Harris Mylonas
Harris Mylonas
Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs
Full-time
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His first book The Politics of Nation-Building: Making Co-Nationals, Refugees, and Minorities, won the 2014 European Studies Book Award by the Council for European Studies which honors the best first book on any subject in European Studies published within a two-year period and the Peter Katzenstein Book Prize for the best first book on International Relations, Comparative Politics or Political Economy in 2013. The book was also awarded an honorable mention by the Rothschild Prize in Nationalities and Ethnic Studies Committee of the Association for the Study of Nationalities in 2014. The Politics of Nation-Building identifies the conditions in which the ruling political elites of a state target unassimilated ethnic groups with assimilationist policies instead of granting them minority rights or excluding them from the state. Through a detailed study of the Balkans, Mylonas shows that how a state treats a non-core group within its own borders is determined largely by whether the state's foreign policy is revisionist or cleaves to the international status quo, and whether it is allied or in rivalry with that group's external patrons. Mylonas injects international politics into the study of nation-building, building a bridge between international relations and the comparative politics of ethnicity and nationalism.
His book Varieties of Nationalism: Communities, Narratives, Identities (Cambridge University Press, 2023; co-authored with Maya Tudor), was published as part of the Elements Series in Political Development. He has co-edited two volumes, Enemies Within: Fifth Column Politics in Comparative Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2022; w/ Scott Radnitz) and The Microfoundations of Diaspora Politics (Routledge, 2022; w/ Alexandra Délano Alonso). He is currently working on a book project tentatively entitled Diaspora Management Logics, analyzing why some states develop policies to cultivate links with and/or to attract back certain diasporic communities while others do not.
His work has also been published in the Annual Review of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Security Studies, European Journal of Political Research, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Territory, Politics, Governance, Nations and Nationalism, Social Science Quarterly, Nationalities Papers, Ethnopolitics, as well as various edited volumes.
Turning to service, Mylonas has served as Associate Dean for Research at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs during 2017-18. He has also served as a representative of the Elliott School of International Affairs to GW's Faculty Senate (2018-2023). Since 2018, he has been editor-in-chief of Nationalities Papers, a peer-reviewed journal published by Cambridge University Press for the Association for the Study of Nationalities. He is also a member of the editorial board of Diaspora Studies as well as the Journal of Modern Greek Studies. From 2019 to 2021, he served as Chair of the Council for European Studies Research Network on “Historical Study of States and Regimes" while since 2021 he is serving as an executive board member. He has also been serving as a member of the Board of Directors of the Association for the Study of Nationalities since 2011.
As part of his public engagement activity, beyond writing opinion pieces mainly for Foreign Affairs and the Washington Post's Blog the Monkey Cage, he recently gave a TedX talk @tedxfoggybottom where he described the process of nation-building through my family history. He is also producing a podcast, together with Andrew Thompson, entitled American Constitutive Stories. Their goal is to create a space where Americans from different walks of life can share their understanding of their national identity, how it relates to other identities, who they think to be American heroes, and what they see as the most promising connecting tissue of our society in the future. Finally, Mylonas has also completed a political documentary entitled, Searching for Andreas: Political Leadership in Times of Crisis. The film premiered at the 20th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, won two awards at the International Documentary Festival of Ierapetra and was also screened at the 2019 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington, DC and the 2021 World Congress of Political Science of the International Political Science Association.
Mylonas received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University, his MA in Political Science from the University of Chicago, and completed his undergraduate degree at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Athens, Greece. In 2008-09 and 2011-12 academic years he was an Academy Scholar in residence at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.
Nationalism, Nation- and State-Building, Social Order, Diaspora Policies, European Politics.
PSC 2332 - European Integration
PSC 2338 - Nationalism
PSC 6362 - Nation Building in the Balkans
PSC 8104 - Qualitative Research Methods
PSC 8388 - Nationalism and Nation-Building
IAFF/PSC 6388 - Nationalism in Europe
Harris Mylonas. Diaspora Management Logics, Unpublished book manuscript.
Harris Mylonas and Scott Radnitz. Forthcoming. Enemies Within: The Global Politics of Fifth Columns, Oxford University Press.
Alexandra Délano Alonso and Harris Mylonas. 2022. The Microfoundations of Diaspora Politics, Routledge.
- Harris Mylonas and Maya Tudor. 2021. "Nationalism: What We Know and What We Still Need to Know" Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 24: 109-132.
