David Jacobson

Professor, School of Global Studies, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Bio

David Jacobson's research and teaching is in politics from a global and legal perspective, with a particular focus on international and regional institutions, international law and human rights issues. He also works extensively in the area of immigration and citizenship, focusing primarily on Western Europe and the United States. He was educated at the Hebrew University (B.A), the London School of Economics (M.Sc.), and Princeton University (Ph.D). He is an academy member of the Cycladic Academy for Europe in Athens and Tinos , Greece , and has been a Visiting Fellow at the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, and the Leonard Davis Institute of International Relations.

Currently Jacobson is looking at a number of issues regarding “global judicialization,” which concerns the growing role of law and judicial bodies across borders, including international courts. He is fascinated the extent to which this phenomenon impacts the idea and practice of democracy; how what he terms “judicialism” implicitly informs cross-Atlantic tensions; shapes blueprints for global governance; is changed by, or shapes, the war against terrorist organizations; and how differences vis-à-vis judicialization are explicitly revealed in debates over the International Criminal Court. He indicates that we have tended to reference the “state” in opaque terms in the literature on international relations, largely forgetting about the intra-institutional divisions, and how this has great implications for global issues. (In the immigration literature, heed is often not paid to institutional/state dynamics; for example, extensive reference is made to “transnational communities” without examining the institutional foundations for such an idea.) He has written or co-authored recent articles on these topics in Human Rights Quarterly (2003), Society (2003), and the Journal of Human Rights (2004), among other places. He is also working on a book on these topics.

Other issues Jacobson is currently following up on include the democratization of “transitional societies”; and the role of gender in social and political change, and in multiculturalism and religious conflict. His books include Rights Across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) and Place and Belonging in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), and he is editor of Identities, Borders and Orders: New Perspectives in International Relations (University of Minnesota Press, 2001, with Mathias Albert and Yosef Lapid); The Immigration Reader: America in Multidisciplinary Perspective (Blackwell, 1998); and Old Nations, New World: Conceptions of the World Order (Westview Press, 1994), as well as other publications. He has given numerous lectures around the world.

He was born in the City of Diamonds, in Kimberley, South Africa, and remain loyal to the Griquas to this day. He lives in Tempe, Arizona with his wife, Sharon and their three wonderful children. A kelpie dog, a cat of uncertain background and two desert Sonoran tortoises have also joined their household. As befits someone in the School of Global Studies he travels widely, especially for his work. His favorite places? Santorini; Barcelona; Jerusalem (where he lived for many years); Riga and the coastal areas in Latvia; Hong Kong; Cape Town; Bellagio, Italy; and Vancouver, Canada. More locally, he is an avid lover of the American West, especially the four corners region where Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico meet. "Go see it some day—it will take your breath away."