Description

The breakup of the USSR was unexpected and unexpectedly peaceful. Though a third of the new states fell prey to violent civil conflict, anarchy on the post-Soviet periphery, when it occurred, was quickly cauterized. Driscoll argues that this outcome had very little to do with security guarantees by Russia or the United Nations and a great deal to do with local innovation by ruthless warlords, who competed and colluded in a high-risk coalition formation game. The research design for the forthcoming book, which shall serve as the basis for the talk, combines ethnography and game theory, quantitative and qualitative methods, and presents a revisionist account of the post-Soviet wars and their settlement. Most of the empirical material was gathered over many years of fieldwork in Georgia and Tajikistan, but speculative policy conclusions draw on recent observations from Ukraine.

Jesse Driscoll holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University. He was an OCV fellow at Yale and a GAGE fellow at the University of Virginia, and most recently a member of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies from 2009-2013. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His work has been published in The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Research and Politics, and The Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology, and his book is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in the Comparative Politics series.