Abstracts

This research explores the discursive landscape of Azerbaijani national identity in its current form, with a focus on three identified groups – Azerbaijani government, traditional opposition forces and youth-led civil society. Employing a mixed-methods approach – combining analysis of presidential speeches along with semi-structured interview data conducted with leaders of Azerbaijani opposition parties and youth civil society activists – this study reveals critical points of convergence and divergence among these groups. The findings reveal that the discursive hegemony of ethno-nationalism stands uncontested both within the Azerbaijani government and traditional opposition all the same. Given that current nationalistic discourses are a direct byproduct of the incumbent government, it functioned for them as an ideological tool to justify and perpetuate its hold over the Azerbaijani society en masse since 1990s. Nevertheless, the traditional opposition has not only failed to offer a substantive ideological alternative, let alone resistance, but has, in many respects, aligned itself with this dominant discourse. Analysis of the taken interviews from the political opposition, this alignment stems entirely from the ideological weakness of traditional opposition parties, which has left them to rely on hegemonic nationalism as the only perceived legitimate discourse for soliciting popular support. As a result, opposition parties have confined their critique primarily to the spheres of social injustice and authoritarian governance, while remaining aligned on ideological front. Whereas the youth-led civil society, an ideologically salient group of activists, academics, and public intellectuals presents a radical alternative to this viewpoint. They openly contest ethno-nationalism as the sole alternative in the ideological front, regarding any alignment counter-productive. For them, reclaiming the discursive landscape is regarded as the most viable form of resistance.

This paper proposes a theoretical framework for understanding musical nationalism in post-Soviet Azerbaijan, situating sonic practices within the region’s wider socio-political transformations. Building on scholarship on musical nationalisation—particularly folklorisation, institutionalisation, and standardisation—it examines how musical forms have become central to constructing national identity after the Soviet collapse. The guiding question concerns ways in which musical practices, and the discourses that surround them, contribute to shaping a post-Soviet national community.
Drawing on Billig’s (1995) concept of “banal nationalism,” the study analyses the intertwined roles of cultural policies and everyday musical practices. It considers both the work of state institutions seeking to consolidate a unified national narrative and activities of local actors—musicians, cultural entrepreneurs, NGOs, and community—whose informal initiatives may reinforce, complicate, or challenge official agendas. Through an exploration of key genres such as mugham and meykhana, the paper shows how Azerbaijan’s musical landscape serves as a site where ethnic traditions are reinterpreted, aestheticised, and mobilised as national symbols. These processes, shaped by Soviet cultural engineering, simultaneously reproduce and transform notions of heritage and authenticity.
To situate these dynamics within a broader theoretical context, the paper engages debates on postcoloniality while avoiding teleological narratives of cultural emancipation (Tlostanova 2018, 2019; Etkind 2011). It highlights how musical nationalism participates in renegotiating Soviet and Persian legacies of cultural hierarchy. The study ultimately proposes an anthropologically informed model of musical nationalism in the post-Soviet context, demonstrating how musical practices and their associated discourses actively participate in imagining the national community.

The objective of this study is to investigate ways in which the war can enhance ethnic identity, with the special emphasis on Azerbaijani minority in Georgia. Historically, Georgia has been home for various national groups, including Azerbaijanis and Armenians. Despite historically prolonged conflict – the First Karabakh war (1988-1994), relations between Azerbaijani and Armenian communities in Georgia remained peaceful and harmonious across various cities, towns and villages.
The outbreak of the 2nd Karabakh war in 2020 acted as a stimulus for reinforcing the ethnic identity for Azerbaijanis not only within Azerbaijan but also beyond its borders, particularly among those living in Georgia. This case demonstrates an opportunity to analyze how war can trigger political mobilization from bottom-up. Interviews conducted with Azerbaijanis living in Georgia believe that the 2nd Karabakh war became emotionally and politically an important turning point. For example, according to participants, Azerbaijanis in different villages of Georgia expressed massive support and, in some instances, some Azerbaijani with Georgian citizenship were willing to join the war on Azerbaijan’s behalf. These considerable developments appear to have contributed to a heightened sense of ethnonational identity.
In the meantime, the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia carries the theoretical potential to generate negative attitude about Armenians among Azerbaijani communities, despite their tight historical cooperation and agonistic relations within Georgia. Consequently, this study seeks to comprehend how the war impacted Azerbaijani respondents’ sentiments towards Azerbaijan; how their national sentiments have evolved; and how they proceed to conduct everyday coexistence with Armenians in Georgia.

This paper seeks to investigate the effect of education type on individual political behaviour, with a particular focus on the development of national identity and perceptions of citizenship and civic duty. Ample literature has shown the relationship between education and voting: education is a strong predictor of turnout, and higher education predisposes one to vote liberal-progressive. The effect of school type: private, or state, and its influence on individual political behaviour and attitudes remains unexplored. This mixed-methods research assesses this both at the elite level, by investigating the relationship between the type of school an MP attends and their voting behaviour on certain economic policies, and the voter level through an original survey of 50 young adults exploring how respondents perceive the influence of their schooling on their political beliefs, their understanding of citizenship, and the formation of their national identity. The survey investigates whether school environments cultivate feelings of belonging, civic responsibility, or political engagement, and how these effects compare with other socialising forces such as family, community, and personal identity. The novel dataset of MPs’ voting behaviour shows that school type has minimal influence on MPs’ voting behaviour, and private education is not determinative of conservative legislative preferences. Among voters, schooling contributes to political awareness and civic self-understanding but is outweighed by familial and personal identity factors in shaping political behaviour. These results challenge common assumptions about the political significance of private education and underscore the continued centrality of class, family, and identity in British political socialisation.

This paper makes a theoretical argument about the role of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) in the national story of Canada in the province of Quebec. I argue that EDI has largely replaced earlier nationalism ideologies of multiculturalism in Canada and interculturalism in Quebec. The present vexation with EDI in Canada, however, has less to do with Trumpism in the United States and more to do with the limitations of the power of EDI as a national narrative tied to national identity.

Although interculturalism in Quebec was positioned against multiculturalism, scholars note that both function as forms of nationalism aimed at welcoming immigrants while maintaining control of belonging. Schools have been the place where these national ideologies are tested. In Quebec an early test of this welcoming stance occurred when a Sikh student won the right to wear his kirpan, signaling movement from assimilation to accommodation (James, 2017). This shift continued with the Bouchard Taylor Commission on Reasonable Accommodation in 2008, which affirmed religious accommodation within Quebec’s secularism model. Prayer rooms in schools and workplaces reflected a move from mere tolerance to welcoming. Yet recent legal measures including Bill 21 (2019), Bill 94 (2025), and the proposed Bill 9 restrict religious accommodation rights especially in schools. A critical discourse analysis of the new mandatory K- 12 Quebec Citizenship and Culture curriculum illustrates the exclusion of Black people and religious groups and provides compelling evidence of the shift away from narratives of national welcoming. While interculturalism faded from Quebec’s national lexicon, EDI emerged as a framework to address institutional racism and challenge meritocracy. However, as minority groups asserted rights rather than relying on welcoming benevolence, EDI became framed as a threat to national narratives of belonging.

This paper investigates the increasingly prominent role of education in shaping national subjectivity within Lithuania, a state experiencing heightened national security anxieties following Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine. This geopolitical threat has spurred a political drive to introduce more patriotic and national security-oriented education across the school system, raising critical questions about the intersection of nationalism, democratic values, and pedagogical practice.
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in one Lithuanian high school, this presentation analyses how schools, as the state’s institutions, actively participate in constructing and maintaining nationality through material space, objects, and everyday school experiences.
Building on the theories of banal nationalism (Billig, 2010 [1995]) and works of scholars linking nationalism, materiality, and affect (Benei 2008; Zubrzycki, 2017; Zembylas, 2022) as well as empirical data from fieldwork, this paper argues that lived experiences, rather than purely cognitive instruction, occupy a central and indispensable role in translating abstract policy directives (like increased patriotism) into embodied national subjects. The paper concludes by reflecting on the implications of this affect-driven, material nationalism for democratic citizenship and the inclusion of diverse populations in a vulnerable geopolitical context like Lithuania’s.

The paper examines the complex positioning of female actors within the 2024-2025 student protests in Serbia, situated at the crossroads of feminist agency and nationalism. Women have been highly visible within the protest movement, occupying the front lines of demonstrations, often as both leaders and targets of police repression, yet their roles remain under-examined within broader narratives of complex socio-political circumstances. Through an analysis of protest-related social media content associated with student movements, as well as digital media, this study investigates how female participants articulate their demands and how they are perceived, focusing on key protest gatherings such as March 8, March 15, June 28, and November 1. Particular attention is given to the interplay between feminist expressions, such as calls for bodily autonomy, equality, and social justice, and nationalistic imagery, including the use of flags, symbols of Orthodox Christianity, and other Serbian national symbols. By interrogating this entanglement of gendered and national discourses, the paper asks whether women’s presence in the protests disrupts or reinforces dominant patriarchal and nationalist paradigms. Ultimately, the analysis seeks to illuminate how digital media (re)produces female agency in a moment of political unrest and how women navigate the symbolic tension between the flag and the feminist banner in contemporary Serbia.

Based on the interdisciplinary research of the women’s movement and the theoretical framework of gendered nationalism, combined with a comparative perspective on feminist activism in the second half of the nineteenth century in Bohemia and in countries such as England, France, and the Nordic states, the author reveals a distinctive feature of Czech feminism: its primary emphasis on nationally oriented conduct. Unlike in other countries, the Czech women’s movement from the 1840s onward was not characterised by anti-male sentiment. Middle-class women were instead viewed as co-creators who, alongside their enlightened male counterparts, would contribute to awakening the spirit and language of the Czech nation. Czech women’s activism thus strengthened the broader male-led movement advocating Czech national independence (autonomy) within the Habsburg Empire, whose dominant ethnic group was German.
From the late 1840s to the early 20th century, the nation was the highest moral value for the Czech activists. Charity, social, and educational activities were expected of middle-class women, but in addition, it was directly required that the “daughters of the Czech nation” should be patriotic in all their activities. The founders of the first Czech women’s association, the Association of Slavic Women, proclaimed that their activities must contribute to the Czech nation achieving the great goal of national welfare by establishing a Czech girls’ school. This was true for the activists from the 1840s until the beginning of the 20th century.

Situated at the intersection of EU enlargement and regional security debates, this paper examines why Serbia has emerged as the principal outlier in the Western Balkans in terms of trust in the European Union and alignment with Euro-Atlantic security structures. Conceptually, it adopts an expanded, historically grounded definition of the Western Balkans that encompasses all former Yugoslav republics plus Albania, and employs Uriel Abulof’s notion of causa sui projects to analyse competing foundations of political community. Empirically, the paper combines recent EU survey data with original research conducted in Montenegro and Serbia to map variation in trust, perceived commonality with Europeans, inter-ethnic attitudes and threat perceptions. The findings indicate that ethnic identity is not fixed, but contingent on ideological, institutional and security contexts. Serbs in Montenegro display higher inter-ethnic trust, greater optimism about post-Yugoslav relations, and lower fear of renewed conflict than Serbs in Serbia, indicating that a single ethnic community can be shaped by divergent causa sui projects.
Interpreting these results, the paper argues that Serbia’s contemporary “loneliness” reflects the persistence of an ethnonational causa sui project—neonationalist in its latest incarnation and epitomized in the late twentieth century by Slobodan Milošević as an early cultural nativist populist—that is structurally in tension with democratic understandings of freedom grounded in equal human dignity. The conclusion reflects on how the enduring dualism between liberal-civic and ethnonational projects in Serbia illuminates broader European struggles to reconcile nationalism, democracy and freedom, and how the Serbian case may foreshadow disintegrative pressures within the EU itself.

This paper uses the 2016 “Diba Expedition” as a critical episode to trace how digital nationalism can become a popular vehicle for authoritarian interference in democratic politics. In January 2016, thousands of Chinese netizens organised around the online community Li Yi Ba (Diba) circumvented the Great Firewall to “invade” the Facebook pages of Taiwanese politicians and media outlets associated with pro-independence positions. Rather than treating this as an isolated instance of online trolling, the paper reconstructs the broader sequence through which such cross-border “patriotic” interventions were made thinkable and legitimate.

The analysis begins from pre-2016 policy documents and official discourses that promoted “positive energy,” online patriotism, and youth responsibility in cyberspace, identifying how they shaped a repertoire in which “going online to defend the nation” was framed as a civic duty. It then examines how participants in the Diba Expedition drew on and reworked this repertoire to portray their actions as defending national sovereignty and correcting allegedly biased democratic debate in Taiwan. Finally, it shows how subsequent state and commercial media coverage retrospectively celebrated the expedition as exemplary spontaneous mobilisation.

Employing small-N process tracing, the paper treats these materials as causal-process observations to reconstruct a chain linking policy signals, online mobilisation, and official endorsement. The case demonstrates how digital nationalist practices can be normalised as a repertoire of cross-border interference that provides both popular legitimation and plausible deniability for authoritarian challenges to democratic self-determination.

This paper examines how Japanese print media employed the language of nationalism to construct an imperial imaginary during the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and the subsequent Japanese invasion of Taiwan (1895–1896). These two conflicts marked Japan’s first large-scale overseas military operations and the initial implementation of colonial rule, forming a critical turning point in the emergence of modern Japanese imperialism. The victory over Qing China not only affirmed the achievements of Meiji modernization but also reinforced Japan’s self-positioning as the dominant power in East Asia. Meanwhile, the invasion and occupation of Taiwan provided the first concrete arena for practicing colonial governance and cultural integration. Unlike Western imperialism, Japan’s imperial expansion was deeply shaped by emotional identification with the emperor system, narratives of collective military sacrifice, and the ideological influence of State Shinto. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities, this paper argues that the media played a crucial role in enabling citizens to imagine and accept the Japanese Empire as a shared national community. Furthermore, newspapers and other mass media functioned as instruments of imperial propaganda, disseminating the legitimacy of Japanese rule to colonial subjects. Through analyzing wartime discourse in three major newspapers—Asahi Shimbun, Mainichi Shimbun, and Yomiuri Shimbun—this paper traces how nationalist language was produced, circulated, and normalized in the public sphere, thereby revealing the mediated, institutionalized, and mobilized processes through which nationalism took shape during the early formation of the modern Japanese Empire.

In the aftermath of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), what could be seen as the first nationalist event in East Asia took place: the establishment of the Republic of Formosa. Formosa, or Taiwan, was a prefecture of Qing China (Taiwan Prefecture) in Fujian Province, since 1684. The Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) which concluded the First Sino-Japanese War stipulated that Taiwan would be ceded to Japan, and upon learning of this, the local officials sent by the Qing court as well as established Han Chinese settlers decided to resist the proposed cession by proclaiming independence of Taiwan as the Republic of Formosa. The Republic was short-lived. It was proclaimed on 23 May 1985 but by 21 October the same year, it was defeated by the advancing Japanese imperial army which was implementing the terms of the Treaty.

The case of the Republic of Formosa provides ample material for discussing nationalism, democracy and freedom. The Republic’s stated mission was to oppose the cession to Japan and to recover Qing suzerainty, which leads to the discussion of which nationalism the event represented. The freedom which was sought to be secured by the move was not linked to self-determination as Taiwanese but freedom from alien rule. The regime of a republic was chosen so as to attract international support but not discussed in reference to values of democracy. The paper reviews the case’s ‘peculiarity’ to add to our understanding of nationalism.

Although literature on nation branding has been dominated by instrumental approaches, a growing subset of works has critically interrogated this practice, portraying it as part of a neoliberal takeover. According to these critical works, nation branding commodifies national identities, reducing nations to units of economic production, symbolic goods to be traded, and citizens to mere consumers, ready to be exploited and disciplined. While relevant, these insights remain tethered to neoliberal rationalities and largely overlook the political dimensions of nation branding

Consequently, this paper takes the discussion on a different direction, approaching nation branding from the perspective of state power. Theoretically, it draws on discussions on symbolic power, nationalism and promotional culture. Empirically, it draws on more than a decade of research on 10 nation-states from Latin America (Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Costa Rica and Peru), including interviews, campaign analysis and news coverage. The examination of these cases reveals that, rather than simply being an instrument of market logics, nation branding is a manifestation of state attempts to monopolise the communication and representation of the nation. More concretely, nation branding is highly political, and it is entangled with the agendas of domestic elites, it is used as an instrument of local partisan struggles, and is often a target of popular resistance. Economic reductionist perspectives should therefore be challenged in order to approach nation branding from the perspective of statecraft and stagecraft, opening up new avenues for discussions about identity struggles, democracy and symbolic and material inequalities.

