Mark R. Beissinger

Mark R. Beissinger is professor of politics at Princeton University. He is the author of Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (2002) and is currently working on a book about the politics of empire.

July 2008, Volume 19, Issue 3

A New Look at Ethnicity and Democratization

Conventional scholarly wisdom holds that ethnic diversity within a given society generally dims democracy’s prospects. Careful reflection on the experience of many post-Soviet states, however, suggests that this need not be so.