1954–
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.
Activities and affiliations
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
Related historical events
Nationalism as Event: Sources, Method, and the "Eventful" Approach
Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State is a methodological work about the study of nationalism as much as it is an account of Soviet collapse. Beissinger records that the project began in 1988, as the USSR was first enveloped by large-scale protest, and concluded thirteen years later; in the course of the investigation what started as a comparative study of protest among multiple nationalities within a single country became a cross-national study spanning fifteen countries or more.
The book's fundamental unit of analysis is the contentious event, which he defines as a potentially subversive act that challenges normalized practices, modes of causation, or systems of authority. The definition deliberately includes not only disruptions that transform an order but also those that attempt and fail to do so, since only the latter makes a systematic engagement with historical counterfactuals possible.
The evidentiary core is an event dataset: systematic information on 6,663 protest demonstrations and 2,177 mass violent events across the entire territory of the former USSR from January 1987 through December 1992, supplemented by case material from the mobilizational records of eighteen nationalities. Because the occurrence of one action changes the probability that another will occur, he treats this endogeneity as the central research question rather than a nuisance, and relies on nonlinear event-count and event-history models, nesting small-n process tracing inside the large-n analysis.
His reluctance to rest the argument on opinion polling is part of the same design. No polls systematically measured Soviet attitudes toward the existence of the USSR during 1987-91, and the first countrywide survey on secession was taken only in August 1989, after the issue had already been politicized. Event analysis was the alternative for catching the shifting issues and forms of action in a period of compressed change.