Jesse Driscoll

Jesse Driscoll is an associate professor of political science and serves as chair of the Global Leadership Institute at the School. He is an area specialist in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Russian-speaking world.

His first book, “Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States,” (2015) is published in the Cambridge Studies on Comparative Politics series. The book maps the processes by which well-functioning domestic hierarchies emerged after relatively short periods of anarchic violence in Georgia and Tajikistan. Driscoll argues that when a state has failed, and promises by the nearby great power (in this case Russia) to provide security guarantees are not credible, policy-makers would do well consider state-building as a complex coalition formation process by local violence entrepreneurs (warlords). His second book (accepted at Columbia University Press, forthcoming 2020) is a practitioner's guide to fieldwork methods for academic researchers.