Prof. Dr. Yoshiko Herrera

Yoshiko M. Herrera is Professor of Political Science at the University Wisconsin Madison. Her research on Russian politics; nationalism, identity and ethnic politics; political economy and state statistics (national accounts); and international norms, has been published with Cambridge University Press, Cornell University Press, Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Politics, Political Analysis, Social Science Quarterly, and Post-Soviet Affairs, and other outlets."
Herrera received her B.A. from Dartmouth College and M.A. and Ph.D. from University of Chicago. Before arriving in Madison in 2007, Herrera was the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Social Sciences in the Government Department at Harvard University (1999-2007). She is also a former Director of the Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia, former Co-Director of the Institute For Regional and International Studies, and former Director of the UW-Madison Partnership with Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan.
At University of Wisconsin-Madison, Herrera teaches courses on comparative politics, social identities and diversity, and the Russian war in Ukraine. In 2021 she was a recipient of the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award at UW-Madison.

Research Project

Privatization, Expropriation and Inequality
This project will compare the novel institutions of 1990s privatization in Eastern Europe and Eurasia with other institutions that were used to divide communal property in settler colonial contexts in the United States. These programs were often framed in terms of the universal value and benefits of individual ownership, but within a few decades the result was the acquisition of land and resources by small numbers of people and the defacto expropriation of land or property of many others. Rather than just focusing on inequality as the outcome, the emphasis will be on 1) the development of specific new institutions; 2) the way that privatization programs were justified as having universal benefit; and 3) the contrast between institutions that were seemingly neutral with regard to who might benefit and the identity-based patterns of inequality that emerged. Case studies are still being developed but will probably include cases from Eastern Europe, Russia, Central Asia, and the United States (most likely Wisconsin and Hawaii).

Contribution to the Colloquium

Privatization and Land reform: What is universal and what is particular?
Privatization and Land reform: What is universal and what is particular?In this paper I consider the discourse of land privatization—the stated objectives and reasons for the need to privatize land—in Eastern Europe and Eurasia and compare it with other historical cases of land privatization in the Americas. I then consider actual land privatization policies, and I consider the outcomes of land privatization across cases. In many contexts, the plans and expected effects are supposed to be universal, but the actual outcomes are argued to diverge from these universal plans, and to be particular, that is, rooted in a specific time and place and dependent on local context. In my analysis I re-evaluate the concepts of universalism and particularism in land privatization discourse, policies, and effects, and I question what we can say is universal about land privatization and what is particular.