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RESEARCH
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 my long-term goal of contributing to our understanding of
states’ management of diversity that may originate from national
minorities, immigrants, diasporas, or refugees. Bot emphasize and
explore the importance of international security considerations in
domestic policy-making.
In my research, I am particularly interested in the role of decision
makers’ perceptions about foreign involvement in their domestic affairs
and the impact these perceptions have on the planning and
implementation of state policies. The first book, discussed
directly below along with related projects, examines these issues
through the lens of nation- and state-building, and explores
decision-making processes with regard to policies targeting non-core
groups within the country. My second book views these issues through the lens of states’
diaspora management policies, and explores policies directed at members
of the core group living abroad.
Thus, my research interests lie at the intersection of comparative
politics and international security. I aim to develop theoretical
frameworks that cross geographic boundaries. Though my empirical work
concentrates on the Balkans and Turkey, I have also published analyses
of electoral competition in Sub-Saharan Africa, of nationalism in Asia
and the Middle East, and of European political developments.
Nation- and State-Building
Under what conditions are state elites likely to
target a non-core group with assimilation, grant it minority rights, or
remove it from the state? Many scholars who have addressed this
question have focused on domestic explanations for state behavior,
while ignoring international factors. In The Politics of
Nation-Building: Making Co-Nationals, Refugees, and Minorities
(Cambridge University Press, February 2013), I offer a geostrategic
explanation for why states pursue distinct policies for different
ethnic groups. Specifically, I argue that a state’s nation-building
policies toward non-core groups are driven by its foreign policy goals
and its interstate relations with the external patrons of these
non-core 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. If the non-core group is
perceived as mobilized by a rival state, the government is more likely
to adopt policies of assimilation (if it is status quo) or exclusion
(if it is revisionist), while groups backed by allied states are more
likely to be accommodated. Non-core groups without external links are
more likely to be targeted with assimilationist policies. The argument
presented in the book bridges comparative politics and international
relations’ literatures pertaining to the process of national
integration.
The book has already garnered substantial attention, winning the 2014
European Studies Book Award by the Council for European Studies for the
best first book on any subject in European Studies published within a
two-year period and The Peter Katzenstein Book Prize for the best first
book on International Relations, Comparative Politics, or Political
Economy in 2013, as well as an honorable mention by the Rothschild
Prize in Nationalities and Ethnic Studies committee of the Association
for the Study of Nationalities in 2014. The book has also been reviewed
in various journals including Perspectives on Politics, International Studies Review, Nations and
Nationalism, and Public Administration and is being taught at
Universities around the country, including at Duke, Yale, and
Northwestern.
This is the first book that systematically documents nation-building
policies in the post-WWI Balkans and uses both historical and political
science methods to analyze state policies toward non-core groups. The
theory is tested against a variety of alternative explanations on
multiple levels of analysis including 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. The book makes three novel conceptual moves:
from the uncritical use of the term “minority” to “non-core group”;
from the restrictive “homeland” to more analytically accurate “external
power”; and, from the dichotomous conceptualization of nation-building
policies as “inclusion/exclusion” or “violent/non-violent” to
“assimilation, accommodation, and exclusion.”
I built on some of the material and arguments developed in my book, to
produce stand-alone articles related to my research agenda on
nation-building. I published a chapter in an edited volume that was
part of the Belfer Center Studies in International Affairs series (MIT
press) on the study of nation-building policies in the Balkans.
An out-of-sample test of my argument in China was published in
Security Studies (co-authored with
Enze Han, SOAS). In that article, we relaxed several assumptions of my
argument from the book to explore the impact that the relative power of
the external patron has on the processes of nation-building as well as
ethnic group mobilization. Given the existence of an external patron,
an ethnic group's response to a host state's policies depends on the
perceptions about the relative strength of the external patron
vis-à-vis the host state and on whether the support is originating from
an enemy or an ally of the host state. The article presents five
configurations and tests our theoretical framework based on data on the
eighteen largest ethnic groups in China from 1949 to 1965. We trace the
Chinese government's policies toward these groups, and examine how each
group responded to the various nation-building policies.
