2008 Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies Winner
The AAASS Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies, established in 2008, and sponsored by the Kathryn W. and Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, will be awarded annually for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology, or geography in the previous calendar year.
Philip G. Roeder
The 2008 AAASS Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies was presented to Philip G. Roeder for Where Nation-States Come From? Institutional Change in the Age of Nationalism, published by Princeton University Press.
A political scientist, Roeder’s ambitious study asks why there are less than 200 nation-states in the world today, even though there have been more than 800 active nation-state projects. Drawing on the Soviet and post-Soviet experience, Roeder’s political institutional explanation is straightforward, original and convincingly argued on the basis of extensive historical analysis. This is comparative, multi-method research at its best, and a significant contribution to theories of the nation-state and conflicts over nation-states in the Soviet and post-Soviet world.
2008 AAASS Davis Center Book Prize Honorable Mentions
The prize committee also decided to present two honorable mentions:
- Zsuzsa Gille received an honorable mention for From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History, published by Indiana University Press
- Catherine Wanner received an honorable mention for Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism, published by Cornell University Press
(Please click on the name of the winner to see the citation for the award, to connect to the publisher's web page with more information about the book, please click on the title)
