Pages

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Bring the Ethnic Stuff Back In

The over-used, super-cliched phrase in poli sci titles--Bring Back something that never left.  Well, I have been focused almost entirely on NATO and civil-military relations since I published my second book (For Kin or Country with the non-terrorist Bill Ayres).  The past four years or so have been a bit of a change of direction from my work on the IR of ethnic conflict. 

Butt I did have a project (with Erin Jenne and Kathleen Cunningham) going on for much of this period--collecting data on diasporas to figure out why some diasporas mobilize and lobby and/or support extremism and others do not.  The dataset on just the US case is still incomplete, but we are getting there.  This workshop involves a bunch of papers on different ethnic politics topics, so it is immersion back in that stuff that was so much the focus of my first fifteen years or so of my career.  Should be interesting.

And what better place to do that than Arizona?  No ethnic politics here?  Hmmm.  My first time in the Phoenix/Tempe area, as my previous trips were mostly through Arizona to graduate school (stopping by the Grand Canyon) and from grad school to my first job.  Arrived at night so I will have to wait to see what this place looks like.

Anyhow, more ethnic politics ahead.

No comments:

Post a Comment