Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Edited by
Ariel I. Ahram
Patrick Köllner
Rudra Sil
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Paperback printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
This volume is dedicated to the memory of the late Giovanni Sartori, whose writings
on concepts and methods have been informing sophisticated discussions about
strategies of comparative analysis for nearly half a century.
CONTENTS
List of Figures ix
List of Tables xi
Acknowledgments xiii
List of Contributors xv
PART I Introduction
1. Comparative Area Studies: What It Is, What It Can Do 3
Patrick Köllner, Rudra Sil, and Ariel I. Ahram
PART IV Conclusion
13. Triangulating Area Studies, Not Just Methods: How Cross-Regional
Comparison Aids Qualitative and Mixed-Method Research 225
Rudra Sil
Bibliography 247
Index 289
LIST OF FIGURES
The editors of the volume are grateful to many colleagues, mentors, and former
students worldwide who have helped to shape their thinking about area studies
and comparative methods. They also appreciate the valuable critiques and sug-
gestions provided by two anonymous reviewers as well as the steady encourage-
ment offered by David McBride at Oxford University Press. In addition, Ariel I.
Ahram gratefully acknowledges support from the Office of the Vice President for
Research at the University of Oklahoma and the Institute for Society, Culture,
and Environment at Virginia Tech for this project. Patrick Köllner gratefully
acknowledges financial support by the GIGA German Institute of Global and
Area Studies for this publication. And Rudra Sil gratefully acknowledges finan-
cial support from the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania
and the Advisory Board of the Huntsman Program in International Studies and
Business for his contributions to this volume.
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Christian von Soest is Head of the “Peace and Security” Research Program
at the GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies in Hamburg and a
Lead Research Fellow at the GIGA Institute of African Affairs. From 2013 to
2014, he was a Transatlantic Fellow at Harvard University’s Weatherhead
Center for International Affairs. His research focuses on international sanctions,
authoritarianism, external interventions, and conflict dynamics as well as
corruption and informal institutions. He has published a monograph titled The
African State and Its Revenues: How Politics Influences Tax Collection in Zambia and
Botswana (2009). He has also co-edited (with Laurence Whitehead) a special
forum of the European Journal of Political Research on international collaboration
among authoritarian regimes (2015). In addition to several book chapters, he has
published in academic journals such as International Studies Quarterly, Journal of
Peace Research, Democratization, Third World Quarterly, Journal of Modern African
Studies, and the European Journal of Political Research.
xx List of Contributors
Introduction
1
PAT R I C K K Ö L L N E R , R U D R A S I L , A N D A R I E L I . A H RA M
Much has been written about the challenges facing area studies in the post–Cold
War era. Social scientists, in particular, have struggled with finding an equilibrium
that balances the continued search for deep area-based knowledge with shifting
markers of disciplinary progress. This volume is motivated by two fundamental
convictions. First, sustained qualitative research on particular areas or regions of the
world remains indispensable for the social sciences, both as a way to expand our
fount of observations and as a source of new theoretical ideas. Second, this research
remains at risk of being marginalized without concerted efforts to incorporate it into
cross-regional comparative frameworks intended to explore the potential relevance
of regional contextual attributes.
Comparative area studies (CAS) refers to a broad approach consisting of any
self-conscious effort to do two things simultaneously: (i) balance deep sensitivity
to context in each of the locales being examined with the use of some variant of the
comparative method to surface causal linkages that are portable across world regions;
and (ii) engage ongoing research and scholarly discourse in two or more area studies
communities against the backdrop of more general concepts and theoretical debates
within a social science discipline.1 Taken separately, none of the components of
1. In employing the term “area” as part of CAS, we do not mean to reify the concept or to suggest
that it is preferable to such similar terms as “world region.” Indeed, both “area” and “world region”
4 P atrick K ö llner , R udra S il , and A riel I . A hram
this approach is especially novel. We frequently hear the refrain that “context
matters,” just as we are regularly advised that social science requires more than
“mere description” of empirical phenomena. We have also seen efforts to inte-
grate “thick” narratives produced by qualitative research on the ground to “thin”
explanatory propositions derived from elegant theoretical models (Bates et al.
