This paper discusses why large-scale and sustained violence has not come to Dagestan in the Russian North Caucasus despite many sources of instability, such as territorial disputes, the influence of fundamentalist Islam, and the potential for interethnic violence. It assesses the general risk of large-scale sustained political violence; identifies issues that are most likely to provoke large-scale violence as well as the likely participants; and identifies early warning indicators of impending violence. The core argument of the paper is that the nature of Dagestan's cleavage structure makes it unlikely that in the foreseeable future the republic's chronic instability will lead to a violent mobilization of the population.

This paper takes up three related questions: (1) what is the difference between ethnic and religious conflict; (2) are theories of ethnic conflict equally applicable to religious conflict; and (3) can available theories of collective violence explain why the nature of internal conflict changes over time, either with respect to individual conflicts or globally? The author argues that distinguishing among types of internal conflict is more difficult than is often assumed and that theories of ethnic conflict typically explain not ethnic conflict as distinct category but sustained internal violence in general, including "religious" conflict. Further, while these theories typically attempt to explain why conflict breaks out in some multiethnic regions but not others, they do not attempt to explain why conflict when it occurs is "ethnic" rather than something else, why the nature of individual conflicts changes over time, or why certain kinds of internal conflict are characteristic of particular periods in history and not others. The paper investigates these questions by looking at three cases: Afghanistan since 1978, Tajikistan from 1992-1997, and Chechnya since 1994.

This dissertation has three empirical chapters that are organized around two central questions: (1) how and why regional, meso-level bureaucrats (fail to) implement some environmental policies in Shanxi and Henan provinces in North-Central China and (2) how to explain environmental policy implementation failure when both recentralization and environmental concerns have taken center stage. The empirical chapters deeply delve into the last central questions: What are the interests that affect and are affected by meso-level bureaucrats and how do meso-level bureaucrats use these interests to further their own goals when choosing which policies to implement and which to ignore? To answer these questions, I conducted 12 months of comparative ethnographic research (May 2018, August 2018 to July 2019) coupled with 148 semi-structured interviews of meso-level officials, civil society organizations, workers, and managers. The main finding is that state-defined interests are not singular, but are contested social objects whose outcomes depend on material, cultural, and positional bureaucratic characteristics, as well as the key explanatory mechanism: individual resourcefulness. The first empirical chapter examines capital as an interest that mid-level officials use and negotiate, showing when, where, and how meso-level state officials resourcefully interact with state-owned, state-controlled, private, and illegal enterprises to further their own interests. The second empirical chapter continues to examine mid-level officials’ interests and resourcefulness by showing the ways in which meso-level officials manipulate preexisting, nascent labor mobilizations to further their own goals, showing how mid-level officials manipulate mass incidents throughout the mobilization process to justify implementing or not implementing environmental policies. The final empirical chapter examines the ongoing political and positional interests that mid-level officials navigate, negotiate, and use when deciding how to implement environmental policies, showing the resourcefulness of these officials as they navigate their role as agents of higher-level bureaucrats as well as principles of lower-level agents, as well as colleagues to officials in horizontal bureaus. Mid-level officials resourcefully and skillfully play competing interests and powers off one another to pick and choose which policies they are going to (either partially or fully) implement and which ones they are going to ignore.

This article focuses on religious practices among Muslims in the Republic of Georgia today. It considers relations between Muslims and other religious groups; the influence of religion on everyday life in Georgia; the relationship between the religious and national consciousness; and tensions between supporters of the syncretic forms of Islam that have been traditionally practiced in Georgia and the allegedly "pure" and "alien" forms of Islam that are typically, although not necessarily accurately, referred to as "Wahhabism" in post-Soviet space.

In this dissertation, I examine how information about the impacts of climate change becomes tractable for both administrative and economic processes of decision-making and valuation. I look at the policy and knowledge networks, devices, formulas, protocols, negotiations and contestations that shape the conditions in which public and private-sector actors incorporate and translate the notion that, as future climates drift from their historical pasts, assumptions about the dependability and stability of weather, natural resource availability and the broader environment in which modern societies have flourished become less and less tenable. Structured around three qualitative cases, each chapter of the dissertation sheds light on how efforts to calculate the physical consequences of climate change are reconfiguring institutional relations in catastrophe insurance, public water management, and state-led coastal wetland protection. Besides foregrounding the social construction of translational networks of decision-making, this dissertation also seeks to answer a central puzzle about institutional innovation – how do organizations make decisions in the face of operational uncertainty, especially when that uncertainty regards the behavior of the physical environment upon which an organization depends? Furthermore, how do uncertainties regarding changes to the behavior of the environment themselves operate across institutional boundaries and affect the strategic positions and relations of institutionally connected actors?

By bringing attention to the nitty-gritty work being done by specific actors interested in translating science into action (frequently through specific, climate-enhanced decision-making devices), my research combines concepts and methods from the sociology of science and technology, political studies of organizational life, and cultural notions of institutional action. Drawing on insights across the three cases, I provide a general theoretical framing for the conditions by which scientific knowledge gets enrolled in processes of institutional governance and transformed into “actionable information”. Actionability, in my cases, is about articulating knowledge and data produced by climate scientists with the particular processes of risk evaluation and risk management that administrative and economic actors use to assist in deciding whether to renew insurance contracts, how to ration dwindling common resources, and where to invest public money in protective infrastructure. In each of these cases, unintended consequences of this actionability reveals the urgent need to develop new theories of institutional change that account for how climate change provokes field-level disruptions that challenge our collective capacity to provide for equitable forms of climate adaptation and protection.

In the last decade, the platform economy has transformed urban life, using crowdsourcing technology to change the way people eat (e.g., Instacart, UberEats, Doordash), move (Lyft, Uber), work (TaskRabbit), and travel (Airbnb). An accompanying, but understudied, change is this economy’s dramatic reorganization of urban civic participation, as platforms mobilize their users to fight the market and labor regulations supported by local civic groups and market competitors. My dissertation uses a mixed-methods approach to examine the social bases of short-term rental markets (e.g., Airbnb) and their consequences for urban civic organizing and policymaking. I argue that the very way these markets are socially organized—relying on civiccapacities, labor and housing inequalities, and technologies that blend “sharing” with transactional forms of exchange—shape the local politics over their regulation, creating new allegiances between civic groups and the corporation.