HARRIS MYLONAS  (Ph.D. Yale University, 2008)

I am a political scientist interested in the processes of nation- and state-building, the politicization of cultural differences, immigrant and refugee incorporation policies, and political development.

I joined the George Washington University faculty in fall 2009 as an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs. I teach courses on Nationalism, European Integration, Nation-Building in the Balkans, and Qualitative Research Methods. For 2008-2009 I was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, where I will return to complete my second year in 2011-2012.

My forthcomingbook,The Politics of Nation-Building: The Making of Co-Nationals, Refugees, and Minorities (Cambridge University Press), identifies the conditions in 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. 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 a forthcoming article on third-party nation-building in occupied territories in Ethnopolitics (with Keith Darden), a chapter on nation-building in the Western Macedonia in the edited volume Rethinking Violence: State and Non-State Actors in Conflict (BCSIA International Security Series, MIT Press),  an article on electoral competition in Sub-Saharan Africa elections in Comparative Political Studies (with Nasos Roussias), and a chapter on Greek repatriation policies in Immigrants and Minorities: Discourse and Policies (Vivliorama/KEMO, with Elpida Vogli). Opinion pieces of mine on international affairs have appeared in Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, CNN.com, Guardian, Newsweek Japan, Hurriyet Daily News and Economic Review, and The Age, among others.