1998). Even so, there is an unavoidable epistemological chasm and methodo-
logical trade-off between idiographic efforts to decipher the subjective under-
standing actors attach to their practices and discourses within their immediate
contexts, and analytic techniques designed to generate nomothetic explananda
valid across some universe of cases. CAS responds to these dilemmas not by jux-
taposing different styles of research as some scholars have sought to do, but by
encouraging efforts that explicitly seek to carve out a middle ground upon which
“contextualized comparisons” (Locke and Thelen 1995) can reveal and partially
explain convergent or divergent processes unfolding across locales situated in
different areas. While CAS is motivated by general questions that bear on cases
from different areas, it calls for qualitative comparisons that value and engage
ongoing research and scholarly discourse within area studies communities. In
fact, contextualized comparisons ideally rely upon scholars who have training
in a particular world region and can thus draw upon an area specialist’s general
sensibilities when grappling with area-specific debates and local complexities in
other, less familiar areas.
Of course, small-N comparative studies that span multiple areas are not new,
and some have even become classics, as is the case with Barrington Moore’s Social
Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966). Yet, most qualitative research
in social science disciplines focuses on particular countries or compares cases
within a single area, even for research problems and phenomena that cut across
world regions. In part, this is a function of the lack of a clear, well-established
methodological justification for the risks involved in delving into a new area
without the credentials and training for that area. In the absence of such a justifi-
cation, it is not surprising that scholars who do attain area expertise tend to sub-
sequently leverage their steadily expanding fount of area-based knowledge rather
than expend time and energy to explore less familiar cases drawn from other
areas. Moreover, the few qualitative comparative studies that do cut across areas
tend to leave implicit the rationale for their methodological choices, or explain
those choices in idiosyncratic terms in relation to a specific substantive ques-
tion and a specific research community. In view of these tendencies, CAS offers
a broad rationale for scholars who adopt roughly similar research strategies for
are constructs that are malleable in principle—a point we elaborate upon in the section “Area
Studies in Flux.” For the purposes of this volume, the terms “area,” “region,” and “world region” are
used interchangeably.
Comparative Area Studies: What It Is, What It Can Do 5
studies community may tend to focus more on debates over language, history,
culture, and arts of various groups, while another may be more influenced by
social scientific concepts and policy-related debates in such disciplines as soci-
ology, political science, (human) geography, and some branches of economics
(see also Eckert 2005, 46–47; Wissenschaftsrat 2006, 9). Thus, particular area
studies fields in various countries can become “strikingly distinctive in their
political, institutional and intellectual histories, and in their relationships with
the disciplines” (Szanton 2004, 4).2
To complicate matters further, what constitutes an “area” or “world region”
within the academe is not self-evident and can sometimes give rise to concep-
tual and methodological dilemmas. As Amitav Acharya (2012, 23–24) noted in
his presidential address to the International Studies Association: “Regions are no
longer viewed as fixed physical, cartographic or cultural entities, but as dynamic,
purposeful and socially constructed spaces.” Rather, they are material and idea-
tional constructs “born out of imagination, discourse and socialization.” In more
recent times, world regions are “more likely to be imagined and constructed from
within than to emerge as convenient labels by outside observers reflecting prima-
rily strategic or economic interests” (Acharya 2012, 35). In short, no standard
physical, biological, historical, political, economic, or sociocultural criteria suf-
fice to demarcate world regions—or even continents—in a coherent and con-
sistent manner (see also Lewis and Wigen 1997).3 Even when regions have been
specifically defined as “geographically bounded parts of the world that are com-
monly viewed as occupying the same large part of the world” (Mainwaring and
Pérez-Liñán 2007, 201, our emphasis), the communities formed among scholars
who study particular expanses of territory only partly overlap with geographic
demarcations influenced by other factors, such as ideological cleavages, develop-
mental patterns, proclivities of leading scholars, and geopolitical battle lines (see
also Middell and Naumann 2010, 156–157; Sidaway et al. 2016, 777–778).4 For
all these reasons, we view past, present, and future conceptualizations of areas
and regions as tentative social constructions subject to revision and contestation.
Indeed, a number of the chapters in this volume implicitly or explicitly challenge
or problematize the boundaries of geographic areas by highlighting the role of
2. Parts of this and the next section draw upon Basedau and Köllner (2007). Related ideas have also
been offered in preliminary form in Ahram (2011b) and Sil (2009).
3. Some geography textbooks (e.g., Blij and Mueller 2010; Rowntree et al. 2014) identify at least a
dozen distinct “world regions” or “realms” that do not always match up with area studies as presently
constituted. For a discussion of the “plasticity” of Asia and the various epistemological approaches
used to track the making and unmaking of this huge phantom region, see Holbig (2017).
