosmopolitans in these two fields -- international justice and just war theory -- are related, and how morality and the laws of war are implemented in the different conceptions of international justice.

 

 

International criminal law (ICL) is a unique branch of law, as it addresses the gravest crimes of concern to the international community as a whole through the imposition of criminal responsibility directly upon individuals (rather than upon states). ICL has become more prominent in recent years. New institutions have been created (most notably, the International Criminal Court [ICC]) and a growing number of international norms have penetrated national laws and are now applied more frequently by national courts (e.g., through the universal jurisdiction doctrine). Still, the theoretic basis of international criminal law is weak and its relationship to national criminal law is less than clear.

The aim of the research group is to examine closely the development of criminal law principles and basic notions in order to evaluate the process of migration of criminal law norms from national to international law. Our hope is that the research will provide a better understanding of the potential and shortcomings of international criminal law at the beginning of the 21st century, and serve as the basis for normative and institutional proposal reforms.

 

Theoretical and practical rationality are concerned with reasons, and aim to respond to normative questions: "What ought one to believe?" and "What should one do?". Theoretical rationality answers its questions by assessing and weighing reasons for beliefe and the (internal) relations among the beliefs. Arguably, theoretical reason aims at the truth of propositions. Accordingly, reasons for belief are considerations that speak in favour of propositions being worthy of acceptance insofar as one's aim in belief is the truth.

The reasons which practical rationality invokes are considerations that speak in favour of performing particular actions or adopting particular intentions and ends. And the internal relationships it appeals to are thos between means and ends on the one hand, and intentions and actions on the other.

Philosophers have always studied theoretical and practical rationality, and both topics continue to present vexing and philosophically significant questions. Many suggestive comparisons and distinctions between the two can be found in the philosophical literature. However, these insights are usually random and piecemeal; a sustained study of the relationships and differences between the two kinds of rationality is rarely conducted. Our aim is to study the similarities and differences between the two areas in a systematic way, so as to apply insights gleaned from one realm to the other, and gain a better understanding of the relationship between them and of the nature of reason in general.