I am a political scientist interested in the processes of state- and nation-building, political development, and diaspora policy. My work contributes to our understanding of states’ management of diversity that may originate from national minorities, immigrants, diasporas, or refugees. I am particularly interested in the role of decision makers’ perceptions about foreign involvement in their domestic affairs and... Continue Reading →
American Constitutive Stories
Together with Andrew Thompson we have put together a space where Americans from different walks of life can share their understanding of their national identity, how it relates to other identities, who they think to be American heroes, and what they see as the most promising connecting tissue of our society in the future.
The Global Politics of Fifth Columns
The invocation of fifth columns in the political arena—whether contrived or based on real fears—has historically recurred periodically and is experiencing an upsurge in our era of democratic erosion and geopolitical uncertainty. Fifth columns accusations can have baleful effects on governance and trust, as they call into question the loyalty and belonging of the targeted... Continue Reading →
What does the pandemic reveal about perennial moral dilemmas between individual and societal interest, as well as the national and the global interest? In our introductory essay for the special issue on Pandemic Nationalism Ned Whalley and I suggest that while nationalism has unquestionably helped overcome collective action problems within state borders, it has undermined... Continue Reading →
Research Methodology
I have been preoccupied with methodological problems in the study of nation-building for many years. My first contribution, “Methodological Problems in the Study of Nation-Building: Behaviorism and Historicist Solutions in Political Science,” appeared in a special issue on Nationalism which was published in Social Science Quarterly. In the article, I discussed the methodological problems that... Continue Reading →
Nation-Building
How do states decide their policies toward “non-core” groups—any aggregation of individuals that a state’s ruling elite perceives as an unassimilated ethnic group? What accounts for the variation in diaspora policy across different groups of co-ethnics living abroad by the same government? Both my published book and the one that I am currently writing serve... Continue Reading →
Political Development
Beyond my interest in the international dimension of internal processes, I have also systematically studied the effects of institutions in domestic politics. In a co-authored article that Nasos Roussias (University of Sheffield) and I published in Comparative Political Studies we explored the links between regime type, electoral conduct, and political competition in Sub-Saharan Africa. In... Continue Reading →
Diaspora Policy
I am currently at work on a second, single-authored book on diaspora management logics. The book is building on various diaspora-related projects I have been involved with. I recently co-edited a special issue on “The Microfoundations of Diaspora Politics: Unpacking the State and Disaggregating the Diaspora” for the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2019)... Continue Reading →
EJPR Political Data Yearbook
My involvement and writings on the financial crisis in Europe, with Greece at its epicenter, led to me being invited to become one of the contributors for the Political Data Yearbook published by the European Journal of Political Research, a major journal of European political science. Richard Katz and Peter Mair began editing the Political... Continue Reading →