4. In this regard, Böge (1997) also offers a path-breaking critical overview of efforts by German
geographers in the 19th and 20th centuries to divide the earth into large areas.
8 P atrick K ö llner , R udra S il , and A riel I . A hram
specialists, while also affecting the standing of area studies writ large in a given
discipline.
Since the end of the Cold War, the wide-ranging styles of area studies schol-
arship have evolved in different ways even in the face of similar global predica-
ments, whether in terms of new security challenges in the aftermath of 9/11 or
the impact of heightened global flows of capital, people, ideas, and best practices.
These trends have certainly affected international affairs in profound ways, with
some popular notions such as “the end of history” (Fukuyama 1989) and “a flat-
tening of the globe” (Friedman 2005) implicitly privileging global processes
of homogenization or convergence. This is not sufficient reason, however, to
assume away the diversity within and across areas, especially when we consider
the different ways in which actors in different locales have been responding to
transnational or global phenomena. Indeed, deep familiarity with area-specific
contextual knowledge becomes arguably more critical for debating the extent to
which “reactions to the global condition” of different groups in different locales
may vary (Middell and Naumann 2010, 163; see also Appadurai 2000; Drake
and Hilbink 2004).
Nevertheless, area studies communities have been contending with a number
of fundamental critiques. One line of attack, especially prominent in the humani-
ties and cultural anthropology, took the form of a poststructuralist deconstruction
of narratives related to non-Western countries or regions. At least partly inspired
by Edward Said’s seminal work on “Orientalism,” this critique drew attention to
the fact that the lens through which non-Western regions and their inhabitants
are typically viewed by Western observers consisted of deep-seated fundamen-
tal binaries of “us” and “them.” This binary reinforced relations of hegemony
and domination in the real world. The implication here is that the study of other
cultures and societies must be radically restructured so as to expose and reverse
prejudiced constructions of the object of knowledge (cf. Mitchell 2004; Schäbler
2007; Sidaway 2013). The putative solutions include calls for greater engagement
with content from the “Global South”—both theoretical and empirical—on its
own terms. The keywords in this context are inclusiveness, which refers to “a will-
ingness to work with alternative theoretical approaches and take into account
hitherto excluded voices,” and pluralism, which requires “a willingness to rec-
ognize the existence of alternative intellectual philosophies, theories, models,
norms, and values” (Narlikar 2016, 3–4). Other scholars have advocated tak-
ing onboard perspectives provided by either European social theorists, such as
Bourdieu, Foucault, Giddens, Gramsci, and Habermas, or by revisionist histori-
ans exploring the lives of “subalterns” in South Asia or other postcolonial regions
(Szanton 2004; Drake and Hilbink 2004; Chakrabarty 2000). In practical terms,
however, this critique did not imply a diminishing of area expertise, but rather
10 P atrick K ö llner , R udra S il , and A riel I . A hram
more intensive engagement with diverse intellectual traditions within the coun-
tries and areas being studied.
With the end of the Cold War, a quite different critique arose in the field of
global or world history, which has come to occupy an increasingly prominent
niche within the discipline of history (e.g., Belich et al. 2016b; Conrad 2013;
Little 2014). This movement has taken issue with the privileged and convenient
focus on nation-states as the default unit for collecting and organizing obser-
vations about social phenomena and world-historical events. This critique has
gained further traction in conjunction with the idea that globalization has inten-
sified dialectical processes of de-and reterritorialization of geographic units pre-
viously assumed to be stable (see Middell and Naumann 2010). Even if global
history does not necessarily imply a universal history, it does depend on a de-
coupling of cultural and geographic space and a de-centering of historical nar-
ratives that focus only on a given locale or society. Countering the fixed spatial
constructs undergirding area studies, scholars have recommended more atten-
tion to how local identities and practices are affected by global flows of culture,
media, and the like, and by the growing significance of migration and diaspora
communities, particularly in relation to transnational economic relations, social
networks, movements, and organizations (see Chakrabarty 1998; Katzenstein
2001; Eckert 2005; van Schendel 2005). Global history extends beyond and
complements, but it need not replace, or compete with, the kind of research pro-
duced by historians focused on a given country or region.
