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Waves of War: Nationalism, State Formation and Ethnic Exclusion in the Modern World , Andreas Wimmer , Cambridge University Press , 2013, pp. 328.
Reviews/Recensions
In this landmark book, Wimmer models the rise and spread of nation-states, the role of ethnic conflict in nation-state boundary creation, and how both relate to the incidence and intensity of modern civil and interstate wars. Building on his (2002) book, Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict, Wimmer constructs a model of nation-state formation using macro sociological and comparative politics approaches and uses quantitative analyses to test hypotheses generated from the model against original databases. The book's ambition and scope produce a "powerful and parsimonious argument" that links the rise and spread of nation-states, types and levels of ethnic exclusion across nation-states and the resulting civil and interstate conflict. However, Erin Jenne, who reviewed Waves of War for the H-Nationalism Network (http://www.hnetorg/reviews/showrev?id=38685), sees its vast scope as "its Achilles' heel" because it leads Wimmer "to shoehorn ...disparate processes under the vague rubric of 'nationalism,' which becomes a shorthand for many causal mechanisms already explored in other works, in more satisfying ways with greater empirical validation." Nonetheless, I conclude that most readers will find the book valuable. Certainly, scholars of civil and interstate conflict should be excited by its scope and originality, although some scholars of nationalism may be put off by Wimmer's offhand dismissal of other approaches and vague conceptualizations of national phenomena. Waves of War has much to contribute to scholarship in both fields, however, especially in its scope, originality and methodological innovativeness.
Wimmer's "analytic framework" that "underlines...the empirical search of the chapters" (11) draws from three traditions in political sociology and comparative politics. Relational structuralism contributes the assertion that "networks of political alliances determine which categorical cleavages--nations... ethnic groups, social classes, regions, cities or tribes--will be focused on" in a country's politics (11). Wimmer also asserts that "such cross-class networks of alliances... represent the building blocks of political life... and [are] the basis on which politically relevant collective identities are often formed" (11), challenging many theories that attribute nationalism's rise to aspects of modernity. Adopting a core claim of contentious politics, he further maintains that political transformations involve "political actors struggl[ing] for control...