Expertise

Regulatory compliance; South Asia; comparative politics; environmental regulation

At the Keough School

Susan L. Ostermann is assistant professor of global affairs and political science at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame.

Courses

• Democracy in Modern South Asia (undergraduate course)

Biography

Ostermann completed her PhD in the Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She also holds a law degree from Stanford Law School and worked for several years as a practicing litigator, focusing on class actions and intellectual property disputes.

Research and Publications

Employing both quantitative and qualitative methodology, Ostermann seeks to understand the relationship between state capacity, coercion and law. Why do we sometimes see compliance with regulations in places where the state is coercively weak and actors, be they individuals or organizations, have strong incentives to break the law? Her book manuscript develops the concept of regulatory pragmatism to explain variation in strategies used by both the Nepali and Indian states to secure compliance with conservation, education, and child labor regulations under challenging conditions. More recent work explores compliance with anti-FGM/C law under conditions of low state coercive capacity in Burkina Faso, Mali and Kenya. Her next project seeks to understand why capable states sometimes choose not to monopolize violence.

While Professor Ostermann’s research focuses mainly on regulatory compliance in South Asia, she is broadly interested in understanding laws and norms and how they change and interact. Towards this end, she has published papers on inter-caste marriage and the role of skin color in Indian politics. She has also published work on the historical roots of conservatism in Indian political thought, the development and expansion of the Indian Election Commission, variation in sex-ratios throughout the subcontinent, the Indian bureaucracy, state capacity in South Asia, and the 2014 Indian general election.

Ostermann’s work has been published in Law & Society Review, Governance, Asian Survey, Studies in Comparative International Development, the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics, Studies in Indian Politics and Law & Policy.

Recent Work

• Liu Institute Justice and Asia grant recipient for the project “Internal Democratization: Explaining the 2018 Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) Merger in Pakistan”

News

• Researcher to examine housing resilience and regulation following Maui wildfires

In the Media

• Researchers: Banning abortion pill mifepristone would be a terrible policy choice and violate human rights (Chicago Tribune)
• Lies about abortion have dictated health policy (Chicago Tribune)
• Want to lower abortion rates? Look to Canada’s example (The Daily Beast)
• Indiana lawmakers should’ve learned from RFRA; don’t repeat those mistakes (Indianapolis Star)
• Access to health care means access to abortion: How the UK and US compare (British Sociological Association –  Everyday Society)
• Abortion, racism and guns: How white supremacy unites the right (Salon)
• How do we regain abortion rights? Take a page out of MADD’s playbook. (Chicago Tribune)
• Pregnancy is risky. Losing access to abortion puts women’s lives at stake (Los Angeles Times)
• Forced pregnancy and childbirth are violence against women—and also terrible health policy (Salon)
• Waiving patents isn’t enough — we need technology transfer to defeat COVID (The Hill, co-authored)