Perhaps the strongest and most sustained challenge to area studies, especially
in the United States, has emerged out of methodological battles in political sci-
ence, where the subfield of “comparative politics” had long treated expertise in
the politics of different countries or regions as a core feature. During the height
of the Cold War, the conceptual apparatus of structural-functionalism (e.g.,
Almond and Coleman 2015 [1960]) provided a bridge between the academic
study of “modernization” in different areas and the U.S. government’s efforts to
track the developmental trajectories of countries in those areas. Substantial fund-
ing was made available to support research within countries and regions, and area
expertise quickly became a key part of both graduate training and job descrip-
tions in comparative politics. With the end of the Cold War, political science wit-
nessed calls for a unified methodology based on fundamental rules of inference
that could ensure rigor across quantitative and qualitative approaches (King et al.
1994). Area specialists doing qualitative research were faulted (at least implicitly)
for relying too much on country-or area-specific training while lacking the level
of theoretical sophistication and methodological rigor expected at the cutting
edge of the discipline. Some even raised the possibility of an “international divi-
sion of labor,” with area-based observational knowledge to be supplied by native
researchers from various countries while political scientists in the United States
Comparative Area Studies: What It Is, What It Can Do 11
5. But, on the limits and potential pitfalls of mixed-method approaches, see Ahmed and Sil (2012).
6. As per the website of SOAS: https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/ (accessed February 27, 2017).
12 P atrick K ö llner , R udra S il , and A riel I . A hram
School of Slavonic and East European Studies is among the leading institutions
worldwide for the study of Russia, the Baltics, and Central and Eastern Europe.
There are also a host of British area studies associations for various countries and
regions, many of which have joined the United Kingdom Council for Area Studies
Associations, founded in 2003. In addition, the Arts and Humanities Research
Council, the British Academy, and other governmental funding bodies have in
recent years funded five collaborative “Centres for Excellence in language-based
Area Studies” that focus on China, Japan, the Arabic-speaking world, and Eastern
Europe, including areas of the former Soviet Union. While similar public invest-
ment is not available for the study of other parts of the world, on the whole, the
commitment in the British academe to area studies remains more robust than in
the United States.
In Germany, the federal government has provided since 2006 massive funding
to foster competition among state universities with the express aim of creating
a dozen or so “universities of excellence.” Complementary competition-based
funding lines have become available for non-university research institutes. Area
studies have benefited from these moves to the extent that they have been suc-
cessful in obtaining funding for new graduate schools, research clusters, and
collaborative national and international academic networks. They have also
benefited since 2009 from a major funding initiative by the Federal Ministry of
Education and Research (BMBF) specifically intended to boost a wide array of
area studies centers and research networks on many world regions as well as on
cross-regional flows and interactions. This has been followed by a BMBF initia-
tive to set up fellowship-based collaborative research centers in South Asia, Latin
America, China, and in Sub-Saharan Africa.7 Finally, private foundations and the
federal government have initiated new think tanks and funding lines for research
on and with (partners in) China, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and some other
world regions. Examples include the Mercator Institute for China Studies
(MERICS), the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS),
and the Volkswagen Foundation’s funding initiative for research on Central Asia
and the Caucasus. Notably, these new streams of funding have not only served
to strengthen and internationalize research and teaching on major regions of
the world, but they have also helped to promote new initiatives intended to
explore transregional connections and circulations (cf. Middell 2017; Mielke and
Hornidge 2017) as well as diffusion processes (see also Huotari and Rüland, this
volume).
Despite the different conditions facing area studies communities in different
countries, the end of the Cold War has prompted social scientists in both Europe
7. Support for these initiatives was boosted by the recommendations by the German Council of
Science and Humanities on how to advance area studies (Wissenschaftsrat 2006).
Comparative Area Studies: What It Is, What It Can Do 13
and North America to ask more questions about processes that traverse and con-
nect world regions, just as scholars of global history are doing in the discipline of
history. Far from suggesting a “flattening” of the world (Friedman 2005), these
engagements emphasize the swerving course of commodity chains, production
networks, diasporic communities, and norm diffusion across an ineluctably tex-
tured global terrain. In Germany, the vitality of such transnational and transre-
gional approaches and of newer global studies programs resulted in 2014 also in
the establishment of an association for transregional studies, comparative area
studies, and global studies (CrossArea). In the United States, the push for multi-
method research, in addition to recent efforts to revitalize comparative-historical
analysis (Mahoney and Thelen 2015), has created an impetus for frameworks
where common concepts are structuring qualitative narratives focused on differ-
ent countries and regions. Still, this work is pushed more by individual scholars
(including several featured in this volume) than by particular institutes. Thus,
research explicitly focused on cross-regional comparisons or transregional pro-
cesses, while still overshadowed by large-N studies and single-area studies, is gain-
ing more traction on both sides of the Atlantic. Importantly, this work is building
on—not ignoring or undercutting—qualitative research focused on given areas.
