Advancing Comparative Area Studies: Analytical Heterogeneity and Organizational Challenges

The book Comparative Area Studies (2018) laid out the distinctive features and value-added of "comparative area studies" (CAS) against the backdrop of ongoing methodological debates in the social sciences.Since that time, the editors of the first volume and other scholars doing comparative research have been exploring the scope and usefulness of the CAS framework in relation to their own work.Others have raised important questions about the epistemological flexibility of CAS and about the institutional pressures that could limit further extensions of CAS, especially given current trends in the academy. This new volume tackles these questions and showcases how CAS can accommodate a wider range of scholarship predicated on more varied methodological and epistemological principles.This includes not only contextualized comparisons of countries from different regions but also interpretive work, comparisons of sub-national units, as well as inter-regional comparisons addressing topics such a