Journal Articles – Juliet Johnson

What’s In a Name? Name Change, Memory-Work, and Symbolic Resistance in Rhode Island

Political Geography, 131 (2026). With Lily Martin and Benjamin Forest.

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Rhode Islanders voted in 2020 to remove the phrase Providence Plantations from the state’s official name despite overwhelmingly rejecting an identical ballot measure in 2010. Drawing on intersecting literatures on critical toponymies, memory-work, and issue framing, we argue that the 2020 ballot measure succeeded where the 2010 measure failed because of three interrelated factors. First, the ongoing memory-work of racial justice advocates in Rhode Island and beyond significantly altered the repertoire of acceptable narratives, images, and symbols available to Rhode Island’s political elite between 2010 and 2020. Second, the intense Black Lives Matter protests in May and June 2020 represented a critical juncture that gave supportive Rhode Island politicians the opportunity to reintroduce the name-change ballot measure under the broader banner of reckoning with systemic racism in the United States. Finally, activists and supportive politicians learned from the mistakes of 2010 and in 2020 mounted a more organized public advocacy campaign framed around contemporary racial justice issues designed to persuade Rhode Island voters to adopt the name change

Aspirational Iconography: The European Union Flag as an Extraterritorial Political Symbol

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 116:2 (2026): 386-404. With Benjamin Forest.

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How and why did the EU flag, once a banal marker of European integration and institutions in its member states, become such a politically charged symbol outside of the European Union? We demonstrate how officials and publics may use such extraterritorial flags to signal aspiration towards, solidarity with, or rejection of the policies, values, and identities that the flags represent, and how this contrasts with banal extraterritorial use. Employing a systematic qualitative media analysis, we trace how the EU flag’s prominence in the 2004-2007 EU enlargements transformed it from a banal to an emotionally charged symbol of European identity, laying the groundwork for its aspirational extraterritorial use by governments, parties, and protestors in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. We argue that flying the EU flag together with national flags represented an affective assertion of national identity in these countries, with the EU flag transformed into a complementary rather than competing symbolic resource for nation-building. Officials and publics in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine used the EU flag to define distinct national identities, to assert common European identities, and as a tool in domestic political conflicts. Most importantly, the flag became a potent anti-Russian geopolitical symbol as Russia became increasingly authoritarian and aggressive. By flying the EU flag alongside their national ones, Georgians, Moldovans, and Ukrainians not only declared themselves to be fully European but also insisted that they would actively contest and construct European boundaries.

Bent into Submission? Domestic Investors and Populist Governments

Perspectives on Politics 24:1 (2026): 49-70. With Alison L. Johnston.

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Do populist governments bend their economic policies to the preferences of bondholders? Populist governments should be a “least likely” case for the market discipline hypothesis. Populist parties typically run on platforms that scapegoat wealthy elites as “enemies
of the people” and hence should be more resistant to changing policy positions in the face of market pressure, given their reluctance to alienate their base. Employing most-different case studies of the Five Star Movement/Lega coalition in Italy and Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary, we find that populists do bend to market pressure but that this “disciplining effect” does not stem primarily from foreign investors. Rather, it was the inaction of domestic investors in bond auctions that caused these governments to reverse course on headline economic policies. Because domestic investors served as both governments’ “buyers of last resort,” they needed to maintain their favor amidst foreign capital flight.

Contemporary Financial Nationalism in Theory and Practice
Nationalities Papers 53:2 (2025): 260-278. With Andrew Barnes.

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The 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath provided fertile soil for criticism of and alternatives to the international liberal order, including the rise of financial nationalism. Contemporary financial nationalism is a view of the world that is nationalist in its motivation for political action, financial in its policy focus, and illiberal in its conception of political economy. At the same time, it is fundamentally shaped by its emergence from within the international liberal order, which both constrains the policy options of financial nationalists and provides opportunities for them to draw on transnational financial resources and institutions to advance nationalist causes. This article offers a conceptual analysis of contemporary financial nationalism that explores its fundamental characteristics, explains what is distinctive about it, delineates its four major policy subtypes, identifies the resources and capabilities required to successfully engage in it, and discusses the implications of doing so. It aids researchers in thinking about financial nationalism’s internal workings across different contexts, in understanding why it has lasted as long and spread as far as it has, in considering how it may evolve, and in contemplating how it can affect domestic and international political economies.

Territory, Place, Flow, and Scale: Spatial Analysis in the IPE of Trade

Geopolitics, 31:1 (2026): 25-49. With Benjamin Forest & Zarlasht M. Razeq.

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We assess the presence and use of the geographical concepts of territory, place, flow, and scale in the International Political Economy (IPE) literature on trade. While IPE scholars have arguably responded somewhat to earlier calls to embrace geography, the uptake remains limited. Relatively few articles incorporate such concepts explicitly and tend to ignore critical scholarship on these ideas. After summarizing the theoretical dimensions of territory, place, flow, and scale in geography, we analyze publications in six leading political science/IPE journals from 2010 to 2022 to identify articles related to trade that draw on one or more of these four concepts. Using a mix of quantitative text analysis and close qualitative readings of selected articles, we find that IPE scholars occasionally use territory, flow, and scale explicitly, but more often their use is implicit. In contrast, place is used rarely, only implicitly, but perhaps offers the greatest opportunity to frame new questions in studies of trade. More generally, we conclude that explicit attention to these four concepts and their use in critical geography scholarship, would help to develop richer, more critical IPE approaches.

