A political scientist who analyzed Soviet dissolution through the paradoxes of federalism
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.
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