Kees van Kersbergen is a Professor of Political Science at VU University Amsterdam. He served as director of the Centre for Comparative Social Studies until 2007 and has also been professor of political science at the Radboud University (Nijmegen). He is the author of Social Capitalism (1995), which won the Stein Rokkan Prize in Comparative Social Science, and co-editor of Expansion and Fragmentation: Internationalization, Political Change and the Transformation of the Nation State (2014).