Research and Selected Publications
Research agenda
Maddie’s research examines religion, human rights, and U.S. foreign policy, with a particular interest in how institutions produce and transmit knowledge about political violence. Her current project focuses on human-rights documentation in Pinochet-era Chile, beginning with the ecumenical Comité de Cooperación para la Paz and continuing with the Catholic Vicaría de la Solidaridad, and follows how that evidence entered legal, archival, and American policy institutions. Methodologically, she combines archival research in Chilean ecclesiastical and U.S. government sources with close attention to bureaucratic categories and documentary practices. Her work asks how institutions decide who counts as a victim, what counts as sufficient proof, and how those decisions shape what later courts, governments, and historians are able to know.
Dissertation Project
Desaparecidos: Church Documentation, Internal Conflict, and the Evidence of Disappearance in Chile, 1973-1980
This dissertation asks how church-based institutions in Santiago turned uncertain reports of disappearance into evidence that could survive official denial. Focusing first on the ecumenical Comité de Cooperación para la Paz and, from 1976, the Catholic Vicaría de la Solidaridad, the project reconstructs the documentary and legal practices through which family testimony became case files, statistical categories, legal petitions, and durable records of state violence. Rather than treating those records as neutral bookkeeping, I examine the institutional judgments built into them: what facts counted as sufficient proof, which claims became recognizable cases, and what happened when the evidence fell short. I also ask what changed when this documentary apparatus moved from an ecumenical organization into an explicitly Catholic one, and how the resulting evidence was later received and reformatted by other institutions.
Drawing on archival research in Santiago alongside Chilean, inter-American, and U.S. government records, the dissertation follows evidence from intake desks and court petitions into broader systems of official knowledge. It argues that the history of disappearance is also a history of institutional thresholds: the rules by which violence became knowable, officially recognized, and eventually preserved for later courts, commissions, historians, and families.
Working Paper
State disappearance and the evolution of U.s. security assistance
This article traces how 'disappearance' evolved from a country-specific proviso into a general category shaping how the United States calculates security assistance. Congress first attached human rights conditions to security assistance law in 1974, and in 1976 wrote Chile-specific restrictions tied to whether the government accounted for detained persons — without yet naming disappearance directly. Only in December 1980 did Congress fold the practice into general statutory language, applicable to any recipient of U.S. assistance, not Chile alone. The article argues that Chile functioned as a proving ground for a category that only later became a standing feature of how Washington evaluates whether a government's conduct disqualifies it from aid — a case in which one heavily documented country reshaped the general architecture of assistance law.
Working Paper
Recursive Legitimacy and the Hypocrisy Penalty in World Politics
Why do states sometimes face their sharpest moral constraint from the very interpreters they empowered? This article develops a theory of recursive legitimacy: when states deploy moral language through authoritative interpreters, those interpreters can transform its meaning through their own doctrinal horizons and return it as a standard the state's own conduct is measured against. The resulting strain — what I call the hypocrisy penalty — compounds over time and cannot be resolved through rhetoric alone.