This type of research does not point to a single analytic strategy or proceed from
a uniform epistemic commitment. It is, however, predicated on objectives and
assumptions that are similar enough to represent a shared analytic perspective
that we refer to here as “comparative area studies” (CAS).
2003; Mahoney and Thelen 2015). The common theme running through these
efforts is a desire to uncover portable mechanisms and causal processes, but with
due attention to the potential impact of context conditions present in specific
historical, sociocultural, institutional, and geographic settings.
This volume brings together methodological essays and empirical studies
that, in different ways, highlight the shared assumptions and intellectual payoffs
of CAS. While area specialists tend to focus on analyzing or interpreting phe-
nomena in individual countries or world regions (however bounded), the social
sciences have also long embraced the quasi-experimental logic associated with
variants of the comparative method. Historically, the two endeavors have been
associated with different research objectives and strategies, yielding different
kinds of knowledge claims. More importantly, the two kinds of approaches were
seen previously as operating at cross-purposes. Dedicated area specialists often
expressed skepticism about the reliability of case studies produced in the service
of macro-comparative analyses, but sometimes without the training or experi-
ence to understand conditions on the ground in a given locale. From the other
side, comparativists in the social sciences have sometimes wondered about the
utility of narratives focused on a single context for theoretical debates or policy
questions that matter for more than one area. This methodological trade-off can-
not be completely overcome or bypassed. CAS is predicated on the assumption
that, while the implied trade-off can never be fully resolved, it can be mitigated
by research strategies that split the difference between a context-bound narra-
tive and universalizing comparison. This not only increases the chances of hitting
upon fresh insights and recognizing parallel debates and discoveries taking place
across different communities, but it also expands the dialogue between general
comparativists and members of different area studies communities.
CAS comes with no pre-set methodological toolkit. Nevertheless, the chap-
ters in this volume reveal CAS’s elective affinities to comparative analyses that
rely on context-sensitive process tracing and cross-case comparisons in iterative
and conjunctive fashion. Put differently, the CAS approach shares with much
recent case-based qualitative research an interest in moving beyond correla-
tional claims toward identifying specific concatenations of factors responsible
for macro-transformations (Mahoney 2001a). The distinction between “data-set
observations” (DSOs), normally used to increase degrees of freedom in regres-
sion analysis, and “causal process observations” (CSOs), which refer to obser-
vations that contain built-in insights and information about the interaction of
contexts, processes, and mechanisms in the process of generating causal infer-
ence is particularly salient (Brady and Collier 2010 [2004]; Mahoney 2010b).
While individual case studies are able to engage in process-tracing, the use of
multiple comparable cases allows for the juxtaposition of an array of causal proc-
ess observations that can yield portable but problem-focused inferences while
Comparative Area Studies: What It Is, What It Can Do 15
also allowing for some degree of engagement with scholarly discourses and con-
tested historiographical traditions within area studies communities.8
CAS refrains from a priori privileging a particular level of analysis, master
variable, or causal mechanism. Rather, CAS presumes an open-ended approach
that reflects the pragmatic spirit of “analytic eclecticism” (Sil and Katzenstein
2010). That is, the ontological and epistemological foundations of CAS sup-
port problem-driven configurative efforts to trace complex interactions between,
rather than prioritize, individual-level mechanisms stressed in rational choice
or psychological analysis, on the one hand, and various structural mechanisms,
material and ideational. Moreover, while searching for portable causal linkages,
CAS recognizes that highly localized contextual attributes can condition the
influence of general mechanisms and even prove decisive in accounting for a
given set of trajectories or outcomes. Charles Tilly and Robert Goodin (2006,
6) assert: “attention to context does not clutter description and explanation of
political [or more broadly: social] processes, but, on the contrary promotes sys-
tematic knowledge”—for example, by recognizing the range of factors at various
levels that drive a particular process, or by identifying scope conditions for expla-
nations of a particular outcome. It is not enough to say that “context matters.”
CAS implies an effort to identify what attributes of different kinds of spatial and
temporal contexts matter in what way for understanding the operation of a given
mechanism or explaining the range of phenomena, processes, and outcomes evi-
dent across a discrete set of contexts (see also Ferree et al. 2013).