This paper examines how contemporary forms of military AI are deployed to undermine collective political agency and obstruct the exercise of national self-determination using Palestine as case study. Theoretically, it brings together Dirk Moses’s concept of permanent security, illuminating state projects of indefinite domination, with Daniel Pipes’s “total victory” paradigm, which explicitly targets Palestinian national determination. Against this backdrop, I analyze AI-supported systems used by Israel in Palestine as a paradigmatic security regime aspiring to perfect foresight and the neutralization of Palestinian political resistance. Building on Lahmann’s argument that pervasive surveillance and algorithmic anomaly detection suppress the spontaneity essential to collective political action and on Gray’s account of AI-enabled sacred violence and techno-theocratic militarism in Israel, the paper shows how machine-learning–driven targeting, continuous population monitoring, and predictive threat modelling function as instruments not only of warfare but of political foreclosure.
Methodologically, the paper uses discourse analysis of Israeli security doctrines alongside critical practice analysis of algorithmic targeting systems used against Palestinians. Two brief case studies: the expansion of anomaly-detection surveillance architectures since 2021 and AI-driven strike selection in the 2023–25 Gaza war, demonstrate how these systems recode everyday Palestinian life as potential threat behaviour and thereby justify expanded coercive force.
The paper contributes to interdisciplinary debates on AI, war, and sovereignty by showing how algorithmic rationalities reshape the temporal and political conditions under which colonised people might act collectively, reframing military AI as a structural impediment to self-determination rather than merely a technological tool of conflict.

This work examines how contemporary European states navigate the tension between nationalism, democracy, and freedom through the lens of digital military communication. The focus lies on the Netherlands, the country long associated with liberalism, tolerance, and conflict-averse self-perception. In the context marked by hybrid warfare, geopolitical uncertainty, polarization, and democratic fragmentation, Dutch defense narratives must simultaneously project alliance, maintain a peaceful democratic identity, and strengthen nationalist sentiments for citizen mobilization. The study analyzes how the Dutch Ministry of Defence constructs national identity, security threats, and civic responsibility on its public website.

Using digital ethnography and critical discourse analysis, this paper traces how linguistic and visual strategies articulate notions of national unity, securitization, and collective agency in a Dutch context. The analysis reveals how ideas of freedom are mobilized to promote security measures and shape public perceptions of national belonging. The study shows how strategic military messaging subtly reframes Dutch identity around resilience, vigilance, and civic duty, while negotiating tensions between regional, national, and supranational affiliations.

This paper examines normalization of opposition to liberal democratic norms in Norway, one of the world’s most liberal democracies (Dahlum & Knutsen 2025). Drawing on cultural backlash theory (Norris & Inglehart 2019) and Bornschier’s (2013) framework of new cultural cleavages, the paper explores how populist right and far right actors’ reframe liberal-democratic values—such as gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights, multiculturalism, and global governance—as a defense of national freedom and democratic authenticity. This could be seen as example of what Mondon and Winter (2020) define as reactionary democracy, the use of democratic rhetoric and legitimacy for illiberal purposes.
Empirically, the paper draws on qualitative interviews with politicians, journalists, and alternative-media actors on the Norwegian right (Fangen 2024), complemented by discourse analysis of online commentary, I show how narratives once confined to the far right have entered mainstream political arenas through discourses on “anti-woke” politics (Cammaerts 2022), “gender ideology,” (Paternotte & Kuhar 2018) and opposition to international institutions and agreements (Dammen & Fangen 2024). These narratives are justified as protecting “ordinary people” and “Norwegian values” from an overreaching liberal elite, illustrating how nationalism and populism rearticulate freedom as resistance to liberalism itself.
By situating the Norwegian case within broader European and global developments, the paper illustrates that illiberalism’s normalization does not necessarily represent a rejection of democracy, but rather its redefinition—one that privileges majoritarian sovereignty over pluralist freedoms. The analysis contributes to debates on the tension between nationalism, democracy, and freedom, demonstrating how appeals to national authenticity can erode liberal-democratic norms from within.

This paper examines Catalan nationalism in exile (1936–1977) as a democratic, civilian-led force resisting fascism. How did exiled Catalanism construct a distinct anti-fascist identity while other nationalisms embraced authoritarianism? What strategies of paradiplomacy, advocacy, and transnational alliance-building enabled its survival and influence? And how did it reconcile national self-determination with postwar democratic reconstruction in Europe?

Drawing on archival material, the study argues that figures and bodies like the National Council of Catalonia in London (1940) consciously framed their struggle within the broader fight against totalitarianism. By engaging with institutions such as the United Nations and the European Federalist Movement, they forged alliances with other stateless nations while promoting federalist and pluralist solutions for postwar Europe.

Through diplomatic lobbying, cultural activism, and intellectual cooperation, exiled Catalanists linked the defense of Catalan rights to universal values of democracy and human rights. Ultimately, this paper positions Catalan nationalism in exile as a sustained model of non-violent, civic-based resistance. The movement not only contested Francoism but also contributed to the emerging European democratic project. It thus illustrates how a stateless nation could mobilize transnationally, reconciling self-determination with democratic reconstruction without resorting to the authoritarian tendencies that defined other contemporary nationalist movements.

Amid the democratic turn of Indian nationalism and the abrogation of royal titles, kingship in India lost its political authority but persisted as a social and ritual function. Despite the dissolution of kingdoms, the presence of kings and the wider notion of kingship endured through regional rituals (Galey 1989). This is particularly evident in the Indian state of Rajasthan, where social life continues to be impacted by the ritual kingship. The article takes up the ethnographical studies from the erstwhile kingdoms of Marwar (now in Rajasthan state) and analyzes the vibrant festival of Gangaur (the conjugal unison of gods, Shiva and Parvati), where the members of royal families organize and actively partake in public processions and rituals. These rituals reinforce the notion of dynastic continuity and legitimacy as the royal procession brings religious authority into the political domain (Bose, 2013). From becoming part of the modern bureaucracy to acting as patrons of religious institutions or mediators in local conflicts, their legitimacy has been maintained through rituals and symbolic authority, remaining a potent force in shaping regional identity and cultural continuity. The deployment of royal processions, symbols, sacrificial narratives, and invented traditions sustain the modern-day kingship in Marwar through the rituals of Gangaur. The study views kingship as a ‘ritual organization,’ definitive of the socio-cultural understandings of sovereignty and self that operate beyond the confines of democratic frameworks. Rather, it negotiates the overarching totalities through the notions of kings, gods, and martyrs evoked in the rituals of Gangaur.

This book examines the political subordination and repression of one or more peoples by another people and its elites within the same polity. This sort of domination is surprisingly more common than we may think, given the value we are said to place on multiculturalism, equality, and human freedom. If we use one plausible proxy for domination – the intentional, targeted, and active exclusion by state authorities of an ethnic community from political power – then forty-two of the world’s countries in 2021, some 23 per cent, practised domination, and a total of seventy-two communities were dominated.

Domination is seen here as an intentional strategy, not simply an unintended consequence of a dominant people’s numbers or power. Correspondingly, the book identifies domination regimes by the “stratagems” they use to dominate. It explains how such regimes are established, maintained, and end.

The book proposes two core theses. First, little can be understood about the rise and fall of domination regimes unless their domestic and external (international) environments, including the interaction between them, are considered. In particular, it is argued that dominated peoples are unlikely to be able to escape from domination by themselves but are likely to need help from outside. Second, domination should not be considered, as some have claimed, a preferred “alternative” to even worse strategies, such as genocide or expulsions, but, rather, as something that facilitates these alternatives.

Several months after the start of Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a new lesson was introduced in Russian schools – “Important Conversations.” The lesson was developed to build “Russian civic identity” and cultivate “historical memory; continuity of generations; patriotism as love for the Motherland; kindness and kind acts; family and family values; Russian culture; science in the service of the Motherland.” As the war entered its fourth year, Russian politicians and public figures started talking about ramping up “military-patriotic education.” They suggested making the “Conversations” a core discipline, rewriting textbooks in all subjects not only in Russia but also in former Soviet republics in order “to remove whatever offends us” and thus to build a “unified educational system.” Attention to the Kremlin’s “patriotic” system of meanings through the prism of the Lacanian-Burkean theory of nationalism is central in this paper. More specifically, I analyze the 11th-grade content of “Important Conversations” and history textbooks and then compare it to how patriotic education is performed. The latter occurs on a visual level: schools and youth clubs organize patriotic concerts and plays, open makeshift war and history museums, and install military-themed playgrounds, among other things. As I identify tensions in the dominant “military-patriotic” narrative, I show how the Kremlin attempts to mitigate them by renegotiating Russian national identity from within the structure of Jacques Lacan’s discourse of the University.

Textbooks function as powerful instruments for shaping collective memory, national identity, and conceptions of freedom, particularly in culturally diverse societies such as India. This paper examines history textbook reforms undertaken by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) between 2002 and 2022, identifying two key phases: the initial reforms under Murli Manohar Joshi from 2002 to 2004 and the extensive curricular revisions under Prime Minister Narendra Modi from 2014 onwards, culminating in 2022. Through qualitative textual analysis, the study investigates how historical narratives concerning the Mughal Empire, India’s independence movement, and the role of religious minorities have been reframed to reflect Hindutva ideology, emphasizing Hindu cultural primacy and promoting a homogenized vision of the nation.

These interventions are situated within broader debates on nationalism, democratic inclusion, and the politics of freedom, illustrating how state-led education reforms mediate the boundaries of the demos, privileging majoritarian perspectives while marginalizing minority voices and pluralist histories. Textbooks are conceptualized as sites where competing visions of the nation, citizenship, and democracy intersect, revealing how ideological projects are embedded within institutional and pedagogical structures.

By analyzing these curricular changes alongside existing scholarship on state, society, and postcolonial identity, the study demonstrates how educational narratives both reflect and actively shape political subjectivities, national belonging, and civic imaginaries. The research illuminates the complex interplay between pedagogy, nationalism, and democratic freedoms, highlighting the instrumental role of knowledge production in negotiating inclusion, exclusion, and contested visions of the nation in contemporary India.

Hindu nationalism is a far-right ethno-nationalist movement shaping contemporary Indian politics, notably since the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014. This movement is underpinned by the ideology of Hindutva, which aims to establish a majoritarian Hindu Rashtra (nation), replacing the secular and multicultural Indian nation. In this paper, I interrogate the politics of ‘Hindu Rashtra’ through the context of universities. Drawing on ethnographic research across five universities in Delhi, India, I propose a threefold framework to explore the relationship between universities and Hindu nationalism. First, I explore the experiences of universities in a Hindu Rashtra; I analyse the label of ‘anti-national’ which has been used to describe universities and its critical members, to show what practices are deemed transgressive of the Hindu Rashtra. Second, I focus on the ‘nationalisation’ of universities, through which universities are mobilised for producing a Hindu Rashtra. Here I inquire how the ‘Hindu’ nation is imagined, realised and reproduced through the university context; I trace how education, campus space and everyday university life becomes entangled within this project. Finally, I demonstrate how universities resemble a microcosm of the Hindu Rashtra. Exploring the contemporary experiences within universities points to the larger goals of the neoliberal, fascistic Hindutva project, which is essential to identify and counter. The paper speaks to emerging discussions on far right and authoritarian nationalisms and their relationship with education, everyday life and space. Given the global resurgence of far-right nationalisms and the consequent attacks on universities, this paper is timely.

This paper examines how the National Museum of Scotland stages sovereignty, freedom, and democracy in its Scotland Galleries. Drawing on my doctoral research, I introduce and apply the concept of museumising sovereignty to analyse how episodes from Scotland’s political past—the Wars of Independence, the Union of 1707, and the 1997 Devolution referendum—are curated to shape national imaginaries.

The galleries do not simply chronicle Scotland’s past. Instead, they mobilise historical episodes as sites of contemporary meaning-making. These episodes create a visual and narrative continuum. This continuum anchors political agency in ancient sovereignty myths, medieval resistance, Enlightenment modernity, and devolved governance. Such a presentation offers a sense of democratic progression. It also silences or brackets contentious questions about popular will, constitutional ambiguity, and the limits of autonomy within the United Kingdom.

This paper treats the museum as a pedagogical and ideological space. It interrogates how democratic values are framed, historicised, and domesticated by curatorial strategies. In the museum, sovereignty is not debated but displayed through artefacts, rituals, and architectural symbolism. This performative rendering transforms freedom and democracy into heritage. These are presented as something to be admired, not contested.

This paper engages with debates at the intersection of nationalism, cultural politics, and memory. It explores how national museums reflect democratic ideals and shows how museums contribute to the selective institutionalisation of these ideals. This discussion raises questions about how cultural institutions shape—and limit—the nation’s political imagination.

The first great struggle to make the British parliamentary franchise more democratic reached its apogee in the years leading up to the 1832 Reform Act. The same period saw the emergence of a new and distinctive architectural style: the ‘Scots Baronial’, one of the earliest revivalist architectural styles to evoke national identity through the use of distinct visual markers—in this case features derived from late medieval and early modern Scottish fortified houses, such as crow-stepped gables, gablet dormers, tourelles, and conical roofs. This paper argues that the emergence of the Baronial style at this time was not a coincidence. Primarily the invention of William Burn, the favoured architect of Scotland’s conservative landed elites, it constituted an important cultural component of their campaign to maintain the traditional narrow franchise. In particular, I seek to show that it provided a material articulation of a Burkean political conception in which ‘privilege’ and ‘liberty’ were interdependent and rooted in Scotland’s feudal political past, as incorporated into the British constitution through the 1707 Act of Union. The emergence of a distinct cultural nationalism in the context of defending an established supranational political settlement has been little recognised in either the political or architectural historical literature. This paper therefore adds a significant fresh strand to Anthony D. Smith’s pioneering analysis of ‘the nation made real’, while illuminating the particularly complex, multi-layered political involvements of early Scottish cultural nationalism.

This paper compares the Scottish and Corsican national movements and asks: under what conditions do sub-state nationalist movements pursue “freedom” through democratic institutions, and when do they resort to violence?

Grounded in a comparative analysis of British and French state traditions, it argues that contrasting centre–periphery relationships shaped nationalist strategies. In the United Kingdom, an evolving, uncodified constitution and the survival of Scottish institutions channelled nationalist claims through democratic procedures within a plural state. The Scottish National Party’s trajectory from marginal protest party to central governing actor illustrates how civic nationalism, electoral competition and the re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 allowed “national freedom” to be framed as more, rather than less, democracy.

By contrast, the French “Jacobin” republican model, with its emphasis on an indivisible people and a direct state–individual relationship, left institutional avenues for Corsican-specific demands limited. The rise of Corsican nationalism, crystallising around the 1975 Aleria events and the creation of the FLNC, is interpreted as a product of this statist configuration. Here, “freedom” is narrated less as democratic deepening than as resistance to an assimilationist state, with armed struggle and historical symbolism at the core of nationalist discourse.

The second part of the paper moves beyond centre–periphery dynamics to examine internal and external factors that shape whether movements adopt democratic or violent repertoires. Empirically, it combines historical analysis, legal texts, parliamentary debates and interviews; conceptually, it contributes to debates on democratic and illiberal nationalism and on the fraught relationship between nation, democracy and freedom.

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the discourses of nationalism and citizenship in Azerbaijan after the Second Karabakh War. The peculiarity of the Azerbaijani nation-building is that the debates on how to build a nation and define national identity had been nourished by two discourses: Azerbaijanism and Turkism. The paper firstly focuses on the discourses on national identity in the pre-independence period while elaborating on the roots and premises of the independence movement. Secondly, it highlights the discourses of nation-building in the post-independence period while discussing the meanings attributed to national identity and citizenship. It shows how these two discourses shaped the existing identity formation in Azerbaijan with a particular emphasis on citizenship identity marked by multiculturalism, tolerance, patriotism, and secularism. Lastly, it elaborates on the changing discourses on nationalism and majority-minority relations since Azerbaijan restored its sovereignty in the previously occupied territories by Armenians after the II. Karabakh war. It argues that previous experience of cohabitation with the ethnic and religious minorities, including Armenians and the existing strong emphasis on multiculturalism and tolerance are important assets after the signing of a peace treaty between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Yet the historical memory of war, othering and enmity, along with growing nationalism, can also hinder the process of peace-building. Moreover, democratization seems not to be priority as stability and security remain major concerns. The paper is based on the data collected through in-depth interviews. Respondents include politicians, members of parliament, representatives of civil society organizations, and scholars.

This paper investigates how the institutionalization of şəhid (martyr) discourse in Azerbaijan has reconfigured the boundaries of the national demos, shifting the basis of citizenship from legal rights to emotional performance. I argue that between 2010 and 2023, the state cultivated an “affective citizenship” where political legitimacy is contingent upon displaying specific emotional responses to national trauma and military victory.

