Jean Mathieu Essis
Director, Department of Local Governments' Administrative Affairs
Directorate General of Decentralization and of Management of Territory
Ministry of State, Ministry of Home Affairs and of Decentralization, Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire
Research: Public Administration, The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Decision Making System: A Working Model for Multilateral Cooperation
Host: New York University, Center on International Cooperation, New York, NY
August 2002 - June 2003

Dr. Jean Mathieu Essis and Laura Perry (CIES)

"It was an honor and a privilege," says Dr. Jean Mathieu Essis who was selected to join New York University's Center on International Cooperation (CIC) for the 2002-03 academic year as a Fulbright Visiting research scholar. Essis is one of a handful of individuals to receive a second Fulbright award; he first came to the United States on a Fulbright Student award to George Mason University for doctoral studies from 1992-96. During the six year period between his Fulbright grants, he established himself as a leading national expert on issues of public policy at the local, national and international levels, while serving as a diplomat, Ministerial advisor, Director of Decentralization and Local Affairs in the Interior Ministry and Adjunct Professor in Law, Political Science, Public Policy and Management in Cote d'Ivoire.

His Fulbright/NYU CIC research fellowship in International Public Policy was made possible by cost-shared funding provided to the CIC by the Madeline and Kevin R. Brine Charitable Trust. The Fulbright/NYU CIC Fellowship was designed to give recently minted foreign scholars an opportunity for research on more effective means of multilateral cooperation and multilateral responses to transnational problems, including the division of responsibility between global and regional multilateral actors.

"It was a unique opportunity for me to continue and expand my research on the multilateral decision-making process established by the states parties to the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (also known as the Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT)," Essis notes. His research objective was specifically to evaluate the contributions of small non-nuclear-weapon-capable states, non-governmental organizations and other non-state actors to the past and present operation of the treaty. During the fellowship period, he surveyed the new NPT literature and collected statistical data to update the database produced and used in his doctoral dissertation. He also attended the Second Session of the Preparatory Committee for the 2005 NPT Review Conference held in Geneva, Switzerland. While there, he interviewed and networked with many representatives of states, intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, as well as other NPT researchers.

The result of those activities are contained in five papers, which he subsequently presented and/or submitted for publication, including a presentation to the CIC Conference on "Policy Approaches to Regional Conflict Formations," where he made a presentation on "Regional Conflict Formations in West Africa" and learned about the study and analysis of similar regional conflict situations in the Great Lakes Region (East Africa) and in South Central Asia.

Among his many other activities during his grant was a November 2002 trip to Wisconsin, partly funded by the Fulbright Occasional Lecturer Fund. He lectured on "Nuclear Weapons, Global Security, and the NPT" at the Department of Environmental and Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin at Green Bay and on "Ethnic Polities, Politics and Policy in Cote d'Ivoire" and "Rights of Passage and Democratic Governance in the ODJUKRU tribes of Cote d'Ivoire" at the Institute on Race and Ethnicity, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

He also independently visited a number of higher learning institutions, including the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University, the School of Public Policy at Georgia Institute of Technology, both in Atlanta, GA; and his alma mater, the School of Public Policy at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. At all these institutions he consulted with leaders in academic program management and faculty members on the operation and evolution of public policy programs in US universities. In addition, Essis made several presentations on the civil war and the larger political crisis in Cote d'Ivoire for African-American, African and Ivorian audiences, at the invitation of non-governmental organizations such as the "Forum des Consortiums de la Diaspora Africaine," the "African Shepherds Organization" and The Greater Washington D.C. Area chapter of "LEBUTU-USA."

Essis appreciated that the program gave him the opportunity to "discover" the needs, aspirations and resources of the growing diaspora of African and Ivorian natives residing in the U.S. and to understand how the tremendous potential that their presence and activities here "can contribute to the new beginning that we hope and expect our generation will bring about in Cote d'Ivoire and in Africa." Most importantly, he concluded, "my participation in the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program enabled me to reimburse a very modest part of my invaluable debt to the U.S. government, academic community and larger public for the knowledge and skills they provided to me when I came here as a Fulbright student, over 10 years ago."

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