Political Science Professor and Chair Sara Mitchell receives DOD grant to collect data on identity claims

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Sara Mitchell
Sara Mitchell

University of Iowa Political Science Professor Sara Mitchell has received a grant from the Department of Defense Minerva Research Initiative. The grant ($204,372; $751,943 total to four universities) will be used to collect new data on identity claims from 1946 to the present.

Identity claims occur when one government's officials make diplomatic claims on behalf of their co-ethnic kinsmen in another country. Russia, for example, used such a claim to justify both its involvement in Ukrainian politics and its annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014.

Broadly, these identity claims can involve demands for equality or better treatment of an ethnic group, support for the group's autonomy or secession, or the claimant state's annexation of territory where its ethnic kin live.

Collection of this data will allow Mitchell and other researchers to study the prevalence of identity claims, identify which states make them and why, examine how these claims managed (e.g., militarily or diplomatically), study the linkage between identity claims, territorial disputes, repression, and war.

Mitchell is a professor and the chair of the Department of Political Science, part of the UI College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

The University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences offers about 70 majors across the humanities; fine, performing and literary arts; natural and mathematical sciences; social and behavioral sciences; and communication disciplines. About 15,000 undergraduate and nearly 2,000 graduate students study each year in the college’s 37 departments, led by faculty at the forefront of teaching and research in their disciplines. The college teaches all Iowa undergraduates through the college's general education program, CLAS CORE. About 80 percent of all Iowa undergraduates begin their academic journey in CLAS. The college confers about 60 percent of the university's bachelor's degrees each academic year.