Drawing on theories of affective governance, I trace how education reforms and state memorialization transformed the şəhid from a figure of mourning into the ultimate standard of civic virtue. This created a hierarchy of belonging: the “free” citizen is not one who exercises democratic rights, but one who aligns emotionally with the sacrificial narrative of the state.

The analysis identifies a critical shift during the 2020 Second Karabakh War, where this emotional institutionalization generated a “ratchet effect.” While initially instrumentalized by the Aliyev administration to consolidate power, the discourse of martyrdom evolved into a structural constraint. By framing compromise as a betrayal of the dead (xəyanət), the state effectively narrowed the scope of permissible political speech. Consequently, “freedom” in post-war Azerbaijan is paradoxically experienced as the liberty to participate in collective nationalist rituals, while the democratic freedom to dissent is pathologized as an emotional defect, effectively expelling the dissenter from the moral community of the nation.

This paper proposes a framework for understanding musical nationalism in post-Soviet Azerbaijan, situating sonic practices within wider social and political transformations. Building on scholarship on musical nationalisation—especially folklorisation, institutionalisation, and standardisation—it examines how musical forms have become central to constructing national identity after the USSR’s dissolution. The guiding question concerns how musical practices and the discourses surrounding them shape a post-Soviet national community.
Drawing on Billig’s (1995) concept of “banal nationalism,” the study analyses the intertwined roles of state cultural policies and everyday musical practices. It considers both the work of institutions seeking to consolidate a unified national narrative and the activities of local actors—musicians, cultural entrepreneurs, NGOs, and community groups—whose informal initiatives may reinforce, complicate, or challenge official agendas. Through genres such as mugham and meykhana, the paper shows how Azerbaijan’s musical landscape becomes a site where ethnic traditions are reinterpreted, aestheticised, and mobilised as national symbols. These processes, shaped by Soviet cultural engineering, simultaneously reproduce and transform notions of heritage and authenticity.
To situate these dynamics theoretically, the paper engages debates on postcoloniality and internal empire while avoiding teleological accounts of cultural emancipation (Tlostanova 2018, 2019; Etkind 2011). It highlights how musical nationalism informs contemporary renegotiations of Russian/Soviet, Turkic, and Persian legacies of cultural hierarchy. Ultimately, the study proposes an anthropologically informed model of musical nationalism in the post-Soviet context, demonstrating how musical practices and their attendant discourses actively shape the imagining of the national community.

Faced with the growing power of digital platforms, online harms, foreign interference and privacy protection, governments are clawing back control over digital technologies. As a result, digital infrastructures are increasingly nationalized. While literature examining digital sovereignty from policy and infrastructural perspectives has grown, little is known about how ordinary citizens react to the digital environment they live in.

Our paper seeks to advance these debates theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, it links debates on digital sovereignty with those on digital and platform nationalism. Empirically, we draw on interviews and digital diaries with 30 participants from Ukraine, Brazil and the UK to examine how ordinary people experience the manifestations of digital sovereignty –from geo-blocking to the proliferation of domestically owned platforms – in their everyday life. Addressing discursive and routine dimensions, we examine what people say about their national identity and how it relates to their digital media use, as well as how they use (and choose between) different platforms and devices.

Our approach throws into sharp relief the tensions between the imagined placelessness of digital media promoted by the tech industry and embraced by many of our participants, and their increasingly nationalised digital life. Hence, we connect macro-level discussions on digital sovereignty with the enactment and reproduction of national identities on a micro-level. We emphasize that platform nations should be understood as lived environments rather than abstract architectures or symbolic representations, opening new paths to understanding how nationalism persists and is reconfigured through digital technologies.

Nationalism in post-socialist states is frequently presented as the primary pathway to collective freedom and democratic self-determination. Yet for many young people in the Western Balkans, particularly in Kosovo and North Macedonia, national belonging no longer guarantees a dignified life. Persistent unemployment, political instability, and unequal treatment of ethnic minorities reveal a tension between the promise of national freedom and its lived realities. In response, an increasing number of youth are pursuing economic mobility beyond national borders not through physical migration, but through digital labor migration, participating in global labor markets online while remaining territorially rooted at home.

This paper examines how digital labor migration enables new forms of economic and personal freedom independent of the territorial nation-state. I ask: To what extent does online platform work provide an alternative route to self-determination for young citizens who feel politically marginalized at home? And what does this shift mean for democratic legitimacy in states that rely on nationalist narratives to retain loyalty and belonging?

Drawing on original survey data and qualitative testimonies from young workers and students in Kosovo and North Macedonia, the analysis explores how global digital labor reshapes aspirations, identities, and perceptions of citizenship. I use a theoretical framework connecting democratic nationalism, precarity, and “exit” strategies (Hirschman), arguing that digital freedom may constitute a form of silent resistance against states unable to deliver equality and opportunity.

By relocating freedom from national institutions to borderless digital markets, these workers redefine sovereignty as the right to choose where one’s life possibilities come from. This transformation challenges traditional democratic claims: if freedom and opportunity are found elsewhere, what, if anything, keeps young people invested in the nation?

Current Turkish media discourse is saturated with disgust towards gendered subjectivities, reflecting the authoritarian conservatism and nationalism that dominate the society (Savci 2021; Sarıoğlu, 2023). These subjects are seen as sources of disgust that undermine national values and promote deviancy, as reflected in the AKP government’s emotional rhetoric and practices. (Sofos, 2021). Despite increased visibility, Women and LGBTQ+ communities face discrimination through anti-gender politics, often portrayed as sources of fear that undermine national values. Drawing on Ahmed’s (2010, 2014) theorisation of emotions, this project conceptualises disgust as an affect that has been used to reinforce established hierarchies and national identities.

This project will investigate the rhetoric of disgust, nationalistic gender politics, and emotions associated with gendered individuals on TikTok, examining how emotions are rhetorically mobilised to target these groups in this digital context through digital ethnographic methods. TikTok was chosen for its ability to create micro-macro social networks, as well as engage with today’s dominant visual culture of communication (Schellewald, 2024, 2021).

The methodology will involve participating in TikTok, examining a corpus of videos, hashtags, and comments, which will be documented through field notes and visual records. This project approaches TikTok as a cultural repository and an animated social field where affective relations are co-produced, aligning with digital ethnography, which sees digital sites as dynamic cultural environments where meanings and emotions are continually created and reproduced. (Pink et al., 2016). Therefore, this paper will offer insights into affective politics regarding how gendered disgust is reproduced in a digital media context.

In the 1920s, as Greece sought to redefine itself in the aftermath of war, displacement, and national reconstruction, the ideals of democracy, nationhood, and freedom were deeply entangled. The 1923 establishment of a separate electoral college for Jewish voters in Thessaloniki, unique within Greece, offers a revealing lens into how national identity and democratic practice were co-constituted and constrained. This paper argues that the policy was not merely an administrative anomaly, but a calculated act of political containment aimed at controlling the Jewish vote, which tended to support anti-Venizelist parties in a city central to Greece’s emerging national identity.

The study situates this episode within the broader context of population exchanges mandated by the Treaty of Lausanne, which brought an influx of Orthodox Christian refugees and reshaped the demographic and political landscape of northern Greece. It examines how religious affiliation, linguistic identity (between Ladino-speaking Sephardim and Greek-speaking Romaniotes), and perceptions of loyalty intersected to delimit who counted as part of the demos. By analyzing electoral reforms, press debates, and state rhetoric, the paper reveals how the democratic process was manipulated to align with a national project that equated “Greekness” with Orthodoxy, marginalizing alternative communal voices and employing gerrymandering to suppress segments of the Jewish population perceived as a threat to the ruling party’s political power.

Ultimately, this case exposes how nationalism can instrumentalize democracy to secure power, illustrating the fragility of freedom when belonging becomes conditional on conformity to the nation’s imagined identity.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an explanatory scheme for the re-emergence of the Macedonian Question as a recurrent feature of modern Greek political life and its imprint on the latter.
Based on extensive archival research and a comprehensive review of media discourse (print, digital and audiovisual), it will explore:
(i) how the early post-Cold War ideological landscape and particular developments of Greece’s internal politics contributed to the sudden revival of a long-ignored nationalist topic as a deliberate, government-sponsored mobilization strategy to divert popular discontent from socio-economic conflicts to an imaginary fight for the nation’s alleged symbolic heritage;
(ii) how this policy finally back-fired, toppling the government who had instigated it and providing right-wing extremism with a novel legitimacy, constructing a solid narrative through public history outlets and various repertoires of nationalist contention that were to be repeatedly evoked and reproduced in the future; and
(iii) how civil rights and liberties, an icon of the Third Greek Republic after the Colonels’ dictatorship of 1967-1974, were subsequently eroded in public opinion and judicial practice, when considered detrimental to national pride.
In order to explain the political appeal and effectiveness of this particular brand of nationalist revival, specifically focused on the Macedonian Question, the paper will also investigate the time-honored function of the latter as a laboratory and a training ground for authoritarian policies and ideas, intrinsically linked to a tradition of identity screening by various state apparatuses, from the late 19th throughout most of the twentieth century.

Through theorization of memory and knowledge, this paper aims to discuss the discrepancies in understanding of ethnicity and ethnic boundaries, followed by a discontinuation of the mnemonic link between generations—as triggered by the silencing of the 2001 armed conflict in North Macedonia—ultimately forming separate mnemonic communities. The conflict—which for the most part played out between the National Liberation Army consisting of ethnic Albanians, and the Macedonian Defense Forces, mainly consisting of ethnic Macedonians—once resolved, did not find its place within public discourse, political discourse, or educational curricula. In fact, in 2004, the Bureau of Education Development specifically decided to leave it out of history textbooks. Communicative memory of the conflict is shared among individuals who witnessed it take place, yet the conflict was never narrativized or embedded in the nation-state’s collective memory. Additionally, it was subjected to bottom-up silencing as well, in an effort by both communities to go back to obtaining normal relations. By relying upon theories of knowledge construction, memory, and silencing, this paper aims to delve into the role of memory in the social construction of ethnic boundaries, as well as the discrepancies in how individuals’ differing mnemonic positionality informs their understanding of their past and their present reality, and thus their understanding of the ethnic boundary.

In Nationalism, historian Eric Storm sheds light on contemporary nationalist movements by exploring the global evolution of nationalism, beginning with the rise of the nation-state in the eighteenth century through the revival of nationalist ideas in the present day. Storm traces the emergence of the unitary nation-state—which brought citizenship rights to some while excluding a multitude of “others”—and the pervasive spread of nationalist ideas through politics and culture. Storm shows how nationalism influences the arts and humanities, mapping its dissemination through newspapers, television, and social media. Sports and tourism, too, have helped fashion a world of discrete nations, each with its own character, heroes, and highlights. Nationalism saturates the physical environment, not only in the form of national museums and patriotic statues but also in efforts to preserve cultural heritage, create national parks, invent ethnic dishes and beverages, promote traditional building practices, and cultivate native plants. Nationalism has even been used for selling cars, furniture, and fashion. By tracing these tendencies across countries, Storm shows that nationalism’s watershed moments were global. He argues that the rise of new nation-states was largely determined by shifts in the international context, that the relationships between nation-states and their citizens largely developed according to global patterns, and that worldwide intellectual trends influenced the nationalization of both culture and environment. Over the centuries, nationalism has transformed both geopolitics and the everyday life of ordinary people.

In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, East-Central Europe has entered a new era of political unease. Promises of protection and national strength increasingly resonate with citizens who once looked to liberal democracy for stability. The current paper examines the re-normalization of authoritarian preferences in this shifting landscape, asking how notions of threat, freedom, and national identity interact to sustain authoritarian demand.

Anchored in the framework of authoritarian populism, the study analyzes how insecurity, perceived injustice, and moral polarization influence support for authoritarianism. Drawing on original public opinion data gathered in 2022-2023 from Poland, Hungary, and Romania, the paper employs a mixed-methods approach that integrates regression modelling with comparative case analysis to uncover both general patterns and national specificities.

The paper argues that nationalism has become the emotional and symbolic medium through which citizens reinterpret freedom — not as openness or pluralism, but as control, security, and collective self-determination. By bridging insights from political theory, history, sociology, and nationalism studies, the paper contributes to understanding how democratic disillusionment evolves into the re-normalization of authoritarianism in a multi-crisis Europe.

Classical theories of nationalism suggest that economic development and state-directed narratives should consolidate national identity. Yet it remains unclear whether this relationship holds in highly developed postcolonial city-states marked by authoritarian governance and intense global integration. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork research in Hong Kong and Singapore (2023-2025), this paper challenges the presumed link between economic modernisation, ideological control, and strong national identification. Based on a set of relational and narrative interviews, I show that despite a strong governments efforts young adults in both Hong Kong and Singapore articulate forms of belonging that are urban, lived, and experiential rather than nation-centred. Participants consistently describe the “city” – its rhythms, sensory environments, micro-cultural practices, infrastructures, and interpersonal solidarities – as their primary site of identification. In doing so, these findings resonate more with postcolonial and phenomenological approaches to identity that with classical national identity theories, pointing to the emergence of city-based identity formations that coexist uneasily with state-led national projects. I conclude the paper by highlighting that ethnographic and narrative approaches are indispensable for studying identity amid democratic backsliding and in soft-authoritarian contexts, where surveys and experimental designs often generate distorted results due to self-censorship, strategic responding, and fear of political repercussions.

The theoretical framework of this paper is the works of Juan Linz who described democracy as “a kind of time-limited leadership”. This is a regime in which voters can regularly demand from the rulers a report on the work done, periodically forcing them to change their political course.
This research is empirical as a study of the relationship between two variables. The dependent variable is authoritarianism and independent variable is nationalism. Triangulation in this paper was reached through several methods of collecting qualitative data (method of documentary investigation; method of collecting data in media and secondary sources) and discourse analysis for analysis in qualitative data.
Political regimes in the former Soviet republics have evolved towards authoritarianism and vice versa: 1) Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Ukraine became democratic; later – Georgia and Moldova; 2) Azerbaijan and Armenia are semi-authoritarian; 3) Russia, Belarus, and Kyrgyzstan are authoritarian; 4) Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan became neo-totalitarian; later – Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. The main research question was: if the main form of manifestation of nationalist contradictions in the republics of the former USSR is political confrontation, do nationalist tendencies increase with the growth of authoritarian tendencies? The study found that there are fewer ethno-nationalist conflicts in Central Asian countries than in their more “democratic” neighbours; conflicts in autocracies are more likely to occur within the ethnic majority. Thus, the hypothesis that nationalist tendencies are intensifying the growth of authoritarian tendencies, and vice versa, has been only partially confirmed.

Studies of nationalism have treated it as a social construct – and one with lethal consequences. Ethiopia’s politics has been polarised since the 1960s between pan-Ethiopian nationalists concerned above all with unity, and ethno-nationalists advocating self-determination for the country’s multiple ethnic communities. After decades of civil war, in 1991 an ethno-nationalist coalition defeated the unitarist government and introduced a federal system granting self-determination “up to and including secession” to Ethiopia’s “nations, nationalities and peoples.” Critics of this Soviet-inflected project warned of a Yugoslavia-style catastrophe. Rather, a period of stability saw high growth rates and an inclusive anti-poverty strategy. But polarisation over democracy and (ethno)nationalism amongst politicians did not abate, pitting an opposition elite, advocating ‘civic’ Ethiopian nationalism and the rights of the individual under liberal democracy, against a post-Marxist ‘vanguard’ regime committed to collective rights through federal representation and direct democracy. In 2018 a new leader adopted a strategy of ambiguity: playing the two sides off against one another and triggering unprecedented rounds of violence. The paper examines the two sets of narratives and their contemporary deployment of academic and intellectual tropes about nationalism (civic versus ethnic), democracy (liberal versus direct) and freedom (individual versus collective): how these are used to explain but also to fuel and justify violent competition. It considers whether there are under-explored analytical resources in the social-constructionist literatures particularly on nationalism and ethnonationalism that might offer Ethiopians space to transcend these three binaries in favour of practices of inclusion, tolerance and cooperation.

The 2018 election has changed the Ethiopian socio-political landscape, intensifying longstanding conflicts over national history. The establishment of the Prosperity Party and the subsequent war in Tigray have led to a reconfiguration of the “National Question”, further shaping Ethiopian nationalism and its mobilizing capacity. Within this context, Abiy Ahmed’s project to restore Ethiopia’s historical greatness has been increasingly centred around the ambition to regain access to the Red Sea.
The colonial construction of the Ethio-Eritrean border and the socio-historical reasons underlying the loss of sea access have reacquired prominence within the national political debate. Framed as a matter of national survival, the quest for sovereign access to the sea has been articulated through a “double nationalist” discourse which operates across domestic and foreign policy arenas. While the current government draws on Ethiopia’s a-colonial and anti-colonial legacy to legitimize its foreign policy agenda, it has simultaneously mobilized narratives of internal historical colonization within the domestic sphere to justify military actions and governance strategies in the northern regions of the country.
Drawing on coloniality of power as theoretical framework, this paper investigates the dual dimension of post-2018 Ethiopian nationalism, constituted around the interplay between State and Ethnic nationalism. Through discourse analysis, fieldwork interviews and secondary sources, the work aims to show how these intertwined narratives, restorationist nationalism, anti-colonial exceptionalism, and imperial revivalism, operate together to reframe Ethiopia’s maritime ambitions as a legitimate pursuit of national destiny, thereby reshaping Ethiopia’s regional posture and internal political order.