Decentering Russia: Challenges And Opportunities

ASEEES Newsnet. January 2024.

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Print adaptation of the 2023 Presidential Address for the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). The address explores what it means to de-center Russia in our scholarly lives and associations, what concrete progress has been made, what remains to be done, and why it is important. Only by listening to and working with each other can we move forward, especially given challenging international and institutional environments. To echo the apocryphal quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin when signing the Declaration of Independence in 1776, “We must all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

Macroprudential Policy on an Uneven Playing Field: Supranational Regulation and Domestic Politics in the EU’s Dependent Market Economies

Journal of Common Market Studies 59:3 (2021): 497-517.

With Dora Piroska and Yuliya Gorelkina.

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Central bankers and financial regulators in East Central Europe and the Balkans regularly employed macroprudential policy before the global financial crisis and continue to be among its most active proponents in the European Union. We draw upon the Dependent Market Economy framework to explore how the EU’s five DMEs – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia – have used macroprudential policy to manage the uneven distributional effects of financial globalization and European integration. We contend that while structural and EU-specific institutional factors define the available policy space, policy choices within that space depend upon how domestic actors translate macroprudential policies into their local contexts. Overall, our analysis highlights the social impact and challenges to European integration of heavy DME reliance on macroprudential policy making, especially when motivated by domestic financial nationalism.

Confederate Monuments and the Problem of Forgetting,

Cultural Geographies, 26:1 (2019): 127-131. With Benjamin Forest.

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Those advocating the removal of US Confederate monuments have generally relied on the claim that because the ideas these monuments represent (i.e. White supremacy) have no legitimate place in political discourse, the monuments should be removed from public space. While we share this normative position, experiences while teaching our interdisciplinary undergraduate course on Memory, Place, and Power forced us to interrogate our reflexive desire to ‘take ’em down’. We learned that as scholars and practitioners, we must not only better explain and defend the nature of the ‘forgetting’ that happens when we remove Confederate monuments but also put our discussion of their fate into a broader international context, one that embraces alternatives beyond the stark choice of removal versus retention.

Символическая политика как предмет Political Science и Russian studies: Исследования политического использования прошлого в постсоветской России [Symbolic politics in political science and Russian studies: Research on the political uses of the past in post-Soviet Russia]

Политическая наука [Political Science] 2 (2020): 15-41. With Olga Malinova.

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We examine political science’s contribution to Post-Soviet symbolic politics through a focus on memory politics, which took center stage in the political competition among post-Communist elites. Under the Soviet regime, Communist ideology and. its symbolism permeated both public and private life. After this system collapses, confronting the ancient regime’s symbolic presence became a visible and often dramatic aspect of post-Soviet transformation in the newly independent states. This led to the proliferation of research on symbolic politics in post-Communist countries.

Adding Rooms Onto a House We Love: Central Banking After the Global Financial Crisis

Public Administration 97:3 (2019): 546-560.

With Vincent Arel-Bundock & Vladislav Portniaguine.

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This article examines the extent to which central bankers have been willing and able to rethink their beliefs about monetary policy in the wake of the global financial crisis. We show that despite the upheaval, the core pre-crisis monetary policy paradigm remains relatively intact: central bankers believe that they should primarily pursue price stability through targeting a low inflation rate in a transparent manner, and that they need operational independence in order to achieve this goal. In a bid to address post-crisis conditions and maintain their credibility, however, central bankers have also layered new elements onto this paradigmatic core. We document both the resilience of pre-crisis beliefs and the process of layering using computer-assisted text analysis and qualitative analysis of 13,586 speeches given between 1997 and 2017 by central bankers from around the world.

Juliet Johnson and David Woodruff, “Currency Crises in Post-Soviet Russia,” Russian Review, 76:4 (2017): 612-634.

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Juliet Johnson and Seçkin Köstem, “Frustrated Leadership: Russia’s Economic Alternative to the West,” Global Policy 7:2 (2016): 207-16.

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Juliet Johnson and Andrew Barnes, “Financial Nationalism and its International Enablers: The Hungarian Experience,” Review of International Political Economy 22:3 (2015): 535-569.

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Juliet Johnson, Daniel Mügge, Leonard Seabrooke, Cornelia Woll, Ilene Grabel, and Kevin P. Gallagher, “The Future of International Political Economy: Introduction to the 20th Anniversary Issue of RIPE,” Review of International Political Economy 20:4 (2013): 1009-1023.

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Benjamin Forest and Juliet Johnson, “Security and Atonement: Controlling Access to the World Trade Center Memorial,” Cultural Geographies 20:3 (2013): 405-411.

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Benjamin Forest and Juliet Johnson, “Monumental Politics: Regime Type and Public Memory in Post-Communist States,” Post-Soviet Affairs 27:3 (2011): 269-288.

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Benjamin Forest and Juliet Johnson, “Monumental Politics: Regime Type and Public Memory in Post-Communist States,” Post-Soviet Affairs 27:3 (2011): 269-288.

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Rachel Epstein and Juliet Johnson, “Uneven Integration: Economic and Monetary Union in Central and Eastern Europe,” Journal of Common Market Studies 48:5 (2010): 1237-1260.

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Juliet Johnson, “The Remains of Conditionality: The Faltering Enlargement of the Euro Zone,” Journal of European Public Policy 15:6 (2008): 826-841.

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Juliet Johnson, “Forbidden Fruit: Russia’s Uneasy Relationship with the US Dollar,” Review of International Political Economy 15:3 (2008): 379-398.