Naomi Levy

Santa Clara University, Political Science, Faculty Member

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website: www.naomilevy.weebly.com

Naomi Levy is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Santa Clara University and specializes in identity politics. She is particularly interested in the ways in which individuals' understandings of their various political identities affect inter-group dynamics, with a focus on post-conflict societies.

Professor Levy is currently engaged in a research project funded by the Minerva Initiative that examines public service provision as peacebuilding in Cambodia, Laos and Uganda. In prior work, she investigated public education and peacebuilding in the former Yugoslavia. She has published in the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding and in Politics, Groups and Identities and has received funding for her work from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Minerva Initiative.

Naomi Levy received her PhD (2009) from the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She also holds an MA (1998) in Social Sciences of Education from the Stanford University School of Education.

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Andreas Umland

National University of "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy"

Andrew Schaap

University of Exeter

Oliver P Richmond

The University of Manchester

Cai Wilkinson (she/they)

Deakin University

Remo Caponi

University of Cologne

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

Nikolaos Tzifakis

University of the Peloponnese

Shamiran Mako

Boston University

Keith David Watenpaugh

University of California, Davis

John Heathershaw

University of Exeter

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Papers by Naomi Levy

Reimagining Public Safety: Defining “Community” in Participatory Research

Law & Social Inquiry, Aug 21, 2023

In the context of a national movement to defund police departments, many American cities are star... more In the context of a national movement to defund police departments, many American cities are starting to reimagine public safety, as activists demand new practices that maintain safety while minimizing harm, as well as ensuring accountability when harms occur. Drawing on Everyday Peace Indicators methodologies, we argue that "community-centered" measurement, combined with researcher-practitioner partnerships, can help move both researchers and policymakers toward a more meaningful approach to policy design and evaluation. However, the application of community-centered measurement to the context of American policing raises important theoretical and practical concerns-in particular, the question of how community is defined, and who gets to define it. In this article, we ask: how do we define "community" in participatory research contexts where the concept of community is overlapping and contested? Using the example of a recent study carried out in the City of Oakland, we illustrate the complexities of applying a community-centered measurement process to the case of public safety and, more broadly, to police reform in American cities. We conclude with a discussion of both the benefits and limitations of our own approach, as well as a set of considerations for those engaging in participatory research. The killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers in May of 2020 sparked protests across the country, with Americans taking to the streets calling for justice for Mr. Floyd and the roughly one thousand others killed by officers in the United States each year (Jenkins et al. 2021). The persistence of police violence has eroded the public's faith in officers tasked with protecting, serving, and fostering well-being in communities (Brenan 2020). Communities impacted by violence, including at the hands

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Measuring Peace from the Bottom Up with the Pasto Indigenous Group in Nariño, Colombia

