Andreas Wimmer

Andreas Wimmer is professor of sociology at UCLA. Wimmer's USIP project aims to better understand the causal mechanisms that lead to armed conflicts fought to achieve separate statehood, ethnic autonomy, or a change in the ethnic balance of power of a state. During his stay at USIP, he will draw on an original data-set of ethnic power relations to produce new case-based analyses and policy recommendations.

Wimmer’s writings have explored how nationbuilding politicizes ethnic differences, and what conditions bring about various forms of exclusion and conflict along ethnic, national or racial lines. He has focused on examples from both the developing and the developed world and used various methodological and analytical strategies: anthropological field research (in Mexican indigenous communities and among the Kurds of Iraq), network studies (in Swiss immigrant neighborhoods and among American college students), quantitative cross-national research (on wars and ethnic conflicts), and a comparative historical analysis (of Swiss, Iraqi, and Mexican nation-state formation).

Wimmer has been professor of sociology at UCLA since 2002. From 1999-2002, Wimmer was full professor and director of the Center for Development Studies of the University of Bonn.  He has consulted for the International Monetary Fund, international and national nongovernmental organizations and national governments in Europe, and was a founding director of the Swiss Forum for Migration Studies at the University of Neuchâtel.

Wimmer received his PhD in social anthropology from the University of Zurich and his MA in social anthropology and sociology of mass communications, also from the University of Zurich.
 

Publications:

• “Ethnic politics and armed conflict. A configurational analysis of a new global dataset”, in American Sociological Review 74(2), 2009:316-337 (with Lars-Erik Cederman and Brian Min)
• “From empire to nation-states. Explaining wars in the modern world”, in American Sociological Review 71(6):867-897, 2006. (with Brian Min)
• Facing Ethnic Conflicts. Towards a New Realism. Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004. (Co-Editor with Richard Goldstone, Donald Horowitz, Ulrike Joras and Conrad Schetter)
• “Democracy and ethno-religious conflict in Iraq”, in Survival. The International Institute for Strategic Studies Quarterly 45(4):111-134, 2003