Henry Hale, an assistant professor of political science at Indiana University, earned his Ph.D. in 1998 at Harvard. During the summer of 2004, Hale worked at the Institute on the topic “Ukraine’s Drive for Independence and Theories of Ethnic Politics,” focusing on the question of how much “identity” politics lies at the root of separatism, especially in Ukraine and Uzbekistan. Continuing this research in the fall of 2004, he plans to develop new theoretical insights into identity to explain how and under what conditions ethnicity matters in political events. This fellowship is funded by the Wolodymyr Smigurowskyi endowed gift in support of scholarship at HURI.