Iván André Ruiz-Hernández is a PhD Candidate in the Johns Hopkins University Department of Political Science. His research interests span regulation and governance, contentious politics, informality, and food and agrarian studies. Iván’s dissertation traces the production, distribution, and presentation of coffee from the mountainous Los Altos region of Chiapas, Mexico, to upscale specialty cafés and import firms in Seoul, South Korea. His research elucidates the often-overlooked informal regulatory systems that emerge from the banal, routine actions of intermediaries in the gray “in-between” of supply chains and how these systems subtly sustain faraway markets. His work has been funded by the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, the Johns Hopkins University Kelly Miller Fellowship, and the Johns Hopkins University Departments of Political Science, East Asian Studies, and Anthropology. Iván completed his Master of International Policy degree and BA in International Affairs at the University of Georgia. His public-facing scholarship is forthcoming in Foreign Policy, where he argues that the latest summer of food-safety crises in the United States stems from a global food system that was constructed to be too vast, too complex, and too informal to be governed effectively from the top down.