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Daniel Bochsler, Elliott Green, Erin Jenne, Harris Mylonas, and Andreas Wimmer). 2021. "Exchange on the quantitative measurement of ethnic and national identity" Nations and Nationalism, Volume 27, Issue 1: 22-40.
- Harris Mylonas. 2020. "The Determinants of Successful Nation-building: Macro-sociological Political Modernization and Political Alliance Structures" Nationalities Papers.
- Kendrick Kuo and Harris Mylonas. 2019. “Nation-Building and the Role of Identity in Civil Wars,” Ethnopolitics.
- Harris Mylonas. 2019."Nation‐building policies in the Balkans: an Ottoman or a manufactured legacy?," Nations and Nationalism, Volume 25, Issue 3: 866-887. 2019.
- Alexandra Délano Alonso and Harris Mylonas. 2019. "The microfoundations of diaspora politics: unpacking the state and disaggregating the diaspora," Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Volume 45, Issue 4: 473-491.
- Harris Mylonas and Marko Žilović. "Foreign policy priorities and ethnic return migration policies: group-level variation in Greece and Serbia," Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Volume 45, Issue 4: 613-635 (with Marko Žilović)
- Harris Mylonas. 2017. "Nation-Building," Oxford Bibliographies in International Relations.
- Harris Mylonas and Nadav Shelef. 2017. “Methodological Challenges in the Study of Stateless Nationalist Territorial Claims,” Territory, Politics, Governance, Volume 5, Issue 2: 145- 157.
- Keith Darden and Harris Mylonas. 2016. "Threats to Territorial Integrity, National Mass Schooling, and Linguistic Commonality," Comparative Political Studies, Volume 49, No. 11: 1446-1479.
- Harris Mylonas. 2015. "Methodological Problems in the Study of Nation-Building: Behaviorism and Historicist Solutions in Political Science," Social Science Quarterly, Volume 96, Issue 3: 740–758.
- Harris Mylonas and Nadav Shelef. 2014. “Which Land is Our Land? Domestic Politics and Change in the Territorial Claims of Stateless Nationalist Movements,” Security Studies, Vol. 23, Issue 4, 754-786.
- Harris Mylonas. 2014. "Democratic Politics in Times of Austerity: The Limits of Forced Reform in Greece," Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 12, No. 2 (June): 435-443.
- Enze Han and Harris Mylonas. 2014. “Interstate Relations, Perceptions, And Power Balance: Explaining China’s Policies Toward Ethnic Groups, 1949-1965,” Security Studies, Vol. 23, Issue 1, 148-181.
- Keith Darden and Harris Mylonas. 2012. “The Promethean Dilemma: Third-Party State-building in Occupied Territories,” Ethnopolitics, Issue 1, March, pp. 85-93.
- Harris Mylonas. 2020. “The Enduring Promise of the European Union,” in Erik Jones (ed.). European Studies: Past, Present, and Future. Agenda Publishing, pp. 193-96.
- Harris Mylonas and Ariel Ahram. 2019. “Hierarchy, Sovereignty, and Adaptation in the Eastern Mediterranean,” in Litsas, Spyridon and Tziampiris, Aristotle (eds.) The New Eastern Mediterranean: Theory, Politics and States in a Volatile Era, Springer, pp. 31-43
- Harris Mylonas. 2018. "The Political Consequences of the Crisis in Greece: Charismatic Leadership and Its Discontents," in Evdoxios Doxiadis and Aimee Placas (eds.). Living Under Austerity: Greek Society in Crisis. New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 46-66.
- Harris Mylonas and Kendrick Kuo. 2018. “Nationalism and Foreign Policy,” in Cameron G. Thies (ed.). The Oxford Encyclopedia of Foreign Policy Analysis, Volume II. Oxford University Press, pp. 223-242.
Book Reviews:
- 2020. Review of Alexandra Délano Alonso’s From Here and There: Diaspora Policies, Integration, and Social Rights Beyond Borders, New York, NY, Oxford University Press, 2018. In Migration Studies.
- 2020. Review of Alan Gamlen's Human Geopolitics: States, Emigrants, and the Rise of Diaspora Institutions, Oxford University Press, 2019. In EUI's Global Citizenship Observatory series. 2018. Review of Zeynep Bulutgil’s The Roots of Ethnic Cleansing in Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2016. in Nationalities Papers, Volume 46, Issue 5, pages 916-919.