In practical terms, the commitment of CAS to context-sensitivity does not
mean focusing on hermeneutic projects and/or eschewing causal generalization
(see Hollis and Smith 1990). It does, however, entail a self-conscious effort to
become familiar with locally significant cultural discourses, social institutions,
contested narratives, and historiographic traditions. While not every scholar can
become an expert in every country or area, it is still worthwhile to experience
some exposure to local complexities on the ground, to intellectual traditions of
native scholarship, and to ongoing debates within relevant area studies com-
munities. This type of exposure can help researchers, especially those who have
expertise in at least one area, strike a balance between the search for portable
inferences and a better grasp of the challenges involved in interpreting actors’
choices and understandings across diverse contexts. This puts CAS near a “mid-
dle ground” between, on the one hand, context-bound scholarship oriented to
idiographic narratives or hermeneutic interpretation and, on the other hand, the
analysis of cases according to the dictates of the comparative method in search
8. For more extensive discussions of process-tracing and the utility of case studies, see Beach and
Pederson (2013), Bennett and Checkel (2015), Blatter and Haverland (2012), Collier (2011),
Gerring (2016), George and Bennett (2005), Rohlfing (2012), and Tansey (2007).
16 P atrick K ö llner , R udra S il , and A riel I . A hram
Table 1.1. Single-A rea vs. Cross-A rea Case Selection in Small-N
Research in Recent Books in the Field of Comparative Politics*
* The sample is based on books reviewed in the comparative politics section of Perspectives
on Politics between March 2006 (volume 4, issue 1) and March 2013 (volume 13, issue 1).
Books are coded as presenting small-N research here when they offer either chapters
on cases or comparisons of the same set of cases over two or more thematic chapters.
Excluded from the sample are: edited volumes, medium-N studies (more than eight
cases), and qualitative studies used solely to illustrate logics rooted in formal or statistical
models. For Europe, Eastern and Western Europe count as separate regions when the
time period examined overlaps with the Cold War. In post-communist studies, books are
coded as single area where all cases are from the former Soviet bloc. Excellent research
assistance was provided by Todor Enev and Basak Taraktas.
18 P atrick K ö llner , R udra S il , and A riel I . A hram
and specify theories if similar processes are found to be unfolding through dif-
ferent paths in widely different contexts. Considering these potential intellectual
payoffs, it is surprising that the balance between cross-regional comparisons and
area-based qualitative research is so heavily tilted in favor of the latter.
The approach of CAS to cross-regional comparison rejects the dichotomous
trade-off between the need for prior area expertise and the logic of comparative
inquiry. It is true that limiting a small-N study to cases from one region, even
for the sake of leveraging prior area expertise, risks shrinking the population of
cases and truncating the full range of variation (Geddes 1990; Rohlfing 2012).
Yet, there is little point to adding new cases if one “gets the story wrong”—for
example, through unconscious selection bias in the use of sources stemming
from a lack of familiarity with the context (Lustick 1996). CAS is predicated on
the possibility that each side of the trade-off can be partly reduced so as to pro-
duce a distinctive kind of research product with a distinctive intellectual payoff.
On one hand, CAS backs away from a strict application of the logic of Mills’s
methods in favor of somewhat more flexible selection criteria for cases—with at
least one or two drawn from a scholar’s area of expertise. On the other hand, CAS
can identify a degree of context-sensitivity in the handling of a given case that,
while not based on first acquiring full-blown training and expertise (including
language study), extrapolates from an area specialist’s experience to recognize the
relevance of contextual attributes, historiographic debates, and the complexities
on the ground in cases outside of one’s primary area of expertise. In effect, CAS
encourages contextualized comparison of similarly defined units selected from
different world regions but with close attention to the complexities and contro-
versies present in studies of each of the individual units. This holds the promise
of intellectual payoffs that are distinct from those generated by more “standard”
approaches in the field, be they large-N analyses or case studies focused on a sin-
gle locale or area.
