Description:

Associate Professor Jesse Driscoll from the University of California San Diego will be joining us for our second virtual Comparative Politics Workshop. His featured work is titled "Ukraine's Civil War".

His first book, “Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States,”(2015) is published in the Cambridge Studies on Comparative Politics series. The book maps the processes by which well-functioning domestic hierarchies emerged after relatively short periods of anarchic violence in Georgia and Tajikistan. Driscoll argues that when a state has failed and promises by the nearby great power (in this case Russia) to provide security guarantees are not credible, policy-makers would do well consider state-building as a complex coalition formation process by local violence entrepreneurs (warlords). His second book (forthcoming 2020) is a practitioner's guide to fieldwork methods for academic researchers.

Please feel free to reach out to Prof. Jordan Gans-Morse (jordan.gans-morse@northwestern.edu) and Salih Noor (snoor@u.northwestern.edu) for more details on the CPW session.