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Brigham Young University political scientist Valerie Hudson has been named one of the year's top 100 global thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine, which cited her 2004 book, Bare Branches , an examination of gender imbalance in populous nations such as China.
The announcement comes as BYU administrators prepare to dismantle the Women's Research Institute, the center that helped spawn Bare Branches and other cross-disciplinary forays into gender studies. Another irony: Hudson's "indispensable" study, which led to the book, met repeated rejection from scholarly journals.
"We thought we had this dynamite idea that hadn't been talked about before," Hudson said. "I took the manuscript home, read it all again to see where we went astray. I reread it and thought, 'This is great.' So we went to the No. 1 journal in security, International Security ."
The Harvard-based journal published Hudson's study in 2002 without even asking for revisions. MIT Press later published the book version with co-author Andrea den Boer, Hudson's graduate student who is now a lecturer in political science at the University of Canterbury.
Soon after the book was published, China began softening its one-child family-planning policy, quietly lifting penalties on families that had a second child.
"Sex ratios were being altered on an unprecedented scale in China and India," Hudson said. "We asked what are the societal ramifications, what are the ramifications for the security of the region?"
They found gender imbalances could lead to civil strife, war and myriad social problems. The authors took their title from a 1,000-year-old Chinese phrase.
"The term 'bare branches' refers to the branches of the family tree that will never bear fruit because of the surplus men," Hudson said.
Hudson appears at No. 97 in Foreign Policy 's list, which is headed by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, President Barack Obama and Iranian dissident Zahra Rahnavard.
Hudson's work most recently documented a link between a society's ability to safeguard women's interests and its relative peacefulness. Societies with a poor history of educating girls, protecting women's health, safety and rights, and punishing those who victimize women tend to be more violent and less secure, according to her study "The Heart of the Matter," also initially published in International Security . Columbia University Press will release a book version in 2011 under the title, Sex and World Peace: What No One Told You and Why it Matters.
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