1955–
A political scientist who analyzed Soviet dissolution through the paradoxes of federalism
In Dissolution, Walker contends that the USSR's full collapse was an outcome that surprisingly few desired, with confusion over the meaning of "sovereignty" during perestroika casting a "fog of war" that hurried disintegration.
Edward W. Walker is an American political scientist who studies national politics, federalism, secession, and ethnic conflict in the Soviet and post-Soviet spaces. At Berkeley he led the program on Soviet and Eurasian studies while examining the links between communist systems and post-communist politics. His major book, Dissolution, argues that Soviet federalism both integrated the union republics and supplied institutions and legitimizing narratives of sovereignty that made secession conceivable when central control weakened.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1977B.A., Harvard University
- 1986M.A., Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University
- 1992Ph.D. in Political Science, Columbia University
- 1997Editor, Minorities, Mullahs, and Modernity
- 1998–1999National Fellow, Hoover Institution
- 2003Published Dissolution: Sovereignty and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
- 2000s–2017Associate Adjunct Professor of Political Science and Executive Director, Berkeley Program in Eurasian and East European Studies
Related historical events
Caucasus secessionist conflicts and the comparative project
Beyond his analysis of federal collapse, Walker pursued a long-running project comparing secessionist movements and autonomy arrangements across the former Soviet space. In a study written for the Kennedy School's Belfer Center 1996-1997 seminar series on the Caucasus and the Caspian, he examined the three most important secessionist conflicts in the Caucasus: Chechnya, Abkhazia, and Nagorno-Karabakh. The study appeared in February 1998 as "No Peace, No War in the Caucasus."
He characterized all three conflicts as locked in a state of "no peace, no war." In Chechnya, after the war began in 1994, fierce Chechen resistance, the collapse of the Russian military, and a popular backlash in Moscow against the war produced a tentative peace treaty in August 1996; yet neither side could find a creative middle ground reconciling Chechen demands for independence with Russian fears of a "domino effect" and the rupture of the Russian Federation's territorial integrity. In Nagorno-Karabakh a cease-fire had held since May 1994, with the Karabakh Armenians holding out for a final ruling on the territory's political status, while in Abkhazia neither Moscow nor a United Nations mission could bring the two sides together after Georgian forces ended their assault in 1993. Walker judged this deadlock to be the most serious obstacle to the long-term stability and development of the Caucasus region.
In the same period he prepared a book on secessionist movements and autonomy arrangements in the former Soviet Union, with case studies on Chechnya, Nagorno-Karabakh, Tatarstan, Abkhazia, Crimea, and Transdniester. He spent 1998-1999 on leave as a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution to work on that project, and as an institutional base he directed the Berkeley Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies, founded in 1983.