Political scientist who argued the Soviet collapse was produced by the event-driven tide of nationalism, not structural inevitability
"Nationalism needs to be understood not only as a cause of action, but also as the product of action": Beissinger argued that events do not merely reflect structures but reconstitute them.
An American comparative political scientist who used event data to demonstrate the relationship between nationalist mobilization and state collapse in the USSR. In his 2002 book Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State, he argued that the Soviet dissolution was not structurally inevitable but resulted from the accumulating 'tidal' effect of nationalist protest diffusing across republics, where events in one context reshaped possibilities in another. Contrasting with Ronald Suny's structural account, Beissinger's position holds that the contagion of nationalist movements and the contingency of events can overwhelm institutional constraints, a framework he later extended to the study of color revolutions and urban rebellion.
Career Timeline
- 1976B.A. magna cum laude, Duke University
- 1982Ph.D. in Political Science, Harvard University
- 1982–1987Assistant Professor, Harvard University
- 1988–2006Professor of Political Science, University of Wisconsin–Madison
- 2001–2004Chair, Political Science Department, UW–Madison
- 2006–Henry W. Putnam Professor of Politics, Princeton University
- 2007President, ASEEES
- 2022Published The Revolutionary City