Section: Staff Profiles

Liliana Riga

Name
Dr Liliana Riga
Title
Senior Research Fellow
Organisation
Sociology, School of Social and Political Science
University of Edinburgh
Address
5.10 Chrystal Macmillan Building 15a George Square Edinburgh UK EH8 9LD
Telephone
+44 (0)131 651 1853
E-Mail
URL
http://www.sociology.ed.ac.uk/staff_profiles/liliana_riga
No Photo

Education

Ph.D. Sociology (McGill University)

M.A. Political Science (International Relations) (Columbia University)

B.A. Political Science (University California, Berkeley)

Research Interests

  • political sociology, comparative historical sociology
  • race/ethnicity, class, and assimilation
  • ethnic and sectarian conflict, ethnic cleansing
  • American society and foreign policy

Previous research has explored the intersection of identities and inequalities in the multiethnic Russian Empire, showing that in 1917 a universalist class ideology (socialism) emerged out of particularistic ethnic networks, experiences, and exclusions. The project on the Bolshevik revolutionaries explored the roles of assimilation strategies and the appeals of universalist ideas in ethnically and religiously diverse contexts.

Two current projects explore similar analytical issues in different contexts. The first is based on a large, two-year Leverhulme Trust research grant (with James Kennedy, University of Edinburgh). Analytically it examines the role of America's diverse democracy on its foreign policies of nation-building abroad. It is empirically anchored around how American political elites' knowledge of their own multiethnic/racial democracy over the 20th century's 'American Empire' has been central to the shape and composition of East Central Europe. Based on archival research, recently released State Department materials, and extensive interviews with policymakers who drafted and implemented the Dayton Peace Accords, we find that there has been a complex, subtle and evolving relationship between America's racial and immigrant experiences with diverse democracy and foreign policy elites' analyses of the mechanisms for the liberal accommodation of ethnic, national, and religious minorities abroad. The analysis focuses in particular on the influence of distinctively American sociologies of assimilation and the sources of social cohesion.

The second project is also underway as a large ESRC proposal: "Evaluating post-ethnic cleansing reconstruction: neighborhood dynamics in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan". The project seeks to link post-ethnic conflict interventions--particularly property restitution and rights of minority refugee/IDP returns--to the patterns of ethnic cleansing that forced the displacement. Adopting a comparative effectiveness methodology, it will examine the democracy aid policies of four agencies (OSCE, UNHCR, USAID, DFID) using 'neighborhood reconstruction' as its unit of analysis.

Publications

 Books

The Bolsheviks and the Russian Empire (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)

Liberalism, Pragmatism, and Multiethnic Democracy. The American Century in East Central Europe, 1919-2001 (with J. Kennedy) (in preparation)

 Articles

(2009) "Tolerant majorities, loyal minorities and 'ethnic reversals': theorizing the construction of minority rights at Versailles 1919" (with J. Kennedy) Nations and Nationalism 15(3): 461-482

(reprinted in Against Orthodoxy: Studies in Nationalism, T. Harrison and S. Drakulic (eds), UBC Press, 2011)

*(2008) "The Ethnic Roots of Class Universalism: Rethinking the 'Russian' Revolutionary Elite" The American Journal of Sociology 114(3): 649-705

*2009 Honorable Mention Award for Best Article in Comparative Historical Sociology, American Sociological Association

(2006) "'The Inquiry' and the Mapping of East Central Europe in 1919: Mitteleuropa as 'Middle America'" (With J. Kennedy) Ab Imperio 4:271-300

(2006) "Ethnonationalism, assimilation and the social worlds of the Jewish Bolsheviks in fin de siecle Tsarist Russia" Comparative Studies in Society and History 48(4): 762-97

(2006) "Reconciling Nation and Class in Imperial Borderlands: the Making of Bolshevik Internationalists Karl Radek and Feliks Dzierzynski in East Central Europe" Journal of Historical Sociology 19(4): 447-72



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This page was published on 1 May 2012


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