In her book Yoshiko Herrera crafts an impressive theoretical argument by first noting and then rectifying an important intellectual inconsistency in contemporary studies of nationalism. While these studies typically view identities as multiple and constructed, they nevertheless tend to treat economic interests as unproblematic and objective. Herrera challenges this assumption by arguing that economic understandings are constructed as well, and that these constructed views of economic interests will affect the relative propensity of substate regions to press for greater autonomy or secession. As she succinctly puts it, “The central argument of this book is that variation in regional activism is explained not by differences in structural economic conditions but by differences in understandings of the economy, which, in particular institutional contexts, resulted in differences in the imagination of economic interests” (p. 11).

Herrera supports this claim by examining regional activism in Russia from 1990 through 1993. She points out that the institutional context of perestroika opened a window of opportunity for the regions to reconceptualize their positions in the USSR and then in the Russian Federation. This window, she argues, remained open until Russian President Boris Yeltsin forcefully dissolved the Supreme Soviet in October 1993 and the subsequent adoption of the December 1993 constitution resolidified center-regional relations. Herrera finds that during this period, comparing such objective regional economic indicators as income, unemployment levels, tax remittances, and so forth across the 55 “Russian” regions (that is, those territorial regions not explicitly identified with a non-Russian ethnic group) fails to predict which regions would engage in struggles for greater sovereignty. More importantly, she argues persuasively that the uncertain, data-poor environment of the early 1990s meant that the various regions had no way of actually knowing whether or not they were significantly economically disadvantaged in relation to one another. Imagined Economies thus places itself in opposition to previous studies of regional activism in Russia by scholars such as Steven Solnick, Henry Hale, and Daniel Treisman, whose arguments focus primarily on Russia's ethnic regions and turn upon objective understandings of the regions' relative economic positions vis-à-vis Moscow.

Herrera's most significant contribution in this book is to bring the insights of constructivist political economy to the study of nationalism. In doing so she goes beyond a mere critique of previous scholarship to offer an intellectual framework for the study of imagined economies. Using schema theory and an adaptation of Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus, she argues that there is no one “real,” correct understanding of economic conditions to be contrasted with misunderstood or manipulated “false” ones. Rather, economic conditions are complex and economic data can be fairly interpreted in multiple and sometimes contradictory ways. Actors take material facts (“bits of data”) and subject them to cognition and interpretations mediated by habitus and institutions. This process leads to the development of intersubjective understandings of the economy, which then crystallize into specific economic and political interests such as sovereignty movements.

Herrera makes her empirical case for the importance of imagined economies in spurring sovereignty movements through a detailed comparison of the Samara and Sverdlovsk oblasts. She argues that although Samara's economic relationship to the central government was “objectively” worse than Sverdlovsk's, actors in Sverdlovsk perceived its economic situation much more negatively. Consequently, Sverdlovsk embarked upon a sovereignty movement while Samara did not. She demonstrates the differences in perception by means of a content analysis of 579 newspaper articles from the two regions published from 1990 through 1993, finding that those in Sverdlovsk consistently described their region's economic relationship with Moscow in more negative terms than did those in Samara.

As a resident of Quebec, I am convinced that Herrera is on to something important when she posits a relationship between economic perceptions and sovereignty movements; for example, recent surveys here show that more than half of Quebec sovereignists believe that remaining a part of Canada is economically disadvantageous, while fewer than a fifth of Quebec federalists think so. But does regional activism arise from perceptions of economic exploitation, or do sovereignty movements themselves encourage a reimagining of economic relationships with the center as more exploitative? While Herrera argues for the central, causal role of imagined economies in determining relative regional activism in Russia, the empirical evidence she presents is more ambiguous. For example, one cannot tell from her data how many of the Sverdlovsk articles in the sample predate the active regional autonomy movement and the subsequent decisions of the regional government in early July 1993 to unilaterally raise its administrative status and to declare the creation of a Urals Republic. This makes it difficult to determine causality. The comparison also raises the question of how negative perceived economic relations must be in order to spark regional activism, because according to the analysis, Samarans also thought that they were getting a bad deal from the central government (in Samara, 63% of the articles discussing Moscow's economic actions toward the region saw those actions as negative for Samara, as compared to 81% in Sverdlovsk [p. 186]). In addition, the discussion in Chapter 6 of the Sverdlovsk sovereignty movement acknowledges that proponents based their case as much on perceptions of constitutional and political inequality as on perceptions of economic injustice. To Herrera's credit, however, these concerns only become evident because she has presented her cases thoroughly and fairly, refusing to omit complicating information.

In short, despite these quibbles about the empirics, Imagined Economies clearly represents a significant theoretical contribution and corrective to the current literature on nationalism, and it sets a promising agenda for future research.