Imperial legacies are as, if not more, important than the modern state system in shaping regional resilience and fracture. And the more that connections can be forged across diverse communities in (post-)imperial peripheries, the more likely that disputes can be resolved without violence. This is the core argument of Anna Ohanyan's theoretically sophisticated, empirically “thick” book, The Neighborhood Effect: The Imperial Roots of Regional Fracture in Eurasia.

Drawing on extensive historiographic research on the overlapping peripheries of the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires, the book traces how a plethora of local agents (e.g., military; bureaucratic; economic; intellectual; revolutionary; tribal; religious/sectarian) engaged with each other and external forces. These dynamics shaped patterns of armed conflict over the long nineteenth century and bequeathed, Ohanyan argues, forms of institutional and social capital (or lack thereof) that continue to shape conflict propensities.

Ohanyan's superpower is her balancing act between history and political science. She offers insights into the power of the past without essentializing history—a tendency all too salient in recent treatments of geopolitics as the “return of history,” i.e., a reading of world politics which recenters therole of historical, c