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Democratizing the Developmental State

Illan Nam

Contact: inam(at)colgate.edu

Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Colgate University

Illan Nam is an associate professor of political science at Colgate University. She studies comparative politics with a focus on East and Southeast Asia. She is broadly interested in processes of state-building and capacity in the region, especially as they are shaped by social and fiscal policy reforms, and the development of  ideas about democracy and the market that have shaped contemporary patterns of polarization. She has written a monograph on health policy in Thailand and Korea as well as articles on state capacity building and party organization. As a Global Forum Fellow, she plans to work on a project that examines the ways in which prior conflicts and cleavages in East and Southeast Asia informed the political consequences of developmental policies and shaped polarization in these societies. She received her PhD from Princeton University.

Research project

The Kaleidoscope of Ideas: Development and Democracy in East and Southeast Asia

This project examines the effect that developmental strategies in East and Southeast Asia, especially as they relate to the rural sector, had upon generating ideas about democracy and the market during the past three decades. I argue that these choices helped bring about an ideological kaleidoscope of ideas that are arranged in mosaic, as opposed to linear, fashion, that encouraged both political polarization and fluid coalitions.