Waves of War

1. Introduction and summary; 2. The birth of the nation; 3. The global rise of the nation-state; 4. Nation-state formation and war; 5. Ethnic politics and armed conflict; 6. Can peace be engineered?; 7. Conclusion; Appendices.

Andreas Wimmer is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research is aimed at understanding the dynamics of nation-state formation, ethnic boundary making and political conflict from a comparative perspective. He is the author of Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict: Shadows of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and his articles have been published by the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, World Politics, Sociological Theory and Ethnic and Racial Studies, among others. Professor Wimmer's work has won best article awards from the Comparative Historical, Political, Cultural and Theory sections of the American Sociological Association as well as the Thyssen Prize for Best Article in the Social Sciences.

'For all their usefulness, quantitative studies of conflict often suffer from theoretical shallowness and historical myopia. Andreas Wimmer complements his quantitative study of global conflict with a deep theoretical understanding of nationalism and ethnicity. He then embeds it into a powerful historical account of the rise and spread of the nation-state during the past two centuries. Waves of War is a critical and timely contribution to the study of conflict that sets a new standard.' Stathis N. Kalyvas, Yale University 'Combining the broad landscapes of comparative macro sociology (in the tradition of Stein Rokkan) with data-filled attention to the micro processes of nation formation (in the tradition of Karl Deutsch), Andreas Wimmer paints an original and compelling picture of the historical development of the nation-state and the relationship of state-building to contemporary violence.' David D. Laitin, Watkins Professor of Political Science, Stanford University 'Andreas Wimmer's Waves of War uses quantitative comparative-historical analysis with stunning success to address some of the biggest questions of macrosociology: the creation of large-scale ethnic communities, the birth of the nation-state, and the role of warfare in the creation of the modern political world.' James Mahoney, Northwestern University