Karen Barkey is currently a Professor of Sociology and History at Columbia University. She is the author of Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization, winner of the Social Science History Award in 1995 and co-editor of After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: The Soviet Union, and the Russian, Habsburg and Ottoman Empires with Mark von Hagen. She has been awarded fellowships from the United States Institute of Peace, Social Science Research Council - MacArthur and National Humanities Center.