Edward W. Walker is Associate Adjunct Professor in the Department of Political Science and Executive Director of the Berkeley Program in Eurasian and East European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His book Dissolution: Sovereignty and the Breakup of the Soviet Union (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003) explains the breakup of the Soviet Union into fifteen successor states, emphasising the role of the institutions and the mythologies of Soviet federalism and nationality policy. He is also the editor of a posthumous volume of writings by Mark Saroyan, Minorities, Mullahs, and Modernity: Reshaping Community in the Former Soviet Union (1997), and he has written and taught on communist systems and post-communist politics, nationalism, ethno-politics, and ethnic conflict in the former Soviet Union; problems of federalism, secession, and nationalism; religion and the state; frozen conflicts in post-Soviet space; political Islam movements in the Soviet successor states; and geopolitics in Eurasia. A National Fellow at the Hoover Institute in 1998-1999, Walker received his PhD in Political Science from Columbia University in 1992; he has an MA from the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (1986) and a BA from Harvard (1977).