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. All projects are based on the collection of new quantitative data that cover the entire world. They involve extensive collaboration with other researchers.
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), in print, 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
2007 Best Article Award of the Comparative Historical Sociology Section of ASA
2007 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, Andreas. “Elementary strategies of ethnic boundary making”, in Ethnic and Racial Studies 31(6):1025-1055, 2008
Wimmer, Andreas. "The making and unmaking of ethnic boundaries. A multi-level process theory", in American Journal of Sociology 113(4): 970–1022, 2008
2009 Theory Prize of the Theory Section of the ASA
2009 Clifford Geertz Prize for Best Article (honoroble mention) of the Cultural Sociology Section of ASA
Wimmer, Andreas. “Herder’s heritage and the boundary-making approach. Studying ethnicity in immigrant societies”, Sociological Theory 27(3):244-270, 2009
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
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
2007 Best Article Award of the Comparative Historical Sociology Section of ASA