PS: Political Science & Politics, 2021

In the early 1990s, a revolutionary movement emerged in the international development research co... more In the early 1990s, a revolutionary movement emerged in the international development research community using collaborative methods and bottom-up approaches to not only create knowledge through qualitative inquiry but also to define criteria and indicators to quantitatively measure key concepts, program results, and impact (Holland 2013, 1). Proponents argued that collaborative methods often provide a more accurate and complete picture of the reality on the ground. In addition, including local people in the process of designing measurement tools allows their perceptions and priorities to be communicated to policy makers even in a quantitative format (Chambers 2010; Firchow 2018; Holland 2013). Thus, international development researchers have used quantitative collaborative methods to develop participatory statistics— sometimes called participatory numbers—to design, monitor, and assess the impact of projects, programs, and policies (Gaillard et al. 2016). This article explores the use of one collaborative methodology applicable to the field of political science, with particular emphasis on scaling it for use at higher levels of analysis. The Everyday Peace Indicators (EPI) methodology forms part of the participatory statistics toolbox. It was developed in 2012 by Pamina Firchow and Roger Mac Ginty as a result of dissatisfaction with traditional approaches to measuring peace-related phenomena. The EPI project pioneered a methodology to source indicators of peace at the community level using focus-group discussions and indicator-verification community meetings to develop quantitative data, or participatory statistics, using collaborative methods (Firchow 2018; Firchow and Mac Ginty 2017; 2020). By generating bottom-up indicators of peace-related concepts, the EPI project illustrated that localized perceptions of peace are not only articulated in different ways from top-down narratives and conceptualizations but also raise different issues. In contrast to top-down indicators that measure peace on a country level, the EPI methodology allows for an analysis of perceptions of peace in different villages and neighborhoods in conflict-affected contexts. Moreover, EPI indicators also can be used to collect longitudinal, individual-level quantitative data that can be used to track changes in perceptions of peace at the local level. Our research team has had tremendous success utilizing these locally sourced indicators to measure peace and related concepts in a wide variety of contexts. For example, our work in Afghanistan shed light on potential openings for women’srights issues in rural areas of Eastern Afghanistan (Firchow and Urwin 2020). Our research also has demonstrated how communities of reintegrated fighters in Colombia can contribute to transitional justice by bringing together human rights and peacebuilding initiatives (Dixon and Firchow 2020). In addition, international organizations including the US Institute for Peace, the US Agency for International Development, and the Inter-American Foundation are using EPI in practical applications to guide and evaluate their local-level programming in war-affected contexts such as Colombia and Sri Lanka. However, the very nature of EPI, which allows for such a detailed localized picture, prevents this methodology from illuminating the wider context. When researchers are focused on community-level peace, this is not problematic. Indeed, EPI’s context specificity is a demonstrated strength of this methodology. Yet, many research questions in political science entail regional or national comparisons and therefore require a higher level of analysis. In these circumstances, EPI’s strength becomes a limitation. Indeed, EPI is so context specific that we are careful to use indicators in the community only in which they were sourced. In this project, however, we seek to build on our prior successes by determining whether the EPI methodology can be scaled up such that a regional measure of peace might be built from bottom-up indicators (Duursma, Firchow, and Levy 2020). If successful, this project will render data gathered using bottom-up indicators more comparable to existing top-down indices and barometers and also will create bottom-upmeasures that can be compared across contexts and groups. This article describes a pilot project that uses this collaborative methodology in an effort to produce a bottom-up barometer of peace for the Pasto Indigenous group in Nariño and Putumayo, Colombia. We initiated this project as a collaboration with representatives from the Coordinación Nacional de Mujeres Indígenas de Colombia (CONAMIC), an indigenous women’s activist group in Colombia. At the same time as we were interested in exploring how our communityfocused methodology might be scaled up, members of

International Peacebuilding and the Politics of Identity: Lessons from Social Psychology using the Bosnian Case

Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 2014

This article argues that international peacebuilding efforts must be understood as identity-build... more This article argues that international peacebuilding efforts must be understood as identity-building projects and applies what we know from social psychology about identity processes to post-conflict peacebuilding. It argues that international peacebuilders must pay careful attention to the relationship between the multiple sources of identity from which individuals draw their self-concepts, such as their ethno-national belonging and their citizenship. Using qualitative evidence from field research on international interventions in post-conflict education reform in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the decade following Dayton, the article contends that the international community's efforts on the ground entrenched ethno-national group boundaries while simultaneously challenging the distinctiveness of these ethno-national identities. As a result, rather than being sites of peacebuilding, the schools of Bosnia-Herzegovina became sites of heightened tensions and controversy.

Public education and social reconstruction in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia

Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity

Abstract: In 2000 we launched a series of studies to try to understand what role, if any, publc e... more

The Puzzle of International Intervention in Conflict-Affected States

The article of record as published may be found at https://minerva.defense.gov/Owl-In-the-Olive-T... more

The Impact of Aid Dynamics on State Effectiveness and Legitimacy

Studies in Comparative International Development

Efforts to build state capacity in developing countries are often predicated on the assumption th... more Efforts to build state capacity in developing countries are often predicated on the assumption that external partners can help states improve their effectiveness and earn legitimacy by providing aid for public service provision. In a theory-building exercise, this paper advances a typology of aid dynamics in order to afford a granular picture of how development assistance for public service provision interacts with internal governance processes in recipient countries. Developing a conjunctural conceptualization of aid dynamics, we articulate how the impact of foreign aid depends not just on how much money is involved but also on whether donors or recipient governments are more influential in designing and implementing aid programs. We illustrate the descriptive utility of this typology by applying it to our empirical research on aid in the health and education sectors in Cambodia, Laos, and Uganda. We also probe causal expectations emerging from the typology, anticipating that aid for public service delivery has distinct and separate effects on state effectiveness and legitimacy depending on the precise aid conjuncture through which it is conceived and delivered. We conclude with suggestions for further research on the impact of foreign aid on state–society relations through the lens of public service delivery.

