Andreas Wimmer is a sociologist and political scientist who was trained as a social anthropologist. He is the Lieber Professor of Sociology and Political Philosophy at Columbia University. His research assumes a long term historical and globally comparative perspective. It asks how states are built and nations formed, how ethno-racial boundaries and hierarchies form or dissolve in the process, and when these inequalities will lead to armed conflict and war. Most recently, he seeks to understand how ideas and institutions travel across the world and with what long term consequences. He has published widely, including the book Waves of War, Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict (Cambridge) and Nation Building: Why Some Countries Come Together While Others Fall Apart (Princeton).

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Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

I think the shift towards more rigorous ways of making arguments and substantiating them empirically is very promising. Causal inference research also has its disadvantages, however, as the questions tend to be rather narrow and most research in that tradition comes in the form of case studies. It becomes harder and harder to see the big picture and to gain a comparative, encompassing perspective that could explain why we see this effect here and that effect there. I hope that macro-comparative research, which is focused on variables and factors that we can’t manipulate in experiments with individual participants or in randomized control trials, will come back. I see some signs of this actually happening.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

I am constantly learning new research techniques and I tend to move around topics quite frequently. Substantially, my views on nationalism and the nation-state have become more positive. In my earlier work, I highlighted the exclusionary nature of both, emphasizing that either ethnic minorities (think of the United States) or migrants (as in many European states that are either homogenous or succeeded in integrating domestic minorities) were left out from the process of forming an integrated political arena. This is basically the message of Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict, which was directed against the standard tales of modernity as a borderless and inclusionary social formation. 

After the downsides of neo-liberal global financial and economic integration became starkly visible, I have come to see nationalism and the nation-state in more positive terms as the—so far—only combination of ideologies and political institutions that can guarantee equal rights, public goods provision, protection from arbitrary........

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