A first group of projects analyzes the emergence of the nation-state, its subsequent diffusion across the world, and the consequences for the dynamics of war and peace. I offer a historical, institutionalist account of this process, according to which the nation-state model diffuses wherever nationalists are empowered, independent of local modernization processes. Once adopted, it provides incentives to politicize ethnicity, which in weak states with weak civil societies leads to ethnic exclusion and thus to violent conflict within and between nationalizing states. Most projects are based on the collection of new quantitative data that cover the entire world and involved extensive collaboration with other researchers.
Kroneberg and Wimmer. "Struggling over the boundaries of belonging. A formal model of nation building, ethnic closure, and populism", in American Journal of Sociology 118(1), forthcoming.
Wimmer and Feinstein. "The rise of the nation-state across the world, 1816-2001", in American Sociological Review 75(5):764-790, 2010.
Best Article Award of the Comparative Historical Sociology Section of ASA
"A Swiss anomaly? A relational account of national boundary making", in Nations and Nationalism 17(4):718-737, 2011.
Wimmer, Cederman and Min. "Ethnic politics and armed conflict. A configurational analysis of a new global dataset", in American Sociological Review 74(2):316-337, 2009.
Appendix with coding rules and additional tables.
To access the Ethnic Power Relations dataset click here
Cederman, Wimmer and Min. "Why do ethnic groups rebel? New data and analysis", in World Politics 62(1):87-119, 2010.
Wimmer and Min. "From empire to nation-state. Explaining wars in the modern world, 1816-2001", in American Sociological Review 71(6):867-897, 2006.
Best Article Award of the Comparative Historical Sociology Section of ASA
Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award of the Political Sociology Section of ASA
The war dataset is introduced in: Wimmer and Min. "The location and purpose of wars around the world. A new global dataset, 1816-2001", in International Interactions 35(4), 2009.
To access the War by Location and Purpose dataset click here.
ETHNITY, BOUNDARIES AND NETWORKS
A second group of projects deals with ethnic boundaries. I am working toward a comparative account that explains why certain empirical constellations conform to constructivist notions while others come close to essentialist understandings of ethnicity. I suggest to understand ethnic boundaries as the outcome of a negotiation process between actors that pursue different boundary making strategies, depending on institutional incentives, their position within power hierarchies, and pre-existing networks of alliances. A series of articles develops this agenda on the theoretical level, while a second, collaborative project traces the emergence of ethnic and racial boundaries with a new social network dataset based on Facebook.com.
Wimmer and Lewis. "Beyond and below race. ERG models of a friendship network documented on Facebook", in American Journal of Sociology 116(2)583-642, 2010.
The Facebook dataset is described in: Lewis, Kaufman, Gonzalez, Wimmer and Christakis. “Tastes, ties, and time: a new social network dataset using Facebook.com”, in Social Networks 30:330-342, 2008.
Kroneberg and Wimmer. "Struggling over the boundaries of belonging. A formal model of nation building, ethnic closure, and populism", in American Journal of Sociology 118(1), forthcoming.Best Article Award of the Comparative Historical Sociology Section of ASA
