Research and Selected Publications
Research agenda
Maddie's research examines the intersection of religion and international security, with a focus on the moral and institutional dimensions of U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America during the Cold War. Methodologically, she combines archival research in Chilean ecclesiastical and U.S. government sources with a hermeneutic approach that treats policy and religious texts as interpretive acts rather than transparent records.
Dissertation Project
Borrowed Words: The Catholic Church, the Alliance for Progress, and the Limits of U.S. Power in Chile, 1961–1990
This dissertation examines how moral language the United States deployed to justify its Cold War policy in Latin America was reinterpreted by domestic religious institutions and returned as a constraint on U.S. foreign policy. Focusing on the Alliance for Progress and its reception by the Chilean Catholic Church, the project traces how human-rights language authorized under the Alliance was later redeployed by the Comité Pro Paz and the Vicaría de la Solidaridad to document abuses under the Pinochet dictatorship, and how that documentation was amplified through international bodies in ways that constrained U.S. policy options. Drawing on original archival research conducted in Santiago and Washington, Maddie develops a theory of "recursive legitimacy" to explain how moral rhetoric, once deployed by a state, can escape its control and be redirected against it.
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 Maddie calls the hypocrisy penalty — compounds over time and cannot be resolved through rhetoric alone. The mechanism is traced through U.S.-Chilean relations, 1961–1978.