The paper examines how projects of national reconstruction in post-apartheid South Africa and post-genocide Rwanda mobilise the language of democracy, rights and freedom while advancing distinct visions of community in deeply divided societies. It focuses on the remaking of identity, asking how appeals to the nation can enable democratic inclusion yet legitimise new constraints.
In South Africa, the negotiated transition, the 1996 Constitution, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission underpin a civic, pluralist project that, drawing on Nelson Mandela’s Ubuntu-inspired vision, seeks to recast the “rainbow nation” as a community founded on reconciliation, constitutionalism and electoral competition. Commonwealth readmission in 1994, supported by monitoring and election observation, becomes part of this identity work: external validation of a demos that acknowledges past violence while promising inclusive citizenship.
Rwanda’s trajectory departs sharply. Post-genocide reconstruction couples state capacity and economic growth with narrowing pluralism. Policies of de-ethnicisation, tight control over memory and speech, and concentration of power in the RPF leadership sustain a developmental nationalism, also described as “survivor nationalism”, in which dissent is framed as a threat to unity. Rwanda’s 2009 entry into the Commonwealth, backed by constitutional and linguistic reforms, helps project a narrative of democratic recovery that sits uneasily with concerns about civil liberties.
By juxtaposing these cases, the paper shows how similar repertoires of democracy and freedom can sustain divergent national projects after mass violence and highlights the enduring tension between the Commonwealth’s stated principles and the realpolitik that shapes its approach to membership and legitimation.

Ernest Gellner’s often cited definition of Nationalism contends that ‘[Nationalism] is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.’ For those nationalists pursuing statehood, this is generally true and motivating. However, it is also true to say that in many instances governments (of multinational states in particular) will go to great lengths to ensure this congruence is never uniformly achieved. Maintaining status quo territorial arrangements and securing the prevailing legal-rational order is, quite literally, their job. National self-determination and territorial integrity are often incompatible ideals/ideas. Animated by this cleavage, my paper will focus on how (and why) jurists are being tasked with the most important of political considerations: under what conditions and in which circumstances can a state break up. Furthermore, and of more critical concern, if (elected) parliamentarians are deferring to (nonelected) jurists in matters of such existential importance, what are the consequences of empowering the Courts in this way? By looking at the concrete cases of the United Kingdom, Canada and Spain, this paper will seek to answer these questions and advance an understanding of juridification that takes into consideration the reinforcing concepts of trust, legitimacy and democracy.

Nation-state borders are far from fixed demarcations of community. The territory of a state may encompass the historical homelands of those excluded from the ideal imagery of the citizen. Spatial-legal logics in the use of political power differentiate between territorial spaces within the nation-state based on what is ascribed to them (e.g., culture, race, or ethnicity). Spaces with residents that do not align with the nation’s imagined core are consequently subjected to more repressive forms of governance. Kurds in Turkey constitute such a community. This paper examines the spatial and neoliberal logic of state repression and violence during the Hendek (Trench) Operations in southeastern Turkey between August 2015 and March 2016. By securitising separatism and designating actors and regions as “terrorist,” the state legitimised violence not only against individuals but against entire communities and territories. The Hendek Operations exemplify this logic: lethal operations carried out by military and police forces, the use of heavy weaponry and air bombardments within the state borders, justified on the grounds of constitutional national security provisions. Conducted within the framework of existing law, these measures blurred the boundaries between legality and violence. Beyond counterinsurgency, the operations constituted a spatial project aimed at dismantling Kurdish hometowns, erasing cultural memory, and facilitating neoliberal capital transfer in places such as Diyarbakır’s Suriçi district. Situating these dynamics within Turkey’s long conflict with the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), the paper demonstrates how repression, violence, and law co-constitute one another in the governance of contested spaces.

Since the end of the Second World War, Croatia has undergone eight major constitutional revisions, five during the socialist period and three in the democratic era. All of these constitutions included historical narratives about nationhood in their preambles and in other parts of the text. This paper aims to reconstruct the narratives of nationhood and popular sovereignty embedded in Croatian constitutions, with particular attention to four key texts (1963, 1974, 1990, 1997) and to the ongoing disputes over how the Croatian national narrative should be articulated in the country’s highest legal document. Each revision redefined who constituted ‘the people’ as bearers of popular sovereignty, with the most profound shift occurring in the 1990 constitution adopted after the first democratic elections. Drawing on Malešević’s conception of nationalism as a grounded global political ideology that is compatible with numerous others, and employing the tools of historical sociology to contextualise constitutional change, the paper uses narrative analysis to examine these foundational texts and contemporary arguments about their current and possible future content. It argues that the most significant constitutional changes, as well as the substance of current debates, stem not from the war of the 1990s but from broader geopolitical transformations and the contested legacy of the Second World War. These developments have progressively narrowed the ideological understanding of who may be considered the carriers of national sovereignty, despite democratic advancements.

This paper argues that Indian anti-colonial nationalism produced a distinctive conception of freedom — swaraj — that simultaneously appropriated and subverted Western liberal discourse, generating competing visions whose tensions remain unresolved in contemporary Indian democracy.
Theoretically, I draw on Partha Chatterjee’s distinction between the material and spiritual domains of anti-colonial nationalism, while extending his framework to examine how freedom itself became a contested concept within the nationalist movement. My central analytical claim is that swaraj operated across three distinct registers: political sovereignty, economic self-sufficiency, and ethical self-transformation — and that leading nationalists prioritised these differently, producing incompatible freedom projects.
Methodologically, I employ comparative discourse analysis of foundational texts by Gandhi (Hind Swaraj, 1909), Ambedkar (Annihilation of Caste, 1936), and Nehru (Discovery of India, 1946), alongside Constituent Assembly debates (1946-1950). This approach reveals how divergent freedom conceptions were institutionally managed rather than reconciled within India’s constitutional framework.
The paper contributes to nationalism studies in two ways. First, it demonstrates that anti-colonial nationalisms generate plural freedom concepts that function as enduring ideological resources. Second, it shows how contemporary actors — both liberal democrats and Hindu nationalists — selectively mobilise anti-colonial rhetoric to legitimise opposing visions of nation and democracy. This analysis offers a framework for comparative scholarship on how post-colonial states navigate the unresolved contradictions inherited from their founding movements.

Through a comparative genealogical analysis of the rules of Indira Gandhi (1966-77, 1980-84) and Park Chung Hee (1961-79), this study examines how colonial governmentality was appropriated into postcolonial nationalism, particularly through the formation of the “democratic” and “developmental” citizen-subject, in India and Korea. Synthesizing and extending debates in postcolonial (and) nationalism studies, as well as Foucauldian ideas of governmentality, we aim to develop an undertheorized concept of postcolonial modernity as the appropriation, rather than mere pluralization, of colonial rationalities of development, civilization, and order. Our empirical analysis focuses on three intertwined discursive fields that shaped and hegemonized elite imaginaries of the modern independent nation: 1. presidential/prime-ministerial activation (e.g., speeches); 2. “public order” apparatuses (e.g., policing and censorship); and 3. apparatuses of national morals and discipline (e.g., education). India’s project emphasized recognition and the management of diversity, where difference justified hierarchical intervention and securitization of minorities. Korea advanced a vision of homogeneity and purity, socializing citizens as uniform agents of modernization. Despite contrasting colonial governing logics, both cases reveal the making of postcolonial modernity through governmentality, particularly the promotion of specific modes of individualism in their panoptic nation, aimed at optimizing the life of the population as a totalized whole and its identification of the “national mission.” Anti-colonial nationalisms, initially emerging as struggles against colonial racism and articulated in the language of liberation, were transformed into authoritarian state ideologies that legitimize and normalize the subjugation of dissent and the containment of popular sovereignty within the frame of constitutional democracy.

This paper analyses how Indian state-led infrastructural development in Arunachal Pradesh, along the disputed India-China border, generates a paradox between state’s performance of external sovereignty and the maintenance of internal democratic legitimacy. Following the 2020 Sino-India confrontations, the Indian state has accelerated the ongoing infrastructural building in the region. This “infrastructural nationalism” has involved the deployment of strategic dual-use infrastructure projects, including last mile roads, hydro power projects, and tourism circuits, aimed at materialising the Indian state’s territorial claims and securing military advantage in this disputed frontier. However, the mega hydro power projects in Arunachal Pradesh have generated fierce opposition from indigenous communities for violating democratic principles and indigenous land rights .
Drawing on fieldwork interviews along with systematic textual analysis of relevant secondary sources the paper demonstrates a fundamental tension in postcolonial developmental nationalism where state’s attempts at sovereignty performances in the borderlands can produce internal differentiation, potentially undermining the very integration process. The local resistance against the ongoing infrastructural development is rooted in indigenous people’s claim over ancestral lands, traditional livelihoods, and customary rights. These claims constitute a form of ecological counter-sovereignty, as it enables them to challenge the state by asserting an alternative place based sovereignty which rests on their indigenous ties to their land and resources. In the context of this, we argue that ongoing contestation reveals how competing nationalism exhibits different ideas of freedom and territorial belonging, reshaping the relationship between nationalism, indigenous self determination, and democratic rights in the borderlands of India.

This paper examines the political representation of non-resident citizens through the case of kin-minority voters in Central and Eastern Europe. In this region, many non-resident citizens are members of kin-minority communities whose political claims stem from their minority status rather than from migration. Their inclusion in national politics raises questions about the boundaries of political community and the forms of representation that extend beyond the territorial state.
To situate these dynamics, the paper draws on Brubaker’s concept of the triadic nexus among the home state, kin-state, and kin-minority (1996), and its expansion into a quadratic nexus (Udrea et al. 2023; Smith 2025), which continues to shape regional patterns of inclusion and representation. Building on this framework, the study investigates whether current arrangements for non-resident voting can be understood as instances of transnational representation rather than extensions of domestic electoral politics.
Empirically, the paper reviews regional legislation on non-resident voting using data from the 2025 Migrant Electoral Rights (MER) Dataset and analyzes the claims for representation advanced by kin-minority voters and their organizations. This approach highlights how kin-minority enfranchisement functions both as a legal mechanism and as a discursive practice shaped by transborder national attachments.
By connecting normative debates on democratic representation with empirical evidence from kin-minority enfranchisement, the paper demonstrates how non-resident voting practices in Central and Eastern Europe illuminate the transnational dimensions of representation and belonging in contemporary politics.

Year 2026 will be 30 years since American sociologist Rogers Brubaker published his influential book “Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe” (1996), elaborating the concept of triadic nexus. The theory has been extensively used to discuss and analyse the situation in Estonia, in relation to its Russian-speaking minority and neighbouring Russia. How does Brubaker’s triadic nexus hold up in Estonia in 2026? What is the position of the Russian-speaking minority in regard to the nationalising Estonian state? Is the Russian-speaking population homogeneous and where do the affinities and loyalties lie? What has changed since 2022 when Russia attacked Ukraine? Does citizenship trump ethnicity or vice versa? Is the Russian Federation still the external homeland for the Russians-speakers in Estonia – and if yes, then how?

The paper will discuss these questions based on several data sources. Firstly, there is the integration monitoring from Estonia, most recent conducted in 2023. Additionally, we rely on data collected as part of our latest research project at Tallinn University (The dynamics of national identity strategies in Estonia in the context of Russian aggression in Ukraine, 2025), regular public opinion monitoring by the Government Office of Estonia and qualitative interviews conducted in 2025 under Lublin University project ENMinResCE.

The empirical data helps to shed light on how Estonia negotiates the situation where the large kin state is reluctant accept their ‘co-nationals’ living outside its borders for good. The paper discusses whether Estonia’s nationalising policies have been successful in countering Russia’s external national homeland policies, whether the Russian-speakers (still) identify with Russia and is there hope for Estonia?

The war in Ukraine, where protection of minorities was used as pretext for full-scale invasion by Russian Federation, has had an enormous impact on the Europe, from economic tensions to decreased security and re-opening of previously forgotten fears and grievences deeply rooted in history. For countries with substantial Russian-speaking populations like Estonia and several others, the impact is on both security and societal cohesion. The article explores the shifts in both the perceived position and agency of the Russian-speaking minority in Estonia and shifts in minority identification, particularly growth of bicultural Estonian Russian identity. Analysis is based on data from the Tallinn University research project “The dynamics of national identity strategies in Estonia in the context of Russian aggression in Ukraine” and qualitative interviews conducted in 2025 within the project ENMinResCE by Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II.

Previous studies have shown that bicultural minority identity significantly differed from single identity in their relation to psychological wellbeing and self-esteem, as well as impact of context factors like for example history discourse on the strength of minority ethnic and national identity. The analysis explores the impact of context factors, such as active war with immediate proximity where the kin state plays the role of aggressor, and related securitization by the host state – on minority relation to the host state, as well as strategies employed to negotiate the impact – possibly including shifts in identity.

The UK is a nostalgic place, and while this might be both intuitively true, and borne out by evidence in media, polling, and parliamentary debate, social science accounts of collective nostalgia, in the UK in particular, are fairly slight. In what follows, we examine the rates, sources and effects of collective nostalgia, outlining how it is different from individual-level nostalgia in its predictors and outcomes. Using data from social attitude surveys across the UK we highlight the salience of ingroups and outgroups for collective nostalgia and demonstrate how this connects to national identity. We then explore the content of nostalgia, creating a new typology of the forms of nostalgia present in contemporary England. We then show how these different forms interact with national identities in different ways before demonstrating how they explain contemporary attitudes to ingroup and outgroup grievance. The result is an analysis of collective national nostalgia from a political science perspective that allows us to better explain contemporary political attitudes.

Migration is sometimes viewed as presenting a challenge to established national identities, while at the same time the national identities of immigrants and related minority groups may be considered to reflect the degree and nature of their ‘integration’ in the national societies in which they live. But exploring these issues among the population of the UK and its constituent nations has been limited by the fact that social and political surveys which commonly include questions on national identity typically only encompass relatively small sub-samples of immigrants and associated minorities. This problem has been mitigated by the inclusion of a question on national identity in the last two UK censuses. In this presentation I explore what we can learn from the resulting data in terms of how national identities among migrant-minority groups compare with those among (national) ‘majority’ populations; how this comparison may vary in different parts of the UK; and whether, in places that are particularly characterised by the effects of migration, the resulting diversity might even influence how those in the ‘majority’ conceive their own national identities.

Canada presents itself as a multicultural society that values diversity and inclusion. Yet, not all voices may be perceived as equally legitimate when it comes to criticizing the country’s social and political order. This study investigates how skin colour, accent, and gender shape the perceived legitimacy of individuals who criticize Canadian multiculturalism. To do so, we leverage a preregistered survey experiment conducted among 4,600 English-speaking respondents across Canada. Participants are presented with an audio clip and a picture of a hypothetical speaker who voices a critique of Canada’s multiculturalism policy on a radio program. The speaker’s profile is randomized by skin colour (White or Black), accent (Canadian, British, or African), and gender (man or woman). Several AI-generated versions of the audio clips and pictures were used to isolate the underlying effects of identity markers, averaging over idiosyncrasies associated with any single voice or image. Respondents then evaluate the speaker’s credibility, the constructiveness of the critique, and the speaker’s legitimacy to intervene in political arenas. The study contributes to understanding the persistence of symbolic boundaries and implicit hierarchies in a country that defines itself through multicultural inclusion. This paper is co-authored with Maxime Coulombe (Concordia)

The autonomist movements that emerged in the Azores in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have received limited scholarly attention outside the archipelago, despite their considerable significance. Particularly influential was the earliest of these movements, in which demands for genuine equality between continental and island Portuguese became the principal driving force behind an autonomist project (Amaral, 2011; Cordeiro, 1992) that functioned largely as a reivindicative expression grounded in the democratic logic inherent in the national idea-an idea that had taken firm root in Portugal over the preceding decades. This mobilization was thus propelled by a national consciousness advocating the full incorporation of all populations and territories into the state, a model later replicated, especially, in islands regions structured as overseas possessions.
This presentation examines the ideological foundations of the first Azorean autonomist movement. Building on scholarship that closely links the concepts of nation and democracy, it explores the formation of the Portuguese nation, its consolidation in the Azores, and the spread of principles of equality and popular sovereignty, with particular attention to their timing in relation to the rise of autonomism. The analysis also considers the long-standing popular cult of the Holy Spirit, present in the islands since the earliest phase of Portuguese settlement. Marked by quasi-pagan elements, horizontal community participation, and relative independence from ecclesiastical authority, this devotion helps explain the democratizing aspirations of Azorean autonomists while also channeling corrective impulses aimed at mitigating historical tensions and rivalries among the archipelago’s principal islands.

