Advancing Comparative Area Studies : Analytical Heterogeneity and Organizational Challenges

Advancing Comparative Area Studies responds to questions about the analytic range of the comparative area studies (CAS) field and the organizational challenges it must navigate. The chapters demonstrate that CAS can cover a broad range of scholarship beyond cross-national comparisons, including interpretive work across different sites, sub-national comparisons at the sectoral level, and inter-regional comparisons addressing topics such as the behavior of regional powers. The volume also considers how the institutional architecture of research universities can be adapted so as to better support cross-regional research and collaboration without sacrificing the quality of area expertise.

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.