Grégoire Mallard

What is Originality in the Humanities and the Social Sciences

Drawing on interviews with peer-review panelists from five multidisciplinary fellowship competitions, this paper analyzes one of the main criteria used to evaluate scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences: originality. Whereas the literature in the sociology of science focuses on the natural sciences and defines originality as the production of new findings and new theories, we show that in the context of fellowship competitions, peer reviewers in the social sciences and humanities define originality much more broadly: as using a new approach, theory, method, or data; studying a new topic; doing research in an understudied area; or producing new findings. Whereas the literature has not considered disciplinary variation in the definition of originality, we identified significant differences. Humanists and historians clearly privilege originality in approach, and humanists also emphasize originality in the data used. Social scientists most often mention originality in method, but they also appreciate a more diverse range of types of originality. Whereas the literature tends to equate originality with substantive innovation and to consider the personal attributes of the researcher as irrelevant to the evaluation process, we show that panelists often view the originality of a proposal as an indication of the researchers moral character, especially of his/her authenticity and integrity. These contributions constitute a new approach to the study of peer review and originality that focuses on the meaning of criteria of evaluation and their distribution across clusters of disciplines.

Can the Euratom Treaty Inspire the Middle East? The Political Promises of Regional Nuclear Communities

This article examines whether and how the delegation of sovereign regulative powers in the nuclear field by states to supranational regional authorities can further nonproliferation purposes. More precisely, it asks whether the second Rome Treaty, which instituted the European Community of Atomic Energy (Euratom), could serve as a model for the creation of other regional authorities in the nuclear field, particularly among Middle Eastern and Arab nations. It argues that the Euratom Treaty provides interesting technical provisions, particularly regarding 1) safeguards against the diversion of fissile materials by state and non-state actors, 2) confidence-building measures for state actors when they establish R&D in nuclear technologies, and 3) fuel supply assurances for state actors. Building on archival research of the Euratom Treaty negotiations and the Euratom Commission, the article argues that, today, supranational provisions included in the Euratom Treaty would have stronger nonproliferation effects than looser forms of international cooperation. However, the article also points to specific weaknesses in the Euratom Treaty and outlines how legal scholars and diplomats can avoid some of its pitfalls.

The gift as colonial ideology? Marcel Mauss and the solidarist colonial policy in the interwar era

Marcel Mauss published his essay The Gift (1925) in the context of debates about the European sovereign debt crises and the economic growth experienced by the colonies. This article traces the discursive associations between Mauss’ anthropological concepts (“gift,” “exchanges of prestations,” and “generosity”) and the reformist program of French socialists who pushed for an “altruistic” colonial policy in the interwar period. This article demonstrates that the three obligations which Mauss identified as the basis of a customary law of international economic relations (i.e. the duty to give, the duty to receive, and the duty to give back) served as key references in the French debate about the relationships between metropolises and colonies in the interwar period. Mauss made this relation between colonial policy and the ethnology of the gift explicit in his book, The Nation. Moving beyond Mauss’ interwar writings, the article traces the genealogy of his later reflections to his involvement in prewar debates about chartered companies.

The Fractal Process of European Integration: A Formal Theory of Recursivity in the Field of European Security

This article challenges the role that successive generations of EU scholars have granted to the transnational networks of European federalists in the process of European integration. Whereas a first wave of scholarship has claimed that they played a huge role in the process 1) by convincing states to change their preferences and adopt federalist treaties instead of intergovernmental treaties – a claim that was disputed by regime theorists, who argued that transnational networks played no role at all in the process of integration – and that European integration was in fact not different from classical inter-governmentalism; a second wave of institutionalist scholarship refined that claim by arguing that federalists played a more limited role 2) by changing the subjective probabilities which states assigned to the possibility of acceptance of federalist treaties. Instead, this wave argued that federalists increased the expected utility that states derived from the signing of federalist treaties, 3) by spreading the risk of rejection of these treaties into successive rounds of negotiations. Federalists, we claim, segmented treaties into components with different probabilities of acceptance, and structured the different rounds of negotiations of these components by starting with the less risky ones, promising to continue negotiating more risky ones in future rounds.

Crafting the Nuclear World Order (1950-1975): The Dynamics of Legal Change in the Field of Nuclear Nonproliferation

This paper opens the analysis of treaties in the security field to sociological and hermeneutic analyses of international lawmaking practices. In a legal world where tensions exist between legal regimes, it claims that the interpretive quality of past treaties determines which legal rules survive and which ones disappear when new treaties with overlapping jurisdiction are introduced. The article demonstrates this thesis by using the dynamics of legal change in the field of nuclear proliferation from 1950 to 1975. It first shows that instrumentalist theories of international law, which see in some aspects of the nonproliferation regime a) attempts by strong states to freeze the status quo, and b) attempts by all state parties to solve coordination and cooperation problems, fail to explain how the global nonproliferation regime was articulated with prior regional regimes, in particular, the transatlantic regime. To explain why discrepancies existed between the two regimes, and why certain rules evaporated, while others survived the paradigm shift, this paper then moves to field and hermeneutic theories of international law. It shows that only by paying attention to the interpretive quality of the constitutive treaties of each regime (whether they are clear, ambiguous, or opaque), can one explain the evolution of the nonproliferation regimes.