A nationalist project is, by definition, grounded in notions of love and belonging, and both citizens and the individuals or institutions who claim to represent them share in explicit invocations of this affection. Yet despite this association with positive emotions, the trajectory of national ideas in relation to violence remains appalling. Contrary to the assumptions of many scholars, this relationship cannot be attributed simply to a narrative in which a ‘good’ patriotism is corrupted and twisted by an ‘evil’ kind of nationalism more prone to violence.

In this paper, I argue that the connection between violence and the nation is rooted in the very conditions that led to the emergence of the latter as one of the crucial concepts in the vocabulary of modernity. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European intellectuals, rulers, and preachers reframed attributes previously ascribed to the divine in secular terms. As part of this process, notions of martyrdom, just war, persecution of heretical views, and holocaust, all of which had been part of Christian theology, were repurposed as organic assumptions of the nascent nationalist worldview. This transformation is manifest within a body of political and religious texts concerning the concept of sacred violence in 17th and 18th century penned in England, France, and Spain and which show how these ‘modern’ nationalist projects inherited an all-too-Christian dilemma: how to reconcile the role played by ‘necessary’ violence and exclusion within an ideology theoretically premised, first and foremost, on communal affection.

This paper explores the relationship between ideology and practice within the framework of a religious nationalism. My particular focus is on Neo-Pagan nationalism, which is typically concidered an ideology. By examining the Zakon Zadrugi “Północny Wilk”, a notable Polish group whose doctrine exemplifies perfectly this type of religious nationalism, I will reveal how ideology directs action, and what are the limits of its power. By offering an ethnographic approach to nationalism as practice, the alternative hypothesis that action generates ideology is tested. As a result, ideological heterogeneity is explained by the heterodoxy of praxis, which directly affects the issue of group membership. The conceptual precision of the concept of “Neo-Pagan nationalism” is also challenged for the sake of ethnographic reality and theory.

Nationalism, through the rise of populist far-Right parties, is increasingly threatening democracy. Nationalist rhetoric is evident in the demonisation of immigrants, refugees and anyone who fails to fit the ‘national’ image, with arguments for defending borders, people and welfare states, directing increasing resentment at economic difficulties. However, theories of democracy, and liberal democracy, often take as a basic assumption a stable community that is required for democracy to work, usually taken to be the national community (c.f. Rawls, 1971). Nationalism itself is linked to the rise of democracy, in the equalising of citizenship that was required to shore up state authority and legitimacy. In the absence of this, as seen in the repeated insistence of multiculturalism damaging national cohesion, democracy is seen to be unstable. So we have a seeming paradox: nationalism appears both necessary for democracy, while also being a poison that can destroy it. It’s this paradox that this paper explores. Taking a historical, comparative and theoretical approach it thinks through the seeming co-dependent relationship between democracy and nationalism, questioning whether nationalism is really a unifying force or strong identity formation (Malesevic, 2011) that is necessary for democratic cohesion, and ultimately explores what a democracy without nationalism would look like.

The historical debate on the nature of nationalism and its relation to the end of history has lasted for several decades; however, questions concerning the existence of nationalism from an existential perspective and the relationship between political ontology and nationalism is undermined except fewer scholar like Brubaker discuss similar concepts on the field. As a result, the aim of this paper is to articulate the question of nationalism from an existentialist angle and reveal the inauthentic creation of nationalism through the change of discourse in history. Drawing on Nancy (2016) and Jameson (2024), I argued that the notion of nation is inherently impossible in two senses, first as the subjective recognition towards one nation, agreeing oneself to be part of that community, since whenever individuals is recognising to be within a community, infinite regression occur as the one’s recognition inevitably fall into infinite sub-categories hence the impossibility of community; the second as the finitude of nations that refute Hegel’s (2012, 2013) argument and various nationalist rhetoric on nation as the absolute spirit (zeitgeist) or transcendental unit, I argued that nations are finite and would not grow transcendent regardless of scenario, as individual beings are being-for-itself rather than in-itself, any claim on individuals have an end-goal are alienating individuals from its authenticity and ontological freedom. Therefore, the notion of nation and nationalism must be a posteriori creations instead of inherent to human nature, as Romanticists would have argued.

This paper seeks to clarify the relationship among nationalism, patriotism, and cosmopolitanism as three ideologies in contemporary political debate. In fact, elucidating these concepts has become especially important in our time: it concerns our normative commitments toward ourselves, our fellow citizens, and others more broadly. Recent works have shown that these concepts are not as mutually opposed as they may seem. For Steven Smith, patriotism represents a middle path that reconciles the two inappropriate extremes of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. American patriotism, he argues, requires citizens to recognize, identify with, and feel gratitude for their own ethos—that is, the distinctive American way of life, history, and emotional attachment to fellow citizens—while also being guided by a universal logos—namely, the values proclaimed by classical liberalism: equality, individualism, pluralism, and so on. Lea Ypi likewise contends that cosmopolitanism and statism are not mutually exclusive: one can begin from one’s own state and, by demanding the state to take action, pursue the ideal of global justice. For these scholars, the question can be formulated as “how to move from the particular to the universal,” that is, how to reach universality without abandoning particularity, and indeed by taking it as our point of departure. By tracing these contemporary discussions about the interrelations among nationalism, patriotism, and cosmopolitanism, this paper aims to provide political theory with a suitable conceptual framework for normatively assessing and critiquing the movements of nationalism today.

This paper offers an in-depth examination of how the German Democratic Republic (GDR) theorised and institutionalised the concept of the “socialist nation” (sozialistische Nation), focusing on its intellectual foundations, political functions, and cultural resonance. The study approaches the GDR’s national theory as a coherent attempt to shape collective identity and articulate a distinct understanding of democracy and freedom within an “actually existing socialist” framework.
Drawing on ideological writings by leading SED thinkers (including Ulbricht, Hager, and Honecker), party congress materials, constitutional revisions, and state cultural programmes, the paper reconstructs the GDR’s effort to define a socialist German national community grounded in anti-fascism, collective economic transformation, and socially embedded citizenship. Rather than interpreting the “socialist nation” as a deviation from classical Marxist categories, the paper situates it as a historically specific response to the unique pressures of a divided Germany, Cold War geopolitics, and the need to stabilise a new societal model. The analysis highlights how the GDR’s national discourse operated simultaneously as an ethical project, a source of social cohesion, and an interpretive framework for understanding democratic participation under socialism.
By foregrounding the internal logic and aspirations of this project, the paper contributes to broader discussions about how nations are imagined, how states define the demos, and how alternative conceptions of freedom are constructed in non-liberal political contexts.

Nationalism scholarship has long acknowledged the importance of collective remembrance for the national memory, but also of a collective ‘forgetting’. Such act allows for the censoring of darker moments of national history while glorifying other aspects integral to the national myth. In the case of Spain, this has manifested as a political narrative which asserts that Spain was not a coloniser of Latin America, but a civilizer and liberator of indigenous peoples from the ‘backward’ Aztec, Inca, and Mayan Empires. While research has devoted some attention to this, there has been less attention to an emerging narrative in which politicians present Spain as a victim of colonization. Thus, using political discourse analysis on speeches spanning 2005-2025, this paper maps the oscillation of Spanish national memory between the categories of coloniser and colonised. I find that alongside the erasure of its imperial history, politicians across the political spectrum reframe Spain as a colonised space; both historically through internal conquest and Napoleonic invasion, as well as contemporarily through sovereignty disputes over Gibraltar and perceived encroachment by the USA and European Union. Ironically, such colonization is then countered with an assertion of historical greatness, invoking the Spanish Empire without using imperial terminology. That such a paradox exists within the discourse, and that this is used to create solidarity with Latin America and colonized peoples, demonstrates the potential implications of this dual-colonial narrative on foreign policy and the national imagination.

Who makes up a nation and has the right to contribute to its everyday shaping? How can nation be reimagined as a polyvocality rather than an elite-driven phenomenon?

Drawing on critical literature on the politics of belonging (Anderson 2013; Yuval-Davis 2006), and critiques of the dominant assimilative approach to minority integration (Favell 2022; Gilroy 2004; Valluvan 2016), this contribution extends the literature on everyday and informal nation-building practices (Edensor 2006; Polese et al., 2018) by presenting ethnographic data on how the Latvian Russian-speaking minority negotiate and navigate state-centric narratives on nationhood and belonging.

The contribution will present work in progress of research, funded through the Horizon Europe programme, on agentic forms of national belonging amongst young Russian speakers in Latvia. In doing so, it addresses a gap in the existing literature, which tends to frame the Russophone minority primarily in terms of its proximity or distance to either Russian state discourse or the Latvian (and by extension European) discourse. This binary lens often overlooks their alternative forms of belonging and limits their agency in shaping their own sense of self and contributing to collective nation-building, which may differ from hegemonic expectations and pre-defined development trajectories.

The research takes an original approach by reimagining everyday belonging and nationhood through a spatial-temporal lens – as a contingent, subjective, and constantly evolving movement through the ethnocentric, ethnoprotectionist space of the Latvian society and global contexts, wherein the transgression of fixed borders within hierarchies of belonging and inclusion is often constrained.

There is an ongoing debate about the factors influencing support for right-wing political parties that promote ethno-national populism. Some scholars emphasize identity, focusing on negative attitudes toward immigration and religious beliefs. Others highlight social class, showing that support for ethno-national populist parties is relatively high among working-class and lower-middle-class voters. In this paper, we examine the rise in support among Mizrahi voters (Jewish immigrants from Arab and Muslim countries) for Likud, Israel’s main right-wing party, in the lead-up to the 1977 general elections, after which Likud first came to power in Israel’s history. Our study offers a new perspective on this well-studied topic by combining historical analysis and statistical methods. Using election results from urban regions across Israel from 1965 to 1977, we analyze how different subgroups within the Mizrahi population contributed to Likud’s growing strength. By merging voting data with socio-demographic information, we show that the Mizrahi middle class was the main driver behind Likud’s electoral growth. We suggest that the Mizrahi middle class shifted its support from Labor to Likud, as the latter promised a better path to social mobility. Instead of viewing Mizrahi voters as homogeneous or passive, motivated solely by their perceived lower status in Israeli society or by certain identity traits, this research sees them as self-aware individuals driven by class interests. Our work makes a crucial contribution by clarifying the longstanding relationship between class and ethnicity in voting research both globally and in Israel, reaffirming the importance of class interests in electoral choices.

This work seeks to examine the relationship between the national and citizenship dimensions and the nature of the process of Israeliization in East Jerusalem. The research questions are: What is the impact of the encounter between “grey nationalism” and “grey citizenship” on the political orientation of Palestinians in East Jerusalem? What factors and motivations influence Palestinians in East Jerusalem to choose between emphasizing their national belonging and their desire to integrate into Israeli society?
“Esralla” is the term used to describe the process of Israeliization among Palestinian minority groups, characterized by the adoption of Israeli language, way of life, and political culture. However, this process is limited instrumentally, and Palestinians still do not have full citizenship, leading to the development of the concepts of “grey citizenship” and “grey nationalism” in the research.
The research assumes that there is a positive correlation between the depth of civic and national marginality and the creation of a process of Israeliization among Palestinians in East Jerusalem. The chosen research method is qualitative. The study will be conducted through 50 in-depth personal interviews with diverse residents of East Jerusalem from various sectors and backgrounds, encompassing both nationalist and civic activists.
The discourse on national identity is essential in modern society and a pivotal discussion in the future discourse of human identity development. Those who believe that the era of nationalism concluded in modern society are mistaken, as national identity remains a flexible dominant identity that evolves over time and has far-reaching political and societal implications. Additionally, the theory of citizenship still remains a fertile field for debates due to the understanding of the connection between the individual and authority, or between citizenship and the state.
From this, it can be inferred that the tension between citizenship identity

Contemporary Jewish-Palestinian relations in Israel present a striking paradox: as Palestinian citizens report growing attachment to the state—rising from 47% in 2022 to 57% in late 2024—Jewish suspicion intensifies, with nearly half believing Palestinian citizens supported the October 7 attack. This divergence creates a dangerous dynamic, where Palestinians strive for greater integration, yet Jewish society increasingly collapses distinctions between Palestinian citizens and those in the occupied territories. Many Palestinians express ambivalence about their Israeli citizenship, seeing it as imposed and lamenting the absence of a meaningful civil identity. Despite middle-class status, privileges expected by elites remain elusive due to their connection with a stigmatized minority identity (Halabi & Shoshana 2024).
In navigating this hostile environment, Palestinian citizens frequently adopt middle-class respectability politics. Rooted in marginalized groups’ responses to stigma, respectability politics involves the adoption of dominant norms to challenge negative representations and gain acceptance. Importantly, it is a reactive, iterative, and coercive strategy—serving both as resistance to stigma and as discipline within the group, as elites enforce behavioral norms to distinguish themselves from the “unrespectable.” Scholars highlight its impact on public behavior and images, constraining members’ speech, appearance, and mannerisms (Higginbotham 1993; Cohen 1997a). This strategy thus polices boundaries of inclusion within the group, and can both challenge and reinforce social hierarchies.

This presentation offers a critical reflection on an under-researched area of the sociality of social discontent and ethnic minority (EM) resistance in Lithuania and Latvia during the rapidly changing global order and addresses an important topic linked to the quality of democracy in this region. The main research objectives are to: (1) to elaborate means, types and forms of resistance (individual, collective, uncovered, covert, formal, informal) among Poles in Lithuania and Russian-speakers in Latvia, (2) to explain cross-national similarities and differences between the countries, and (3) by empirical observation to investigate the inter-linkage between different resistance form that contribute to social change. Our aim is to assess effectivity, productivity, creativity and mobility of the resistance to answer the question if resistance may challenge and transform EM position in relation to the power. From a methodological point of view this is a comparative study on multiple levels. Also, qualitative research design is selected for this study (40 semi-structured interviews and observations). This presentation is a part of the NCN Project: Ethnic and National Minority Resistance in Central Europe (ENMinResCE).

Ethno-regionalist parties’ orientations and attitudes towards European integration represent a controversial empirical question within the scholarship of ethno-territorial party politics (Gomez Reino, 2018); with some scholars describing this party family as a stable “Europhile fringe” (Jolly, 2007), while others propose a much more nuanced and mutating picture (Lynch, 1996; Elias, 2009; Hepburn, 2010). Besides addressing this empirical question by identifying Eurosceptic positions within ethno-regionalist parties, the paper aims to provide explanations based on theoretical insights coming from the general party politics literature (Hix, 1999; Hooghe et al., 2002; Bartolini, 2005), as well as from the specific literature on ethno-regionalist parties (Lynch and De Winter, 2008; Massetti and Schakel, 2021). Drawing from several different sources – established datasets as well as party documents – and using different scales of Eurosceptcism (Kopecky and Mudde, 2002; Taggart and Szczerbiak, 2008; Flood, 2009), the paper addresses the empirical, classificatory and explanatory questions by comparing all ethno-regionalist parties in Europe and identifying trends, particularly in the relation between Euroscepticism and other ideological features, such as radicalism on the centre-periphery and/or on the left-right dimensions. The paper also identifies and analyses some ‘paradigmatic cases’, representing specific types of Eurosceptic ethno-regionalist parties.

Interethnic conflicts continue to disrupt global stability and reshape geopolitical landscapes across many
regions. Nationalism is frequently identified as a primary cause of these conflicts, and only a few scholars have explored the specific motivations of ethnic minorities in their pursuit of political power and the objectives they aim to achieve once they attain it.
As we witness escalating environmental degradation and resource scarcity, our comprehension of ethnicity-
based conflicts grows more intricate. Disputes between different ethnic groups often stemmed from
struggles over land control and the aspirations of certain groups for greater autonomy within their nations.

But if an ethnic minority aims to gain political power and autonomy to control economic institutions and
more effectively benefit from them, as Acemoglu and Robinson explain, how can we categorize these
conflicts as ethnic rather than resource-driven?
Since 1945, such conflicts have led to the deaths of at least 11 million people, with some estimates
indicating even higher figures. The factors contributing to the emergence of these conflicts are complex
and often framed around ethnic issues, which frequently dominate scholarly discourse. Comprehensive research utilizing comparative case studies is crucial to effectively identifying the primary drivers of interethnic conflicts. In this paper, I will examine two interethnic conflicts from Eastern Europe, focusing on Moldova, alongside four conflicts from the Caucasus region, Georgia.