Symbolic Threats in the Schools of Post-Conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia

How does the education of children shape the prospects for lasting peace in countries recently re... more How does the education of children shape the prospects for lasting peace in countries recently rent by civil war? When the wars that raged through the former Yugoslavia ended, the fight over ethnically cleansed territory moved from the battlefield to the classroom, and is now being waged over the next generation's identities. Students throughout the region continue to learn group-specific

Learning national identity : schooling effects in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia

When aid builds states: party dominance and the effects of foreign aid on tax collection after civil war

International Interactions

ABSTRACT Does foreign aid strengthen or weaken post-conflict states? We examine the effects of ai... more ABSTRACT Does foreign aid strengthen or weaken post-conflict states? We examine the effects of aid on tax collection after civil war, an important dimension of state effectiveness. While the literature emphasizes aid’s perverse effects, the relationship between aid dependence and the growth of tax collection is unclear. We argue that the impact of aid reflects its political utility for ruling elites in consolidating their authority after civil war. While dominant parties subvert tax strengthening reforms to solidify their political base, elites in more fractionalized settings rely on external political backing to manage internal challenges to their authority, and are more likely to comply with donor conditions. We test this argument through a Latent Curve Analysis of tax collection rate growth in post-civil war countries from 1978 to 2012. We find that aid is associated with slower growth in tax collection in dominant party settings, and more rapid tax growth in politically fractionalized settings. The findings highlight the need for attention to internal political dynamics to explain aid effectiveness after civil war, and point to opportunities to strengthen institutions in some post-conflict countries.

When aid builds states: party dominance and the effects of foreign aid on tax collection after civil war

International Interactions

Disentangling aid dynamics in statebuilding and peacebuilding: a causal framework

by Naomi Levy and Jessica Piombo

International Peacekeeping, 2016

While scholars and practitioners alike argue that the pursuit of sustainable peace in post-confli... more While scholars and practitioners alike argue that the pursuit of sustainable peace in post-conflict developing countries requires international interventions to build state capacity, many debate the precise effects that external assistance has had on building peace in conflict-affected states. This paper seeks to clear conceptual ground by proposing a research agenda that disentangles statebuilding and peacebuilding from each other. Recent scholarship has made the case that the two endeavours are geared towards distinct sets of goals, yet few have subjected the causal mechanism underlying those processes or the relationship between them to sustained theoretical and empirical inquiry. Additionally, despite decades of mixed results from international interventions, we lack knowledge of the mechanisms by which external engagement leads to specific outcomes. To address these gaps, this paper offers a causal framework for understanding the effects of aid dynamics on state coherence and the depth of peace. It specifies the variables in that framework, with a view to establishing a new research agenda to advance our understanding of statebuilding and peacebuilding. Finally, it proposes that public service delivery in post-conflict countries offers fertile empirical ground to hypothesize about and test the relationship between state coherence and sustainable peace. International peacebuilding interventions in post-conflict countries are typically designed as statebuilding efforts that channel high levels of assistance towards building state capacity, which is in turn believed to enhance their prospects for sustainable peace. Yet statebuilding and peacebuilding are distinct processes with different logics that may, in reality, both reinforce and contradict each other in specific circumstances. Indeed, part of the reason why international interventions in post-conflict countries have yielded disappointing results is that their design is predicated on often untested assumptions about how the foundations for sustainable peace are best achievedand how the different processes for attempting to do so are truly interrelated. This paper seeks to clear conceptual ground by disentangling statebuilding from peacebuilding through a focus on the impacts of international aid on each of these processes. The goal is to establish a theoretically informed

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