State-Building, Secession, and Nationalist Movements
I have published a paper on third party state-building efforts in
collaboration with Keith Darden (American University). This work flows
naturally from the concluding chapter of my book where I draw the
policy implications of my argument. The motivation for this project was
our dissatisfaction with widespread arguments in both scholarly and
policy-making circles that the path to stability in cases like Iraq and
Afghanistan is to increase the size of the police and the army. Our
concern was that an increase in the number of people who are trained in
the arts and implements of force does little, on its own, to build the
capacity of the state or to increase order. We suggest that effective
state-building requires effective nation-building. It rests on a
successful effort to create social cohesion, loyalty and legitimacy of
rule. If efforts to build coercive capacity precede efforts to build
loyalty and legitimacy, the result is more likely to be a future civil
war than a stable governing state. A second, and more sobering,
argument we make is that nation-building is at least a generational
process. Although these strategies take time, the hastier alternatives
have proved historically to be dangerously ineffective. Nation-building
requires a durable commitment, and, thus, in most contemporary settings
third-party state-building is almost certain to fail. We conclude with
some thoughts on what a more general theory of third-party
nation-building would have to take into account, highlighting three
important elements: First, the actor who is doing the nation-building;
second, the structure of the international environment during the
operations; third, the characteristics of the local population. Our
article was published in Ethnopolitic as lead article and the editors of the journal
invited comments by Fotini Christia (MIT), Erin
Jenne (Central European University), Gordon Bardos (Columbia
University), as well as from David Siroky and Yoav Gortzak (Arizona
State University).
Darden and I also have an article in Comparative Political Studies entitled “Threats to Territorial Integrity, National Mass Schooling, and Linguistic Commonality.” We
ask: Why are some countries more linguistically homogeneous than
others? We posit that the international environment in which a state
develops partially determines the extent of its linguistic commonality
and national cohesion. Specifically, the presence of an external threat
of territorial conquest or externally supported secession leads
governing elites to have stronger incentives to pursue nation-building
strategies to generate national cohesion, often leading to the
cultivation of a common national language through mass schooling.
Comparing cases with similar levels of initial linguistic
heterogeneity, state capacity, and development, but in different
international environments, we find that states that did not face
external threats to their territorial integrity were more likely to
outsource education and other tools for constructing identity to
missionaries or other groups, or not to invest in assimilation at all,
leading to higher ethnic heterogeneity. States developing in high
threat environments were more likely to invest in nation-building
strategies to homogenize their populations.
A thematically related article that I co-authored with Nadav Shelef
(University of Wisconsin-Madison) was published in Security Studies.
In “Which Land is Our Land? Domestic Politics and Change in the
Territorial Claims of Stateless Nationalist Movements,” we explore the
conditions
under which stateless nationalist movements change the geographic area
they see as appropriately constituting the nation-state they aspire to
establish. We argue that shifts in the territories stateless
nationalist movements seek as their nation-states occur as a byproduct
of the politically competitive domestic environment in which these
movements are embedded. As nationalist movements engage in the
competition for power and survival, their leaders may alter their
rhetoric about the geographic extent of the desired national state to
meet immediate political challenges that are often only loosely related
to territorial issues. If these initially tactical, rhetorical
modulations successfully resolve the short-term challenges that spurred
their adoption, they can become institutionalized as comprising the new
territorial scope of the desired national state. Our article
draws a number of hypotheses from the literatures on nationalism and
state-formation that might account for such changes. We compare their
predictions about the timing, direction, and process of change to the
empirical record in the two stateless national movements in the
post-Ottoman space: Fatah and the Macedonian Revolutionary
Organization. This article is part of a larger data collection project
we hope to undertake.
Diaspora Management
I am currently at work on a second, single-authored
book about the politics of diaspora management.
My work on this
began in 2008, when I collaborated with Elpida Vogli (University of
Thrace) on a chapter analyzing Greek incorporation strategies toward
co-ethnic repatriate groups. That project was motivated by the
observation that the Greek state followed different policies toward
similar sized communities of Greek repatriates from the former Soviet
Union and Albania in the 1990s. Our chapter, which was published in
2010 in Greek, concluded that the difference in treatment was a
function of state interests, but the intensity of the preferential
treatment of the Greeks from the former Soviet Union can only be
explained by electoral and patronage politics.
