Overview

Strategic decisions to reduce the size, scope, or ambitions of organizations - including states - in order to enhance future prospects, are among the most difficult and least well-understood choices made in collective life. This volume makes a bold effort to identify the conditions in which less really is more. Each contributor to the volume analyzes the possibilities for institutional redesign, including state contraction, for responding effectively to destabilizing and often violence-laden conflicts. Among the countries discussed in detail are Turkey, Pakistan, Morocco, Congo, Jordan, Indonesia, Russia and the former Soviet Union, Iraq, and India. An impressive array of experts assess strategies that go against the grain, strategies to 'righsize' and even 'downsize' states by changing their external and internal borders. Typically this means opposing prevailing prejudices against partition and 'seraratist' solutions as well as paying high political costs in the short run for more manageable political problems in the long run. Understanding the conditions under which such strategies can be entertained and successfully implemented is as difficult, and as important, as making this kind of option available to beleaguered states in a complex and rapidly changing world.

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9780199244904

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The empirical part of the volume offers a fascinating tour d'horizon of actual, potential and failed examples of right-sizing throughout the world. Canadian Journal of Political Science This is an excellent book and seems set to become a foundational work ... both theoretically strong and directly politically relevant ... The book displays the kind of coherence and clear sense of purpose which is lacking in many edited books ... All of the contributors bring a wealth of empirical data and a fine-grained understanding of the specifics of place to the book ... This is an amazingly rich book, both theoretically and empirically. The Global Review of Ethnopolitics This book with its two frameworks in an attempted synthesis, one by O'Leary focused on ethno-nationalism and the other by Lustick not especially dealing with nationalism, must be evaluated as a new creative set of propositions of much value in the quest for solutions for states with inflamed borders. The case studies are, in particular, rich in offering insights and can be fruitfully applied to ethno-national struggles. Nations and Nationalism

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