While nationalism is a term that is often associated with instability, violence, extremism, terrorism, wars and even genocide, in fact most forms of nationalism are nonviolent. Beyond politics, it is a set of discourses and practices that shape economic, social, legal, and cultural life all over the globe. This book explores the global rise and transformation of nationalism and analyses the organisational, ideological, and micro-interactional mechanisms that have made it the dominant way of life in the twenty-first century. In a series of case studies across time and space, the book zooms in on three key forms of lived experience: how nationalism operates as a multi-faceted meta-ideology, how national categories have become organisationally embedded in everyday practices and why nationalism has become the dominant form of modern subjectivity. The book is aimed at readers interested in understanding how nation-states and nationalisms have attained such influence in contemporary world.

The question of political participation in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy is especially intriguing because of the empire’s multiethnic character and the unequal distribution of political power among its nationalities. The dominant nationalities – German Austrians and Hungarians – introduced numerous legislative restrictions at both national and subnational levels, limiting the political participation of smaller groups. Less examined are the urban governance systems that developed in autonomous territories where these dominant groups were not present. Cracow, Lviv, and Trieste on the Austrian side, as well as Fiume (Rijeka) in the Hungarian half of the empire, illustrate such cases. Here, the so-called first-order minorities (those possessing autonomy) – Poles in Cracow and Lviv and Italians in Trieste and Fiume – adopted local ordinances similar to those used by the empire’s ruling nations to suppress second-order minorities. In Cracow and Lviv, these included Ukrainians and Jews; in Trieste and Fiume, Slovenes and Croatians. Using legal and historical document analysis, this paper examines how the complex interplay of ethnic (and religious) composition and unequal local power relations, further shaped by historical, political-legal, and economic factors, influenced the urban governance systems of these cities – specifically their administrative organs, local authority, financial independence, and electoral systems. The methods employed by first-order minorities to exclude second-order minorities from urban governance – often supported by German Austrians and Hungarians – generated legislative arrangements that appear both unique and unusual compared to contemporary American or British urban models, as well as other cities within the Habsburg Empire.

‘Islam is under threat’ and ‘defending Islam’ are slogans of recent Malay Muslim majoritarian mobilisations in Malaysia. In such majoritarian movements, social media platforms and popular preachers play key roles in amplifying right-wing narratives. Through online and offline ethnographies, this paper examines the interactions among various actors (especially popular preachers) and platforms (notably Facebook, TikTok, and WhatsApp groups) in shaping Muslim public opinion amid increased political and religious contestation in Malaysia. In other words, it explores how social media practices, religious changes, and political mobilisation are interconnected and mutually influence each other. The focus is on a few popular preachers who use religious rhetoric to justify hostility against various ethnic, religious, and gender minorities. Their preaching activities take place across multiple sites and platforms, presented in diverse styles and formats to reach different audiences, yet all aiming to build an ‘affective’ counter-public along religious lines and exclude those who fall outside its embrace. This paper will also examine the convergence of Islamism and Malay nationalism in this process – Islam is increasingly mobilised to serve the Malay agenda, and at the same time, Malay nationalism is ever more intertwined with Islamic conservatism. Such a form of religious nationalism shares a similar playbook with Hindu nationalism, Zionism and the Christian right-wing movement – the creative use of social media, the great replacement conspiracy theory, the mobilisation under the name of defending a particular religion, the rise of ‘illiberal’ democracy and anti-minority politics all go hand in hand.

This paper examines the contestation between the concepts of democratic nation-state and minorities’ rights and freedom. It focuses on the German public debate over Jewish entitlement within the envisioned nation-state during the 1848 Revolution.
Theoretically, liberal democracies are considered ethnoculturally neutral: minorities could integrate into the nation and share people’s sovereignty regardless of cultural or ethnic difference. However, drawing on Friedrich Meinecke’s analytical models of Kulturnation and Staatsnation, it becomes evident that the “Jewish Question” exposed a fundamental tension between expectations for a German democratic nation-state and prevailing notions of national identity.
Beyond the formal entitlement granted to Jews in 1848—entitlement soon revoked—the paper shows that even defenders of democracy retained an understanding of national identity that, while permitting Jews’ political participation, continued to sustain their social and cultural exclusion. A central element of mid-nineteenth-century German national identity was Christianity. Indeed, following Enlightenment legacy, this was an “enlightened Christianity” that emphasized German Christian culture over theology or ritual practice. However, inclusion was challenged. For example, the liberal politician Moritz Mohl conceived of Jews as a separate nation that could not fully incorporate into the German people, while Johann Sepp, another advocate of freedom and equality, maintained that it would be presumptuous to allow Jews to appoint German Christian officials. By applying philological and contextual analysis, I argue that in the German case the Kulturnation ultimately prevailed over the Staatsnation—identity triumphed over democracy—resulting in the distinct nationalization of Judaism and Jews, rather than their democratic integration.

The aim of this contribution is to present a case study that revolves precisely around the three concepts that give this conference its name: nationalism, democracy and freedom. The study is set in the Basque Country after the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975. During the next decade Spain witnessed a change of political regime, from a dictatorship that had lasted almost forty years to a democratic system. The foundations of democracy were then laid, and Spain became a state of autonomous regions.
In the Basque Country, this process towards democracy, although linked to or even subordinate to that of the Spanish State, had its own specific characteristics, problems and demands. Specifically, the quest for democracy was conditioned by Basque nationalist requirements, and public debate on democracy was based on the concepts of freedom (both individual and collective) and self-government, both of which, at the same time, became demands for constitutional recognition of historic Basque rights and institutions.

This paper investigates how Galician migrants in the Basque Country negotiated national, linguistic, and cultural identities in the early 1990s—a period marked by contested Spanish and Basque identities, ongoing political violence, and the continued construction of Spain’s sui generis federal system. It draws on 91 semi-structured interviews collected by historian Bernardo Máiz across the Basque territories, commissioned by the Xunta de Galicia—the autonomous government of Galicia—as part of a research project titled “Galegos en Euskadi, Galicia no corazón.” Although the study was never written nor published, this corpus, forgotten for over thirty years in Máiz’s hands, provide a rare oral-history glimpse into diaspora experiences and the everyday enactment of nationhood amidst ETA violence and competing national projects -namely Spanish, Basque, and Galician.
Framed by the theoretical perspectives of banal nationalism and everyday nationhood, this study examines how multiple generations of Galicians articulate belonging across overlapping national imaginaries, revealing the tensions between attachment to Galicia and engagement with Basque and Spanish political cultures. Through discourse analysis, the narratives of these “lost voices” shed light on how diaspora communities imagine political and cultural belonging within contexts of minority status, migration, and contested sovereignty.
By focusing on the everyday practices through which Galicians negotiate identity across local, regional, and transnational spaces, this paper emphasizes how diaspora communities simultaneously adapt to and resist contested national projects. The interviews demonstrate that memory, cultural expression, and participation in political debates function as forms of negotiation and subtle resistance, positioning Galicians at the intersection of transnational belonging, the reconfiguration of national identity, and the politics of protest, recognition, and cultural survival.

The proposed paper examines how left-wing sub-state nationalist movements in the Basque Country and Ireland have redefined independence in terms of democracy, freedom and social welfare since the early 1980s. Drawing on research into welfare nationalism and movement framing, the paper explores how initiatives formerly linked to armed conflict and revolutionary socialism came to advocate self-determination as a means of achieving social rights, equality, and popular sovereignty. In doing so, it contributes to current discussions about the potential of ‘the nation’ to promote or restrict democratic freedoms.
Methodologically, the paper combines a comparative-historical analysis with a qualitative discourse analysis of party and movement materials, such as programmes, manifestos, leadership speeches and strategic documents. These are considered alongside major institutional and socio-economic turning points, such as autonomy/devolution, post-conflict normalisation, the post-2008 austerity cycle and the territorialisation of welfare politics.
The analysis traces a gradual shift from classical claims to national self-determination toward a broader “right to decide/choose” and a process of democratic radicalisation, understood as efforts to deepen and broaden democracy by expanding participation, embedding rights-based and welfare commitments in sovereignty claims, and contesting neoliberal constraints on popular rule. Under this banner of leftist welfare nationalism, independence is increasingly articulated as the institutional capacity to universalise social rights through democratic policy-making, while differentiating these projects from exclusionary, right-wing nationalisms.

The idea that “the Yellow River is the mother river of the Chinese nation” is a deeply rooted cultural notion in modern China, yet this symbolic expression differs significantly from the river’s historical image. In ancient times, the Yellow River, revered as the zong (supreme ancestor) of the “Four Major Waterways” (si du 四渎) within the state sacrificial system, held sacred status but lacked any maternal connotation. Entering the modern era, nationalist thought and the “Western-Origin Theory of Chinese Civilization” (Zhonghua wenming xishuo 中华文明西来说) reshaped the river’s image, reinterpreting it as the “promised land” of national origins and aligning it with the political needs of nation-state construction in the late Qing and early Republic. During the War of Resistance against Japan, cultural works such as The Yellow River Cantata (Huanghe dahechang 黄河大合唱) elevated the river’s symbolism, linking it to the Chinese nation’s suffering, resistance, and unyielding spirit. Consequently, the “mother river” emerged as a unifying metaphor within a multiethnic national identity. The modern conception of the Yellow River as the “mother river” is thus not a continuation of ancient tradition but a modern cultural construct—one repeatedly redefined to serve the evolving imperatives of nationalism and state-building.

Nationalism provides a framework through which people navigate their social, and political realities and engage with the world around them. It influences how a country views itself, others, and its future capacity, all paramount to how it conducts its foreign policy. Using the example of the Australia-China bilateral relationship, this paper compares expressions of nationalism across two regime types, and analyses the interplay between nationalism and public opinion on foreign policy. Australia and China maintain a complementary economic relationship, marked by extensive trade, people-to-people ties, and China’s significant role as Australia’s largest trading partner. Relations were in a deep freeze from 2017–21 with concerns in Australia over political interference, strategic asset pursuits, dependency on one export market, and the detention of Australian citizens in China, as well as retaliatory Chinese wolf warrior diplomacy and economic coercion. The relationship began stabilising from 2022 onward, with resumed diplomatic dialogue, and easing of trade restrictions. While there is a large tranche of literature exploring the impact of nationalism on China’s foreign relations, there is far less that explores the same issues in China’s partners. This article fills that gap. The authors ran a 30+ question survey (n=1100) in Australia and China on nationalism and perspectives on the bilateral relationship in late 2024. While Australia-China relations may be officially in a state of stabilisation, the survey findings reflect more divisive attitudes, with a significant proportion of respondents holding on to “us vs. them” nationalism in response to threat perceptions.

The emergence of exclusionary localism in Hong Kong was puzzling because the city’s residences were traditionally attached to China nationalistically and culturally, despite politically skeptical to the Chinese Communist Party. This paper explains the emergence of exclusionary localism which later transformed into separatist movement in Hong Kong by using a processual mechanisms-based approach and argues that the rise of exclusionary localism is derived from three phased mechanisms, including: 1) accumulation and innovation of cultural-symbolic resources, 2) embodiment and identity actualization, 3) negotiation and mainstreaming. This paper has three components. First, it reconceptualizes “identity” as a discursive field compositing of three interplaying components, namely semantic narrative, activists’ subjectivity and public perception. A richer ontology of identity better reflects the qualitative transformation of identity instead of narrowly viewing as incremental change along existing political spectrum, and allows us to reconcile the tension between the constructivist-instrumental approach and the essentialist-primordial camp. Second, by utilizing a rich collection of qualitative and quantitative evidences including activists’ interview record, political entrepreneurs’ advocacy and pooling results, we argue that the emergence and transformation of identity is explained by three chronological mechanisms which together reveals the process of identity emergence and consolidation. We employ process-tracing method and Bayesian reasoning to showcase the validity of our argument. Last, we discuss our finding’s wider implication by indicating that exclusionary identity enhances the energy of democratization movement (tactical success), but risk of polarizing state and society’s relationship (strategic failure). We also test our framework’s generality using the case of Korean Peninsula.

The dusk of nationalism and nations seems only a distant possibility, considering the recent gains that ‘hotter’ forms of nationalism have made in the realm of high politics, both in the global North and South. This raises multiple methodological questions: How can we best understand it without making any sweeping generalisations? How can we study a phenomenon that makes claims of timelessness? Are conventional theories of nationalism still useful? Finally, how does one problematise this modern, ubiquitous enigma that camouflages its existence and presents itself as timeless?

All these questions have profound implications for our understanding of nationalism, and by extension, for the existing theories and necessitating that our theories avoid the fallacies of presenteeism, finalism, and essentialism and begin by problematising existing views and knowledge about nationalism. To that end, this paper proposes a rethinking of nationalism through a sustained engagement with Michel Foucault’s oeuvre. This entails, firstly, delineating the rules of formation on an archaeological level that give nationalism the productive capacity/power to produce its object — the Nation. Secondly, through this perspective, we can better understand the inherent heterogeneity, multiplicity, and complexity of power/knowledge relations within nationalism that preclude its study and analysis through a grand unified theory, and instead make genealogy a more suitable alternative. Finally, this perspective allows us to show how a particular iteration of nationalism and nation acquires coherence and dominance, and how, by functioning as a regime of truth, it seeks to maintain it in the face of a polyvalent field of discourses.

This paper interrogates the struggle between the Pakistani state and Baloch nationalists through the entwined politics of nationalism, sovereignty, and freedom, focusing on how authority is enacted and contested over both living and dead bodies. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s theorization of necropolitics and placing it in dialogue with Foucault’s conception of biopower, the paper argues that the governance of life and death in Balochistan has become central to determining who may claim membership within the national community. Enforced disappearances, the withholding and manipulation of corpses, and the regulation of mourning practices form key components of a coercive sovereign strategy that fuses biopolitical management with the exclusionary logics of state nationalism. Incidents such as the seizure of Karima Baloch’s body, the discovery of mass graves, and the return of physically and psychologically scarred disappeared persons reveal a mode of statecraft that polices dissent by rendering the Baloch not as citizens endowed with rights, but as subjects whose vulnerability to death structures their political existence.

In response, Baloch nationalists articulate alternative imaginaries of freedom and belonging, grounding political agency in practices of recovery, identification, and public commemoration. New Kahan—a graveyard near Quetta that houses numerous unclaimed or unnamed bodies—functions as a counter-national space where the unmarked dead are reimagined as martyrs, and where memory becomes a ritualized form of democratic resistance. Based on document analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, and interviews with political and non-elite actors, the paper demonstrates how Baloch nationalism contests authoritarian rule through corporeal, symbolic, and affective practices that expand the terrain of national self-determination beyond armed struggle.

Between the 1960s and 1970s, global decolonisation influenced the adoption of anti-colonial master frames by several small liberation movements in Western Europe. While this frame helped consolidate strong ideological cores, it failed to resonate with societies increasingly drawn to narratives of modernisation rather than resistance. In Galicia, the gradual disappearance of explicit anti-colonial rhetoric from public discourse has often been interpreted as evidence of its exhaustion, with its occasional reappearances treated as mere vestiges of anachronistic narratives.

Yet this focus on outward-facing discourse contrasts with the lack of attention to the movement’s internal interpretative frames. Drawing on 20 in-depth interviews with key actors in Galician nationalism, this paper analyses the tension between publicly moderated frames and the hidden interpretative frames rooted in anti-colonial thought that continue to guide internal meaning-making. The findings show that, despite their absence from official discourse, the movement’s internal cohesion still draws on an underlying unspoken grammar of resistance.

The paper argues for the need to complement analyses of externally resonant public discourse with attention to internally inherited interpretative frames. Only through this dual approach can scholars identify the hidden frames that sustain long-term cohesion and strategic alignment within nationalist movements.

This paper examines the Principality of Wallachia in the 1830s as a case study of how small states negotiated modernity, sovereignty, and emerging nationalism within a semi-colonial imperial framework. From 1829, the Romanian Principalities were placed under Russian protectorate, situating Wallachia in a complex geopolitical landscape shaped by Russian imperial oversight and Ottoman suzerainty. Traditionally portrayed as a passive object of Russian domination, Wallachia instead emerges here as an active political actor that strategically reinterpreted externally imposed reforms. The Organic Regulation (1831), designed by Russian administrators as a tool of imperial oversight, paradoxically created new political, legal, and discursive spaces which Wallachian elites appropriated to advance institutional development and national projects.
Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach that integrates political and legal history, discourse analysis, and theories of imperial governance, this paper examines how these reforms were internalized, contested, and creatively transformed by Wallachian elites. During this time, the General Assembly – initially conceived as a consultative body – became a site of debate over rights, political accountability, and the limits of imperial authority. The national movement led by Ion Câmpineanu linked liberal ideas, British and French diplomacy, and reinterpretations of the Regulation to build a political programme centred on national freedom. The 1838 Act of Union and Independence crystallised these ideas, reframing sovereignty and unification as democratic and national claims. Wallachia thus illustrates how nationalism can emerge through struggles over governance, rights, and freedom within an imperial political order.

