Russian and East European Studies
Professor of Political Science
Rudra Sil is Professor of Political Science and the SAS Director of the Huntsman Program in International Studies & Business. His research and teaching interests encompass comparative politics, Russian/post-communist studies, Asian studies, labor politics, international development, international relations theory, qualitative methodology, and the philosophy of the social sciences. He is author of Managing ‘Modernity’: Work, Community, and Authority in Late-Industrializing Japan and Russia (University of Michigan Press, 2002) and Beyond Paradigms: Analytic Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010), coauthored with Peter Katzenstein. The latter book was one of thirteen titles in international relations honored as a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title in 2011. Professor Sil’s articles have appeared in a wide range of journals, including Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Theoretical Politics, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Industrial Relations, Studies in Comparative International Development, Current History, andPost-Soviet Affairs. He is also author of more than a dozen book chapters and coeditor of five anthologies, including The Politics of Labor in a Global Age (Oxford University Press, 2001), World Order After Leninism (University of Washington Press, 2007) and, most recently, Comparative Area Studies: Methodological Rationales and Cross-Regional Applicatons (forthcoming, Oxford University Press). Professor Sil is currently working on two books, Russia Reconsidered: Fate of a Former Superpower (under contract, Cambridge University Press) and Pathways of the Post-communist Proletariat: Labor Politics in Russia, China and Eastern Europe. Some of the research for the latter book was presented in a paper that received the APSA Best Paper Award for the Labor Studies section at the 2013 Annual Meeting.
Office Location
Phone
Selected Publications
- BOOK -- Managing "Modernity": Work Community and Authority in Late-Industrializing Japan and Russia. University of Michigan Press, 2002. Order this book from the publisher.
- BOOK -- Beyond Paradigms: Analytic Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Coauthored with Peter J. Katzenstein. -- CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title in 2011. Order this book from the publisher.
- ARTICLE -- “The Battle Over Flexibilization in Post-Communist Transitions: Labor Politics in Poland and the Czech Republic, 1989-2010,” Journal of Industrial Relations (forthcoming Fall 2017).
- ARTICLE -- “Labor’s Travails in Postcommunist Eastern Europe,” Current History, vol. 116, no. 788 (March 2017).
- ARTICLE -- "Avant-Garde or Dogmatic? DART [Data Access & Research Transparency] in the Mirror of the Social Sciences,” (with Guzman Castro) in APSA-CP: Newsletter of the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association 26, 1 (Spring 2016): 40-43.
- ARTICLE -- "When Multi-Method Research Subverts Methodological Pluralism - Or, Why We Still Need Single-Method Research" (with Amel Ahmed), Perspectives on Politics 10, 4 (December 2012): 935-953.
- ARTICLE -- "Analytic Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics: Reconfiguring Problems and Mechanisms across Research Traditions" (with Peter J. Katzenstein), Perspectives on Politics 8, 2 (June 2010): 411-431.
- ARTICLE -- "Stretching Postcommunism: Diversity, Context and Comparative Historical Analysis" (with Cheng Chen), Post-Soviet Affairs 23, 4 (2007): 275-301.
- ARTICLE -- "Communist Legacies, Postcommunist Transformations, and the Fate of Organized Labor in Russia and China" (with Calvin Chen). Studies in Comparative International Development, 41, 2 (Summer 2006): 62-87.
- ARTICLE -- "State Legitimacy and the (In)significance of Democracy in Post-Communist Russia" (with Cheng Chen), Europe-Asia Studies 56, 3 (May 2004).
- ARTICLE -- "The Foundations of Eclecticism: The Epistemological Status of Agency, Culture, and Structure in Social Theory," Journal of Theoretical Politics (July 2000).