For this style of comparative inquiry, simply identifying and absorbing the
relevant background knowledge and/or acquiring the necessary skills for field-
work can be a daunting task (see also Hall and Tarrow 1998). Nevertheless, a
growing number of scholars have taken on this challenge, typically in mono-
graphs that afford the space needed to delve into contextual factors across several
cases.9 Some examples may be found among past works by many of the authors
contributing to this volume (Ahmed 2013; Ahram 2011a; Cheng Chen 2007;
Saylor 2014; Sil 2002; Smith 2007). Just a few other examples from the last two
decades include: Ruth Collier’s comparative-historical examination of the role of
9. Such work is generally difficult to compress into article form, unless we relax our expectations of
context-sensitivity for each case. See, however, Chen and Sil (2006), Saylor and Wheeler (2017),
Slater and Simmons (2013), and von Soest et al. (2011).
Comparative Area Studies: What It Is, What It Can Do 19
10. For further discussion of concepts, see Collier et al. (2006), Gerring (2012: chapter 5), Goertz
(2006), Schedler (2011), and Schaffer (2016).
20 P atrick K ö llner , R udra S il , and A riel I . A hram
research has evolved over the past two decades, evincing greater theoretical ambi-
tion and incorporating Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), which is par-
ticularly useful for medium-N studies. He delves into studies of democratic
transformation across four regions and of political participation in marginalized
communities across four countries to demonstrate the value of cross-regional
comparative studies for gaining traction on important political problems of our
time. Laurence Whitehead, in chapter 3, sees CAS as offering a distinctive “depth
of vision” that allows researchers to strike a balance between the deep but narrow
treatment of countries with the broader but often “flat” view of political reality
in universal studies. Warning against overly reductionist explanations for phe-
nomena spanning multiple world regions, Whitehead lays out several protocols
for cross-regional comparative research that aims at propositions that may be
broadly causal but are also configurative, multidisciplinary, and aimed at devel-
oping understandings that can be corroborated within each world region. In
chapter 4, Christian von Soest and Alexander Stroh point to structured qualita-
tive comparison across world regions as a bridge between studies that highlight
diversity within regions and those concerned with global datasets without atten-
tion to regional context. While recognizing the practical challenges of executing
research across regions and the pitfalls of concepts made to travel too far, they
employ cross-area comparative studies of judicial politics and neopatrimonialism
to highlight the value of “applied CAS.”
The next three chapters look into how specific area studies traditions initially
contribute to particular understandings that can be refined through considera-
tion of comparable phenomena in other areas. In chapter 5, Mikko Huotari and
Jürgen Rüland highlight the possibilities opened up by CAS for moving the field
of Southeast Asian studies forward, using the intrinsic interdisciplinarity of area
studies scholarship to lower disciplinary (and subdisciplinary) barriers centered
on methodological issues. While emphasizing the importance of concept port-
ability and transitivity, they stress the importance of drawing comparisons to
non-Western regions around crucial phenomena as a means of forging broad
arguments that can transcend “Western-centric” theory-building in many social
science disciplines. Amel Ahmed, in chapter 6, reexamines key assumptions and
debates in American political development against the backdrop of scholarship
on 19th-century European democratization. While historical studies of elec-
toral reform in Europe generally ignore the American case, Ahmed delves into
U.S. political history to show how efforts to contain working-class mobilization
through electoral reform first emerged in the United States and subsequently
influenced European elites in their efforts to cope with the same problem. At
the same time, the implicit parallels between the objectives and strategies of
American and European political elites enable Ahmed to show that the absence
of a workers’ party in the United States is perhaps not as much of an exceptional
22 P atrick K ö llner , R udra S il , and A riel I . A hram
outcome as once thought. In chapter 7, the final chapter of Part II, André Bank
notes that, while intra-regional comparisons have been the most prevalent in
Middle Eastern studies to date, the various efforts to analyze the Arab Spring
have created more openings for cross-regional comparisons. The varied dynam-
ics, trajectories, and outcomes of the political upheavals that swept across the
Middle East have encouraged area experts on the region to engage in more sys-
tematic comparative work and to recognize the value of insights drawn from
parallel phenomena in other spatial and historical contexts. In particular, Bank
refers to insights that can be drawn from political upheavals that evinced simi-
lar dynamics, though not necessarily similar origins or outcomes, in both post-
Soviet space and European history.
The chapters in Part III of the volume are intended as exemplary empirical
studies based on comparative analyses of cases selected from different world
regions. All of the chapters share the premise that direct comparison of similar
units is necessary for a better understanding of political, social, and economic
transformations unfolding in two or more world regions. The chapters are topi-
cally diverse and deal with different sets of comparable cases; yet, they all dem-
onstrate a common self-conscious effort to treat the cases in a context-sensitive
manner while relying on cross-case comparison to uncover hidden parallels and
generate novel arguments. Collectively, the studies go a long way toward demon-
strating the kinds of intellectual gains that CAS brings to the table.
