Dr. James Raymond Vreeland

James Raymond Vreeland (Ph.D., New York University, 1999) is Associate Professor of International Relations in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. He holds a joint appointment in the Government Department. He conducts research in the field ofinternational political economy, specializing in international institutions.

Vreeland has growing global experience. He has presented his research in over fifteen countries located in six different continents. Additionally, he has held affiliations with universities on five continents including Bond University (Australia), ESADE (Spain), Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Germany), ETH Zürich (Switzerland), Korea University (Korea), University of California Los Angeles (USA), Universidad Nacional de San Martín (Argentina), University of São Paulo (Brazil), and Yale University (USA). He speaks English, French, and Spanish.

Research:
How does globalization, particularly as it is embodied in international institutions, impact politics in the developing world? Certain international institutions – like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – are well known to people in the developing world and often appear to exercise as much or even more authority than their own governments. This has led some to suggest that these forces of globalization threaten the very sovereignty of developing states. Yet, global forces still leave room for governments to maneuver. Professor Vreeland's research shows the various ways in which vibrant politics in the developing world interact with international institutions to produce domestic and foreign policies.

Vreeland's research explores a wide range of policy outcomes, including economic growth and the distribution of income under programs of economic reform, the foreign policy positions of developing countries, the transparency of policy making under various political systems, and even the commitment of governments to defend basic human rights or, alternatively, to engage in such pernicious activities as the practice of torture.

His explanations for such policy outcomes address the ways in which international institutions interact with domestic politics, in particular the ways in which international actors can be used to do the dirty work of governments - how they can "launder" dirty politics - how they are used as scapegoats - in short, how international actors can be the "dark knight" in domestic politics (sometimes for better, sometimes for worse). The domestic institutions he has focused on include both democratic and dictatorial political regimes. His research is most known for its treatment of international institutions, particularly the International Monetary Fund, and more recently the World Bank and the United Nations. 

In addition to his first book, entitled The IMF and Economic Development (Cambridge University Press, March 2003), he has written an introductory text on the IMF entitled The International Monetary Fund: Politics of Conditional Lending (Routledge, January 2007), and he co-edited Globalization and the Nation State: The Impact of the IMF and the World Bank (Routledge, 2006). He is currently working on a new book entitled The Political Economy of the United Nations Security Council, which is under contract with Cambridge University Press.