Following the collapse of the USSR, Russia found itself in a state of ideological indeterminacy. On the one hand, the Soviet project, grounded on the principle of internationalism and communist theory, had been discredited. On the other hand, the new political elite actively endorsed a ban on any state ideology.
In the absence of a dominant historical narrative regarding key figures and events from the past, the search for a national idea extended over several decades. This topic gained a significant place in state rhetoric only in the early 21st century. The first two terms of Vladimir Putin’s presidency were characterised by a pragmatic and instrumental approach to the formulation of a national idea. However, starting in 2012, this idea began to take on more precise contours in his narrative, accompanied by substantial politicisation of history and the active development of memory politics.
This paper explores the transformation of Russia’s national idea in the post-Soviet era, focusing on the politicisation of history and its role in reinforcing imperial narratives. It argues that the evolution of Russia’s national idea content in President Putin’s statements reflects his changing views on the role of the state, society, and the Russian Federation’s place in the world. The president’s rhetoric demonstrated a shift from neoliberal pragmatism to a conservative and patriotic discourse. Consequently, in public discourse, the authorities increasingly referred to traditional values, patriotism, the imperial past, and historical memory as fundamental components of the national idea.

In this paper, we examine how religion has re-emerged as a structuring force in nationalist politics through what we call an ethical alliance between Russia’s desecularizing state and segments of the U.S. Christian right. Drawing on Peter Berger’s argument that modernity produces not only secularization but significant desecularizing counter-movements, and on Karpov’s analytic refinement of desecularization as deliberate, actor-driven re-sacralization of public life, we argue that Putin’s Russia represents a paradigmatic case of state-led moral transformation. Under this model, the Russian Orthodox Church functions as a central institution in crafting a form of moral geopolitics that frames sovereignty, security, and civilization in sacred terms.

We show that this moral vocabulary resonates strongly with U.S. Christian nationalist discourse, where Russia is increasingly portrayed as a defender of “traditional values” and an ally in resisting liberalism’s alleged moral decline. Through comparative discourse analysis, we trace how shared tropes—spiritual warfare, civilizational struggle, divine order, and the sanctity of the nation—circulate between Russian state-church elites and American conservative media ecosystems.

To clarify what is at stake for democracy, we contrast Russia’s hierarchical sacralization of political authority with Ukraine’s pluralist, anti-imperial religious nationalism, demonstrating that Orthodoxy itself does not produce authoritarianism; political uses of the sacred do. We argue that the defining geopolitical conflict of the twenty-first century is not “West versus the Rest,” but religious nationalism versus liberal pluralism and a struggle over whose moral vision defines freedom.

This paper examines the genocide discourse in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. The long duration analysis reveals a pattern in the Russian policymaking to interpret genocide instrumentally as a quintessential Nazi crime.

Ever since the crime of genocide entered international legal discourse, the Soviet Union and now the Russian Federation have been intent on linking it to the Second World War. During the debates on the draft genocide convention on the UN floor in 1947–1948, Soviet representatives took a high moral ground by declaring genocide as the ultimate crime of the Nazis. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who reviewed and edited the draft Soviet proposal, removed all references to genocide as an international crime that could have a political form.
Contrary to common belief, Stalin did not oppose references to political genocide to avoid responsibility for prosecuting political opponents in 1936–38. His true concern was the elimination of opposition during the Sovietization of Eastern Europe. After ratifying the Genocide Convention in 1954, Moscow utilized it as a rhetorical weapon against the West, particularly the United States, which only submitted the instrument of ratification in 1988.

The glaring lack of impartial legal studies on genocide in the Soviet Union continued into post-Soviet Russia. References to genocide resurfaced concurrently with Russia’s aggression against Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, as an ex post facto justification for military intervention. The tired Soviet interpretation of genocide as primarily a Nazi crime has been reimagined in light of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Russian Federation has belatedly embraced a victim ethos. The new legal concept of “genocide of the Soviet people” conveniently blends the atrocities committed by the Nazis during World War II with the alleged offenses of Ukrainian “fascists” since 2014.

In recent years, social scientists have advanced the study of ethnicity, yet analyses of ethnic advocacy in post-communist contexts remain limited. This research examines the advocacy strategies and political access of ethnic interest groups (EIG’s) in Bulgaria, drawing on original survey data from representatives of ethnic minority organizations. It investigates how institutional and political conditions shape ethnic interest groups interactions with political parties in a system that constitutionally bans ethnic parties and thus restricts opportunities for direct minority representation. Integrating insights from nationalism and ethnicity studies, interest group research and minority politics, the study identifies the factors that enable or constrain political access. These include organizational type and structure, resource availability, transnational linkages, ideological proximity to political actors, and parties’ positions on ethnic minority rights. Situated within the broader trajectory of Bulgaria’s democratic development, the analysis underscores the role of nationalism and enduring tensions surrounding minority inclusion in political system. The findings show that ethnic interest groups act as important political actors who navigate narrow access points and contested political environments, and that their strategies reflect broader struggles over minority representation and democratic consolidation in Bulgaria.

This paper examines the shift from the socialist-era ethos of so-called bratstvo i jedinstvo (brotherhood and unity) and transnational worker solidarity in former Yugoslavia to contemporary nationalist discourses in independent Slovenia that frame migrants as threats to welfare resources. Drawing on classical theories of nationalism and contemporary debates on welfare nationalism, as well as research on the construction of migrants as “undeserving” within welfare hierarchies, I analyse how the Slovenian case highlights tensions among nationalism, democracy, and freedom. In socialism, workers’ rights were understood as transcending ethnic belonging, enabling mobility and economic participation across republican borders. Since 1991, however, democratic nation-building has increasingly intersected with exclusionary welfare narratives. The paper presents new empirical data about welfare recipients and investigates how political and media discourses – regardless of factual data – depict migrants as welfare “users,” “burdens,” or “leaches,” shaping public opinion and influencing policy debates on integration, social rights, and national membership. I argue that the shift from socialist transnational solidarity to post-socialist “welfare bordering” demonstrates how national projects can simultaneously support and restrict democratic freedoms. The Slovenian case shows how exclusionary nationalisms mobilise welfare narratives to redraw the boundaries of the demos, raising questions at the heart of current discussions of nationalism, democracy, and freedom.

Finland and Ireland became independent in the aftermath of World War One but the roots of their independence were seen by nationalists as lying deep in the past. Although both states have remained independent since then nationalist leaders like Mannerheim in Finland, and De Valera in Ireland saw history as a perpetual testing ground of their respective nations. Since both a past of recurrent conflict and the possession of spiritual values were central to that worldview, this paper uses the concept of ‘spiritual realism’ to analyse ‘Mannerheim’s Finland’ and ‘de Valera’s Ireland’. The concept combines elements from the classical realist view of international relations with the stress on survival and recurrence in the ethno-symbolist approach to nationalism. It poses the question of whether the achievement of formal independence in 1917 and 1921 was key to both the Finnish and the Irish conception of national freedom.

The rise of nationalities and nationalisms during WW1 was one of the most important factors undermining Empires, mainly in the sensitive period of 1916-18, when the use of this leverage was fatal to the multinational imperial powers in war. In 1915, at the intervention of Italy to the European war against the Austro-Hungarian former ally, the memory of “Risorgimento” was the reason to justify this option, as the Italian people was oppressed by Austrians along the long 19th Century. Italy considered itself as a sort of a country leader for small nations and new nationalities. But the leverage of emerging nationalities oppressed by Imperial governments was first unofficially employed by Germans in an anti-Russian strategy, mostly through nationalities’ organizations (such as in the Lausanne congress, 1916). Only after the Italian defeat at Caporetto (1917) this approach became also an official national policy launched by Italians in the anti-Habsburg strategy, finalized in the Rome Pact (April 1918). This paper aims to describe the premises and this last focus around this Italian policy with new archive’s documents and military files, illustrating the consequent military national factors in the trenches of the Italian Eastern front. Italy tries to become, more than France, the leading country in this competition, even if soon engaged in the controversial position with Southern Slavs, perceived and treated by Italian nationalists as peoples submitted to the Italian leading role.

„Spain has become a European secret” wrote the German Rheinisches Volksblatt in November 1924, lamenting that the “Mussolini-copy” Primo de Rivera had been in power for over year, leaving most of Europe without detailed information from Spain due to censorship. This paper challenges this notion of a Spanish “secret”. It argues that while liberal Europe may have been in the dark, extreme right-wing and proto-fascist groups across the continent actively cultivated a celebratory media narrative of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship (1923–1930). This research presents a transnational, comparative media analysis of the dictatorship’s image as projected exclusively in the illiberal press of four states: Weimar Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland. The paper’s central thesis is that these right-wing media outlets deliberately promoted Primo de Rivera as a key symbol in a nascent Illiberal and fascist transnationalism, framing his military coup as a successful model for authoritarian nationalism and achieving “national freedom” from democratic chaos. This comparative study illuminates the transnational spread of illiberal, authoritarian, and fascist ideas and demonstrates how the crisis of democracy and freedom in interwar Europe was fueled by a transnationally rising anti-democratic right. The research is part of a bigger international project examining the global dimension of fascism between 1923-1930.

Pioneering scholar of language and nationalism Joshua Fishman proposed that the sociology of language should ask “who speaks (or writes) what language (or what language variety) to whom and when and to what end?” (1971: 219). Recent scholarship has, however, questioned the objectivity of “languages,” and “varieties/dialects,” viewing them as human categories often shaped by nationalist ideals. In this talk, I argue that sociology of language should draw on insights from nationalism studies and treat any putative linguistic entity as first “imagined” and then socially constructed, or as a category of practice (ala Brubaker). I thus propose a new inquiry that asks: “who creates (or invents) what language (or variety) to whom and when and to what end?” I approach this question by tracing the classes that have historically accumulated linguistic capital and controlled the markets linguistic good (clergy, poets, academicians, journalists) and analysing how they shaped linguistic ideals and practices. This Bourdieu‑inspired sociology of “linguistic classes” clarifies the roles of intellectuals in inventing languages and varieties/dialects under feudalism, empire, and national-democratic regimes. Drawing on a selection of European, post-colonial and Asian cases, I construct a model to address questions like: Why are some languages are deemed holy or prestigious while others low or “vernacular”? Why are the extremely similar Norwegian–Swedish and Urdu–Hindi treated as distinct languages? Inversely, while is there no American or Canadian language but only English with different “accents”? Why has Malayalam been depicted as a “daughter” or “dialect” of Tamil but never vice versa?

How did artists who refused military service imagine, and practice, belonging to the nation? This paper argues that the Bloomsbury Group’s conscientious objection during the First World War constituted a mode of dissident citizenship rather than a retreat from politics, which is tied to nationalism and the forms of legitimate political participation. Focusing on Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, and David Garnett, the paper traces distinct pathways to resisting conscription under the Military Service Act (1916) and the tribunal system. Through John Maynard Keynes’s proximity to policy-making and the group’s connections to civil-liberties advocacy, including the National Council for Civil Liberties (founded 1916), these figures navigated wartime bureaucracy, surveillance, and public censure. Strachey’s queer self-fashioning and his satirical literary practice register a refusal of martial masculinity and imperial virtue; Grant and Garnett, trying to secure an agricultural exemption and relocating to a Sussex farm, model a pragmatic, communitarian ethic of service outside the military. Despite divergent strategies, all three faced scrutiny and prosecution, revealing how the state policed the boundaries of national loyalty. The paper reads correspondence, memoirs, and artistic/literary work alongside wartime legislation and civil-liberties campaigns to show how Bloomsbury pacifism generated alternative repertoires of participation. It elucidates how anti-war commitments became constitutive of both political identity and creative form in the Bloomsbury Group.

The closest figure to a founding father in Denmark is the poet, theologian, and author N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872), often cited as the primary source of Danish nationalism. Still today, Grundtvig remains a key point of reference for both left- and right-wing political parties when articulating their respective concepts of the people, the nation, and what it means to be Danish.

A central concept in Grundtvig’s work is the Danish word “folkelighed”. This concept is frequently translated as “folksiness,” “peoplehood,” or “popular,” yet none of these translations fully captures its meaning. Grundtvig’s notion of “folkelighed” combines two concepts: “folke” (people) and “lighed” (equality). In a distinctive way, he unites the idea of the people with the idea of equality, thereby articulating a form of nationalism that is inherently egalitarian, democratic, and liberal.

The aim of this paper is to provide a conceptual history of “folkelighed” as articulated by Grundtvig between 1810 and 1848, and to trace how the concept continues to inform contemporary theoretical discussions of nationalism and national identity.

Using Reinhart Koselleck’s framework of conceptual history, the paper analyzes how folkelighed operates as a key semantic innovation in Danish political thought. My main argument is that Danish nationalism, examined through the lens of “folkelighed,” offers a new understanding of nationalism as constituted by freedom, equality, and democracy. This paper thus contributes to current debates on the nature and future of nationalism by examining how freedom, democracy, and equality are constitutive of Danish national identity.

This study examines the pivotal role of Koha Ditore, Kosovo’s main Albanian-language newspaper, in shaping ideas of freedom during the Kosovo War (1998–1999). Employing critical discourse analysis of wartime reporting and editorials, the research explores how the newspaper acted as a voice in building and supporting Kosovo Albanian national identity, especially with reference to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and the wider fight for political independence.

In the setting of Serbian state violence, propaganda, and efforts to erase Kosovo Albanian public life, Koha Ditore was not just a record of war but also played a role in creating national meaning. At first, the newspaper dealt with international uncertainty about the KLA. Over time, it changed how readers saw the group, shifting from seeing them as small rebels to viewing them as a true symbol of resistance and self-rule. This change matched growing calls for freedom, either through joining Albania or creating an independent Kosovo.

The analysis contends that Koha Ditore’s editorial line served as a mediating space between political elites, diasporic networks, and the war-affected local population, shaping a story of national future using ideas of rights, victimhood, and justice. By showing the press as a place for ideas, the study highlights how nationalism, war, and media come together in times of crisis, where freedom is not just described but also imagined into reality.

Although the war in Kosovo ended 26 years ago, and the country has been functioning as an independent republic since 2008, the question of how to integrate its residents remains unanswered to this day. Whereas the Albanian civil disobedience in the 90s was a form of a bottom-up protest against unjust policies introduced by an authoritarian regime and a manifestation of a peaceful resistance movement towards them, supposedly leading to a democratic change, the Serbian boycott of public institutions and low activity in public life are fueled by a third external agent and lead to the obstruction of democratic processes.

This paper aims to critically analyze and compare two seemingly similar examples of non-violent resistance against the authorities and their institutions in different political circumstances. Both of them build upon nationalistic narratives. However, the first one is a self-organized initiative of marginalized citizens against the authoritarian regime, whose goal is to weaken the center of power and establish a new political entity. The second is a set of hostile actions, supported from the outside, against a democratic state that undermines its authority, creating a power vacuum or political gray zones in the region.

Independence and statehood are the epitome of nationalism’s political success and the ‘gold standard’ that any nationalist movement aims to achieve. Yet, the absolute majority of nationalist and secessionist movements are met with hostility by the countries they’re trying to split from and indifference and/or opposition from the rest of the world. This paper examines the role of international intervention in achieving Kosovo’s statehood and discusses it in wider international context and in the light of the more recent cases of failed independence referendums in Catalonia and Kurdish Region in Iraq due to the lack of external support. The main focus of the paper will be on the role of democracy in nationalist and secessionist disputes. Democracy is important both as an ideal, that can be strengthened or weakened because of the nationalist political disputes, but also as a tool to gain international legitimacy and support. Examining one successful and two unsuccessful independence movements, the paper argues that democracy is a key element in any contemporary nationalist dispute with both the affected state and independence-seeking nationalist movement usually drawing on their (higher) democratic credentials (‘democratic outbidding’) to justify the denial of right to self-determination and the right to exercise it, respectively.

The consensus of nationalism scholarship, among political scientists, scholars of IR, and even philosophers, is that nationalism is not necessarily illiberal. Yet most of them have dismissed the last three decades of Habsburg and Central European history, which has refuted the national narratives on which the classic theories of nationalism and much political science are based. Following Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner’s first definition of nationalism, prominent political scientists consider self-determination and national movements in general to be nationalist and conflate patriotism and nationality with nationalism, hence nationalism’s possible benign and “liberal” nature. Yet these views are based on ahistorical assumptions, including the belief that the creation of mono-national states à la Mazzini was progressive, when Lord Acton already considered it a “retrograde step in history.” Through the Habsburg lens, this paper focusses on the distinctions between nationalism, on the one hand, and diverse forms of national allegiance, dynastic patriotism, supranationalism, and Landespatriotismus, on the other, showing how Habsburg considerations on nationalism would correct several of the assumptions of nationalism scholarship.

