Academic Research

Dr. Mark Thomas

“The unmaking of Nation States”:

Within what social settings does political entrepreneurship lead to the breakup of a nation state? Under what conditions do the institutions of a nation state display a pattern of frequent disintegration? When are conflicts of a secular nature deflected into sectarian conflicts? Why do non-violent people take sides in violent civil conflicts? When and what kind of foreign intervention triggers or mitigates civil conflict? My book project brings methods used in economics and anthropology to construct a conceptual map to answer questions of this kind. The conceptual map is applied to specific social settings that prevail in different nation states to provide a description of essential conditions under which people interact and to predict possible outcomes of their interaction.