Since then I continued working on the theoretical framework and
published a chapter entitled “Ethnic Return Migration, Selective
Incentives, and the Right to Freedom of Movement in Post-Cold War
Greece,” in a volume edited by Willem Maas, Democratic Citizenship and
the Free Movement of People. In this chapter, I explore whether the
right to ‘freedom of movement’ was violated by the Greek repatriation
policy toward Greeks from the former Soviet Union. I conclude that the
right to ‘freedom of movement’ was not formally violated by the
repatriation policy. Nonetheless, the government policy did attempt to
influence the settlement pattern of the repatriates that opted to enter
their Repatriation program, in an attempt to use the Greeks from the
former Soviet Union to change the ethnic demography of Thrace and boost
its economic development in the same region, by linking the right to
repatriate itself as well as the privileges that accompanied it with
settlement in specific locations. Overall, however, labor market
opportunities ended up having a higher impact on the settlement
patterns of the Greek repatriates from the former Soviet Union than the
selective incentives put in place by the Greek administration. As a
result, the goals of decentralization and national homogenization of
certain peripheral areas did not materialize. Ironically, the poor
implementation of the program, the dependency developed through the
different stages, and the de facto segregation of this population from
the rest of the Greek society have probably hindered rather than
facilitated their national integration.
Building on my prior work on Greece, I spent the summer of 2013 in the
Republic of Korea exploring whether the logic I had identified in the
Greek state was operative outside of Europe and its neighborhood. I
spent a month and a half in Seoul, at Korea University, researching
their diaspora policy. I conducted over 20 interviews on various
aspects of the policy. A policy memo was published as a result of a
talk I gave at The Asan Institute for Policy Studies, one of the
leading think tanks in the country.
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 our piece,
we raise several questions: Are the systematic effects of electoral
rules the same across regime types? Does the conduct of elections
affect the process of strategic coordination between voters and
parties? When do votes count? The literature to date has not considered
these issues and also analyzes elections in settings where a crucial
set of its assumptions are clearly violated. We argued that the
mechanism of strategic coordination only operates in democracies that
hold free and fair elections, and exhibit the ways it the mechanism is
not operative outside of this domain. To conduct this analysis we
compiled a new data set on sub-Saharan African elections and
demonstrated that the interaction of electoral rules and ethnopolitical
cleavages predicts the number of parties only in democratic settings
with free and fair elections, failing to produce substantive effects in
nondemocratic ones.
Additionally, my teaching and policy engagement led to a policy memo on
the EU enlargement policy in the Western Balkans. The financial crisis
and the recent rounds of enlargement have raised doubts –if not
hostility—toward existing, candidate and potential candidate states
from the region among western European member states and their
constituencies. At the same time popular support for the EU project is
at a low point in many parts of the Western Balkans. The involvement of
Turkey, Russia, as well as non-state actors in the region complicates
the picture for the EU and the US. Realistically, we need to rethink
first, the content of the European vision; second, what is the public
good that is being provided by this club; and, third, whether the Union
can expand and still produce the same quality of public goods as
before. The EU, I argue, needs to implement the Lisbon Treaty more
effectively. In short, overcoming the troubles at the center of the EU
is as important for sustaining popular support in the Western Balkans
as is the orientation of the local leadership, if not more.
Euro-Atlantic integration may be the only viable alternative for the
Western Balkans at the moment, but for it to remain the only
alternative in the future the EU itself has to overcome this impasse.
If we do not address these questions we may be talking past each other
and more importantly over the heads of the citizens of the Western
Balkans.
Finally, the recent financial crisis in Europe, with
Greece at its epicenter, occupied some of my attention in the past six
years. I wrote a series of op-eds (LAtimes, CNN.com, Foreign Affairs, among others) as
well as more analytical pieces, including a chapter in an edited volume
for Springer in 2011 and an essay entitled “Democratic Politics in
Times of Austerity: The Limits of Forced Reform in Greece” in
Perspectives on Politics in 2014. My involvement and writings on the
crisis 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 Data Yearbook
more than two decades ago as an annual special issue of the European
Journal for Political Research, where “a network of established
political scientists […] were to write individually authored reports on
developments in their country during the previous year.” Since
2010, I have published two co-authored entries (with George Th.
Mavrogordatos, University of Athens) and three single authored ones.
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