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Harris
Mylonas
I
am an Associate Professor of Political Science and International
Affairs at George Washington University interested in the processes of
nation- and state-building, diaspora management policies, the
politicization of cultural differences, and political development.
After completing my Ph.D. in political science at Yale University in 2008, I joined the
George Washington University faculty in fall 2009. I teach undergraduate
courses on Nationalism and European Integration, and graduate courses on Nation-Building in the
Balkans, Nationalism and Nation-Building, and Qualitative Research Methods. For 2008-2009 and 2011-2012
academic years, I was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for
International and Area Studies.
My book,The
Politics of Nation-Building: Making Co-Nationals, Refugees, and
Minorities was
published by Cambridge
University Press in 2012 and won The Peter Katzenstein Book Prize for
the best first book on International Relations, Comparative Politics,
or Political Economy in 2013, the 2014 European Studies Book Award
by the Council for European Studies which honors the best first book on
any subject in European Studies published within a two-year period, and an honorable mention by the Rothschild Prize in Nationalities and Ethnic Studies Committee of Association for the Study of Nationalities in 2014.
In The Politics of Nation-Building I
identify the conditions under which the ruling
political elites of a state target non-core groups with assimilationist
policies instead of granting them minority rights or excluding them
from the state. I argue that a state's nation-building policies toward
non-core groups - any aggregation of individuals perceived as an
unassimilated ethnic group by the ruling elite of a state - are
influenced by both its foreign policy goals and its relations with the
external patrons of these groups. Through a detailed study of the
Balkans, I show that the way a state treats a non-core group within its
own borders is determined largely by whether the state's foreign policy
is revisionist or cleaves to the international status quo, and whether
it is allied or in rivalry with that group's external patrons. The
theory is tested against a variety of alternative
explanations on multiple levels of analysis: a dataset of
nation-building policies towards all politically relevant non-core
groups in the Balkans after WWI, archival evidence on case studies
focusing on the treatment of a few non-core groups over time, and a
microlevel subnational study of a religiously, culturally, and
linguistically heterogeneous province.
My recent publications include an article in Comparative Political Studies on
the impact of the international environment in which a state develops
on its linguistic homogeneity and national cohesion (co-authored with
Keith Darden); an article in Social Science Quarterly on the methodological problems in the study of nation-building; and an article in Security Studies on the conditions under which
stateless nationalist movements change the area they see as
appropriately constituting the nation-state they aspire to establish (co-authored with Nadav G. Shelef).
I am currently working on a second book project - tentatively entitled The Strategic Logic of Diaspora Management Policies - analyzing why some states develop policies to cultivate links with
and/or to attract back certain diasporic communities while others do
not.
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