Workshop on Culture, History, and Society

Date: 

Friday, October 27, 2017, 12:00pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street, Room 1550

"Nation Building: Why Some Countries Come Together While Others Fall Apart"

Speaker:

Andreas WimmerLieber Professor of Sociology and Political Philosophy, Columbia University.

Contact:

Yueran Zhang
yueranzhang@g.harvard.edu

This event is part of Harvard Worldwide Week  |  #HarvardWorldwide

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Chairs:

Orlando Patterson, Faculty Associate. John Cowles Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Harvard University.

Daniel Lord Smail, Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of History, Department of History, Harvard University.

Ya-Wen Lei, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Harvard University.

Abstract:

In this talk, Columbia sociologist and political scientist Andreas Wimmer offers new answers to an age-old question. Why is national integration achieved in some diverse countries, while others are destabilized by political inequality between ethnic groups, contentious politics, or even separatism and ethnic war? Traversing centuries and continents from early nineteenth-century Europe and Asia to contemporary Africa, Andreas Wimmer delves into the slow-moving historical forces that encourage political alliances to stretch across ethnic divides and build national unity.