Franke Wilmer APSA Candidate Statement

Career and Accomplishments

Franke Wilmer received a PhD from the University of Maryland in 1990 and is currently a Full Professor at Montana State University where she served four years as Political Science Department Head.  She has published two books and is currently writing a text on International Human Rights.  The Indigenous Voice in World Politics (Sage 1993) examines the international activism of indigenous peoples within the theoretical framework of a normatively-grounded emerging world society and world-system.  It argues that the marginalization and moral exclusion of indigenous peoples is rationalized by an ideology of  “progress” produced and reproduced within master narratives of modernity in settler and post-colonial states. 

The Social Construction of Man, the State, and War: Identity, Conflict, and Violence in Former Yugoslavia (Routledge 2002) elaborates the thesis that political dehumanization is rooted in exclusionary moral communities using psychoanalytic theory applied to the case of the 1990s Yugoslav wars.  Franke has also published articles and book chapters on identity, conflict, feminism, and political theory.  She has received numerous teaching and research awards as well as the 1998 APSA Pi Sigma Alpha teaching award, and has served as co-chair and co-program chair for the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics section of APSA.

Franke was appointed by Governor Schweitzer to chair the Montana Human Rights Commission in 2005.  She was elected to the Montana State Legislature in 2006 and is currently seeking reelection.  She serves on the Education Committee, the State Administration and Veteran’s Affairs Committee, the Governor’s Capital Financial Advisory Council, and chairs the Interim Committee on State Administration and Veteran’s Affairs.

Statement of Views

Graduating high school in 1968, my generation witnessed what Senator Robert Kennedy called the “mindless menace of violence” take both his and Reverend Martin Luther King’s lives.  These tragedies, in the aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, book-ended my intellectually formative years.  Reconciling racial and social injustice and politically motivated violence with the liberal promise of collective moral improvement has consequently played a central role in my teaching and research agendas.

Methodological diversity is both the most engaging and potentially divisive challenge we face as social scientists today.  Useful knowledge about the social world can result from the adaptation of the methods of inquiry developed in the natural sciences.  But the social world is critically different from the natural world and this difference must also be addressed methodologically and theoretically.