Advancing Comparative Area Studies: Analytical Heterogeneity and Organizational Challenges

The book Comparative Area Studies (2018) laid out the distinctive features and value-added of "comparative area studies" (CAS) against the backdrop of ongoing methodological debates in the social sciences. Since that time, the editors of the first volume and other scholars doing comparative research have been exploring the scope and usefulness of the CAS framework in relation to their own work. Others have raised important questions about the epistemological flexibility of CAS and about the institutional pressures that could limit further extensions of CAS, especially given current trends in the academy.

This new volume tackles these questions and showcases how CAS can accommodate a wider range of scholarship predicated on more varied methodological and epistemological principles. This includes not only contextualized comparisons of countries from different regions but also interpretive work, comparisons of sub-national units, as well as inter-regional comparisons addressing topics such as global human rights and the rise of regional powers that go beyond comparative politics (the focus of the first volume). This book also offers practical, realistic discussions of how our current institutional architecture can be adapted to support cross-regional comparative research and to better connect different area studies communities--while acknowledging the long-standing value of deep area expertise.

Ariel I. Ahram is Professor at the Virginia Tech School of Public & International Affairs in Arlington. He is an Associate of the Institute of Middle East Studies of the GIGA, the German Institute for Global and Area Studies. He earned his PhD in government and MA in Arab studies at Georgetown University and BA at Brandeis University.

Patrick Köllner is Vice President of the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Director of the GIGA Institute for Asian Studies, and a professor of political science at the University of Hamburg. He studied politics and management as well as modern Japan studies at the universities of Konstanz and Essex and holds a doctorate and a habilitation in political science from Humboldt University of Berlin and the University of Trier, respectively.

Rudra Sil is Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught since obtaining his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. His scholarly interests encompass Russian/post-communist studies, Asian studies, labor politics, international development, qualitative methodology, and philosophy of social science.