In c hapter 8, Cheng Chen offers a careful, contextualized comparison of anti-
corruption campaigns launched in China and Russia by, respectively, President Xi
Jinping and President Vladimir Putin. Although superficially similar in their official
goal of seeking to curb corruption, these campaigns reflect quite different political
imperatives derived from different antecedent conditions and institutional settings.
Putin’s anti-corruption campaign is mostly a defensive move to contend with fac-
tionalism in a weakly institutionalized “hybrid” regime. In chapter 9, Ariel Ahram
offers an explanation of state and regime breakdown in the Arab world that hinges
on the precursor regimes and the varying ability of different kinds of republican and
monarchical authoritarian systems to respond effectively to the diffusion of popu-
lar challenges. But, Ahram also shows how the Arab Spring uprisings had varying
ripple effects in neighboring non-Arab countries like Israel and Mali.
In c hapter 10, Benjamin Smith’s study of separatist movements across Africa,
Asia, and the Middle East derives its core insights from examining the history of
the Kurds, who comprise significant minorities in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey.
Hypothesizing that the Kurds’ semi-feudal social structure provided a kind of
ready-made institutional and organizational basis for rebellion, Smith circles back
to examine Tuareg and Acehnese state-seeking movements, as well as the negative
cases of Latin America’s “missing” separatism. In chapter 11, Ryan Saylor delves
into the impact of natural resource booms on state development, relying on a
Comparative Area Studies: What It Is, What It Can Do 23
deep historical comparison that spans not just two disparate geographic areas,
Africa and Latin America, but two distinct periods of global political economy,
the 19th and mid-20th centuries. This audacious scope allows Saylor to explain
how different interests and institutional alignments can turn natural resources
into a blessing or a curse.
In c hapter 12, the final chapter of Part III, Calvin Chen traces the diffusion
of a particular form of economic organization from China to European coun-
tries in the post–Cold War period, borne by immigrants who have been able to
reconstruct stable diaspora communities. Using multi-site ethnography, Chen
details the remarkable adaptability and usefulness of particular social networks
and cultural norms that were built into the “Wenzhou model” but reappeared
in Prato, Italy, where Wenzhounese Chinese settled down and set out to launch
new business ventures. While some ethnographers (and historians) continue
to be averse to comparison on epistemological or even ontological grounds (cf.
Middell and Naumann 2010; Sidaway 2013; Sidaway et al. 2016), Chen’s chapter
demonstrates that comparative inquiry can take the form of multi-sited ethnog-
raphy, which has come to be an increasingly accepted form of idiographic analysis
within anthropology and other social science disciplines.11
In the concluding chapter of this volume, Rudra Sil redeploys the term “trian-
gulation”—typically used to suggest a combination of quantitative and qualitative
approaches to data collection and analysis—to capture the distinctive role that
CAS and cross-regional contextualized comparison can play in pooling observa-
tions, analyses, and narratives that arise from doing purely qualitative research
across different geographic areas. Such a comparative approach is not without risks
and pitfalls, especially considering the challenges of grappling with esoteric debates
or particular local complexities in cases that fall outside of one’s primary area of
expertise. Yet, Sil argues that the payoffs are well worth it, given the potential for
hitting upon distinctive kinds of theoretical insights and illuminating new connec-
tions between scholarly inquiry taking place in separate area studies communities.
11. George Marcus (1995, 102) notes that “[c]omparison reenters the very act of ethnographic
specification by a research design of juxtapositions in which the global is collapsed into and made
an integral part of parallel, related local situations rather than something monolithic or external
to them. This move toward comparison embedded in the multi-sited ethnography stimulates
accounts of cultures composed in a landscape for which there is yet no developed theoretical con-
ception or descriptive model.”
24 P atrick K ö llner , R udra S il , and A riel I . A hram
PLATE 100
PLATE 101
PLATE 103
No. 48, BEDFORD SQUARE, CEILING,
FRONT ROOM, FIRST FLOOR
PLATE 104
No. 50, BEDFORD SQUARE,
FANLIGHT IN ENTRANCE HALL
PLATE 105
No. 51, BEDFORD SQUARE, CEILING,
FRONT ROOM, FIRST FLOOR
PLATE 106
No. 68, GOWER STREET, DOORCASE