Nationalism emerged only in the nineteenth century as a project grounded in cultural homogeneity and the congruence of political and ethno-linguistic units – a transformation recognized by historians like Eugen Weber, Kedourie, and Mosse. By integrating their historiographical insights, the paper challenges the assumption that nationalism is or can be liberal or benign and offers a historically grounded corrective to contemporary understandings of nationalism. The paper draws on my article forthcoming in The European Legacy.

This paper explores the framing and salience of patriotism in British media, and its divergence from public opinion, between 2014-24. Debates over ‘Britishness,’ emerging in the aftermath of both the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014, and the Brexit vote in 2016, have catapulted questions of national identity to the forefront of British politics. Concurrently, political parties in Britain now actively compete over who can best ‘deliver’ Britishness, exemplified by Labour’s commitment towards branding itself as the ‘party for patriots’ under Keir Starmer. This paper investigates the presentation of patriotism in the media, and asks whether this is reflective of concomitant changes in public attitudes towards patriotism and national identity. Building on the theories of agenda-setting (McCombs and Shaw 1972), framing (Entman 1993), and Zaller’s ‘Receive-Accept-Sample’ model (1992), this paper utilises a mixed-methods approach: first, undertaking content analysis on a novel corpus of 440 articles from the BBC, The Guardian, The Sun, and The Telegraph, to highlight both the salience and increasingly polarised framing of patriotism in British media. A supplementary statistical analysis of Waves 1-29 of the British Election Study is undertaken to uncover changes in public opinion and attitudes towards patriotism and national identity. The paper finds that despite the salience and polarised framing of patriotism in British media, public opinion on national identity and attachment remains stable, raising critical questions regarding the influence of mass media in shaping, and potentially misleading, our perceptions of which issues are truly pertinent to the British voter.

Lebanon’s recent crises such as the 2019 financial and banking collapse and the Arab-Israeli wars have reignited sectarian, ethnic, and political tensions, jeopardising the country’s security and social cohesion. Within this context, several Lebanese politicians, media figures, civil society activists, and religious leaders have appealed to the Lebanese state institutions as the only guarantee against chaos. This research argues that the invocations of the Lebanese state in these discursive events go beyond references to institutions towards leading a discursive struggle for collective imaginaries whereby the state is both an object and means for this struggle. To this end, the present study subjects a sample of discursive events articulated by Lebanese public figures, who represent different parties, movements, and ethnic groups, in the digital and material spaces, to a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The purpose of this analysis is to probe what assumptions about the state, freedom, and democracy these discourses construct at the national and transnational levels and what discursive and social practices underpin these constructions. Meanwhile, this study digs deeper than the seeming consensus on the unifying role of the state to contrast these competing discourses in light of the view of the state as a pragmatic means and the search for a constructive nationalist impetus.

Applying Miroslav Hroch’s three-stage model of the formation and evolution of national movements in Central and Eastern Europe to the Croatian case, Mirjana Gross—one of the most influential scholars of modern Croatian history—argued that the final phase of Croatian nation-building, marked by the mass dissemination of national identification, occurred at the end of the nineteenth century following a prolonged period of stagnation. The key agents of this transformation were a new generation of young intellectuals and politicians known as the “Progressive Youth,” who introduced the principles of modern mass politics into the Croatian public sphere, largely by emulating Czech models—particularly the Czech Progressive Movement and Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk’s Political Realism. According to prevailing interpretations, this generation brought the idea of the democratization of political life into Croatian politics. This paper seeks to critically examine that assumption. Through an analysis of their writings, programmatic texts, and political practices, it demonstrates that the turn to mass politics in late nineteenth-century Croatia did not necessarily imply democratization. Rather, it could serve as a vehicle for populist politics that legitimized nationalist leaders without meaningfully expanding popular participation. This case thus invites a new reading of Hroch’s model: the “nationalization of the masses” need not correspond to a democratization of nationalism. Instead, it highlights the uneasy and contingent relationship between nationalism and democracy in Central European political modernity.

The paper examines how young citizens in Slovenia constructed meanings of democracy, democratic participation, freedom of speech, and protest during the Covid-19 state of exception. Drawing on 17 in-depth narrative interviews conducted between 2022 and 2023, the study analyses how young people negotiated their rights and obligations as members of the political community, and how their narratives articulated (or resisted) forms of national belonging mobilised during the pandemic. Methodologically, the paper employs constructivist grounded theory with multi-stage coding (descriptive, focused, and thematic), allowing the analysis to remain grounded in participants’ lived experience while generating broader conceptual insights.
The findings show that young citizens hold a highly ambivalent understanding of democracy: they value democratic ideals, such as pluralism, individual rights, collective decision-making, yet perceive formal institutions as unresponsive and exclusionary. Democratic participation is largely understood through personal responsibility, localised decision-making, and relational forms of citizenship, rather than through formal political engagement. Freedom of speech is framed as a core democratic right but also as a domain where national and moral boundaries are negotiated: participants emphasise tolerance and pluralism while simultaneously endorsing limits in the name of social cohesion, public safety, or expert authority.
Protests emerge as a central arena where democracy, freedom, and national belonging intersect. While respondents defend the principle of protest as a democratic safeguard, they often distance themselves from actual protest movements, viewing them as ineffective, polarising, or captured by competing visions of the nation. Covid-19 thus produced a landscape in which national identity, democratic norms, and civic freedoms were simultaneously affirmed, contested, and reconfigured.

There remains continuing debates about democracy and national belonging in Great Britain, within an continuously changing environment of how the nations (England, Scotland and Wales) are constructed and views within the State context (Britain) (Moreno 2005). The wider purpose is to develop sociological understandings of dual/compound identity, by exploring ‘national’ identities (English, Welsh and Scottish) within a wider ‘state’ identity (British), with consideration for cultural, social and political institutional influences. The project situates itself in broader debates of nationalism, nation-building and personal identity construction.
The project draws on key theoretical and historical literature, including debates of the civic-ethnic identity distinction and Kiely et al.’s framework of ‘markers and rules’ (2001; 2005). The focus is on the views of young adults, as representatives of future perspectives in the UK – to understanding the shifting sociopolitical sands of national identity, as socially constructed in Great Britain.
A questionnaire provides a contextual overview of identity trends in the sample; through qualitative interviews, the project then explores how national identity is not only perceived as a concept but also constructed and navigated within their social context. A comparison between England, Wales and Scotland will provide us with a better understanding of the nuances of national identity, shaped through narratives of devotional, freedom, democracy and cultural-history.
These perspectives are essential to contributing to the evolving debate around independence v integration of Great Britain, especially in this era of globalisation and blurring borders of nation-states.

This presentation addresses how the Chinese tradition of Confucianist honour formulates contemporary Chinese foreign policies and participates in the ideological construction of national identity and nationalist understandings of ‘freedom’ from a constructivist perspective. In reviewing the extant literature regarding in international relations and foreign policy analysis, the author transpires that the following challenges hinder further development of researches on Chinese IR: i) the relative inability of realists to explain why ‘emotional’ factors within the context of an increasingly assertive authoritarian nationalism and illiberal interpretations of sovereignty frequently led the Chinese state’s hawkish responses toward even very tiny cultural disputes, rather than pursuing their economic interests ‘rationally’; and ii) the need for constructivists to reveal historical processes of how specific values and ideologies participate into the shaping of China’s foreign policy. Taking the Xi Jinping administration’s nationalist diplomacy as a form of nationalist performance mobilising public sentiments around national dignity and sovereign freedom, this presentation attends to overcome the above theoretical limitations through advancing a constructivist approach to reexplain China’s foreign policymaking mechanism. The author argues that Confucianist honour ideologically shapes China’s understanding and pricing of national interest. To further examine this argument, the author aims to identify conditions responsible for the Chinese concept of its national honour. Drawing on relevant historical materials, this presentation concentrates on the Chinese tradition of interpreting and defending its honour, which is currently reshaped by China’s political elites, civil society, and the Chinese nation’s interactions with its neighbours and major great powers.

Cross-Strait relations reached a historic high before Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen assumed office in 2016, yet the Taiwan issue has since re-emerged as a geopolitical flashpoint with renewed potential for U.S.–China military confrontation. Global media and policy elites frequently concern the potentiality that Beijing will deploy offensive actions to reoccupy Taiwan, especially after China’s economic slowdown in the post-pandemic era. Numerous geopolitical analysts and international think banks are keep (re)assessing if and/or when PRC compel to launch a large-scale social mobilisation campaign, legitimising a shift from peaceful to armed solutions. Because the Taiwan issue has long been central to contemporary Chinese nation-building discourse, such a shift would require a major reconfiguration of the Chinese national identity narrative. Therefore, this project asks whether and to what extent Taiwan is indeed an object of militarised desire driven by Chinese nationalism. We examine: 1)what Taiwan signifies to the construction of Chinese national identity; 2) how Taiwan-related narratives have contributed to the persistent (re)articulation of Chinese national identity. The study employs a mixed-methods design. Using the corpus of People’s Daily (1946–2024), we apply keyword trend analysis, topic modelling, and sentiment analysis to identify long-term macro-discursive patterns in official representations of Taiwan. These computational findings are complemented by qualitative discourse analyses of high-level political speeches, party documents, and major state media commentaries, offering deeper insight into how Taiwan has been made central to identity construction—especially in the post-2016 context.

In the Xi Jinping era, Chinese digital nationalism has been rapidly expanding with the increasing popularization of the internet, characterized by participatory propaganda. Within this framework, Chinese netizens actively redefine the concept of freedom to contest the so-called “Western imperialist narratives.” Adopting critical discourse analysis (CDA) of key social media (PSM) political discourses, the author argues that this redefinition is a collaborative process between bureaucratic nationalism and folk nationalism in contemporary Chinese cyberspace. The party-state elites set the macro-agenda, while digital subcultures provide the discursive labor, such as vlog influencers, key opinion leaders, and numerous nationalist and pro-socialist Chinese internet users. These actors mutually reconstruct a “freedom with Chinese characters” not as individual autonomy and political rights, but as “freedom from chaos” (safety) and “freedom from foreign interference” (sovereignty). By positioning national strength as the prerequisite for liberty, they construct an “anti-imperialist identity” that bolsters collective ontological security. In conclusion, this study proposes to validate the hypothesis that Chinese digital nationalism constitutes a CCP-dominated “counter-hegemonic project” by provincializing Western liberal values. Thus, the author will firstly explain how “freedom” is discursively weaponized in key digital mobilization events to challenge Western epistemic dominance in China. Then, the author will critically discuss how participatory propaganda functions as a vehicle for the process of nationalist cultivation, as well as how those party-state elites mobilize fandom logic and meme warfare to equate national sovereignty with personal safety.

This paper examines the origins of Russia’s aggressive foreign policy, focusing on the war against Ukraine. It argues that Ukraine’s status within the USSR had become a problem for nationalist circles by the Brezhnev period. Reassessing the mechanisms of Soviet disintegration, the paper challenges the narrative of a spontaneous collapse of empire.
It shows that the creation of a sovereign Russian Federation was shaped by institutions of the Soviet state, especially the KGB. This process pursued two goals: replacing the authority of the Communist Party apparatus with that of the security services, and separating a Russian unitary state from a multinational superpower to allow a restoration of empire with provinces rather than union republics.
Special attention is given to the Russian Federation project as a product of political dualism between the USSR and the RSFSR. Russian institutions existed in a deliberately weakened form, through the absence of a Russian Communist Party, to prevent rivalry with the all Union center. This arrangement reflected a compromise between Leninist and Stalinist models of imperial governance.
Drawing on Soviet debates, the paper shows that elites before 1991 advanced alternatives to the union state, including an Andropov era project and a competing project of Russian sovereignty.
Finally, the paper traces post Soviet Russian Ukrainian relations. While Soviet imperialism recognized Ukraine’s separateness, post Soviet imperial discourse recast it as a misguided Russia, epitomized by Vladimir Putin’s claim that Ukraine was a Leninist invention. Aggression against Ukraine followed from the internal logic of the Russian Federation project.

It is known that resistance occurred among the USSR’s peasantry in response to attempts by the Soviet state to procure more grain, beginning in 1928, and especially following the introduction of wholesale collectivization and dekulakization in 1929-30. In Ukraine, these policies and the subsequent development of famine conditions also triggered a rise in Ukrainian national sentiment (nationalism), which was unique within the Soviet Union. In early 1930, for instance, there were cases where Ukrainian peasants during mass disturbances called for Ukraine’s independence. Nationalist and anti-colonial sentiments in response to Moscow’s agricultural policies occurred among other societal groups, including Communist Party and Komsomol members.

The rise in national feelings was commented on by Ukraine’s Communist Party leaders and by Joseph Stalin in Moscow. In late 1932 and early 1933, he reacted by taking more direct control over the republic, replacing some of Ukraine’s leaders, and by authorizing special operations by the security service to forestall alleged nationalist uprisings.

The proposed paper will outline and give examples of the rise of national sentiment among Soviet Ukraine’s population, focusing on the 1930-33 period. It will analyze how Communist Party leaders responded, including how they explained the rise of nationalism in Ukraine. The focus on nationalist reactions to agricultural policies and the reaction of the Kremlin leadership is needed to address a historiographical lacuna and to better understand how economic policy by a central authority, in this case, in Moscow, could trigger a nationalist reaction in a peripheral region, like Ukraine.

The idea and construction of Russian national identity has become for Putin a crucial ingredient of politics, both domestically and in Russia’s foreign relations and geopolitics. Scholars of Russian history of nationalism have noted that, in recent years, strategies used by Putin in Russian identity building have decisively shifted towards ethnicization as both the establishment and ordinary citizens have increasingly considered Russianness in strictly ethnic (cultural) terms. The purpose of my paper is to provide a sociological-historical and ethno-symbolist analysis of this transformation of Russian imperial-ethnic nationhood under Vladimir Putin and to examine its role in Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In order to better appreciate the role of ethnic nationalism as the ideological underpinning of Vladimir Putin’s geopolitics, I explore the following three ideas:

1) the transformations of the Russian idea of narodnost’/nationality since the 19th century to the present;

2) the gradual “ethnicization” of Russian nationalism after a brief attempt by Yeltsin at building a more civic-oriented national identity; from rossiiskaia civic identity under early Yeltsin to russkaia ethnic-imperial-state identity under Putin;

3) the effective fusion of state and ethnic national identity in the “state-as-civilization” project as explained by Putin in his 2012 essay On the National Question.
I conclude my analysis with a few predictions for European security and geopolitics, and especially for the future of Ukraine and Russia; to that end, I consider potential scenarios for the future of the region that stem from the imperial-ethnic vision of Russian nationhood.

The paper critically examines the participation of Tibetan women in exile in India in the Tibetan nationalist movement, within the theoretical framework of Nira Yuval-Davis’s intersectional analysis of gender and nation. Following the Tibetan uprising of 1959 against the Chinese occupation of Tibet, the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetans, along with his followers, fled to India and set up their Parliament-in-Exile in Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh. The government in exile had undergone several democratic reforms under the patronage of the Dalai Lama, which led to an increasing representation of women in the Central Tibetan Administration. Tibetan women in exile played a significant role in consolidating their nationalist agenda through varied strategies and mechanisms. The paper focuses on two major dimensions of Tibetan women’s involvement in their nationalist resistance: 1) their political participation and representation in Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile in India, 2) their mobilisation through women’s organisations, specifically the Tibetan Women’s Association (TWA). The paper argues that the Tibetan nationalist movement has overlooked an independent struggle of Tibetan women for their own autonomy while reproducing gendered national identities. The study is based on the field surveys and interviews conducted with Tibetan women parliamentarians, activists, and TWA members at Dharamshala, India. Using the qualitative method, in-depth interviews and Focus Group Discussions were conducted. A thematic analysis was employed to draw inferences from the data collected.
Key Words: Gender, Nation, Tibetan Women, Exile, India

Mainstream studies explaining identity change employ pooling (quantitative approach) and discourse analysis (qualitative approach) as major method, but most studies have mistakenly conceptualized new political identity as an extension of existing identity binaries instead of an emerging different kind. Moreover, scholars find it challenging to conceptualize the role of emotion into existing framework. I argue that many analytical challenges could be tackled with a thicker ontology of “identity” by breaking the concept into components covering supply-demand factors, and macro-micro level variables. Instead of identification, this paper defines “identity” as the interplay between components of a discursive field including political entrepreneurs’ narrative construction, radicals’ subjectification and public’s perception. The second half of paper operationalizes the thick ontology of identity. I demonstrate that Charles Tilly and William Sewell’s processual framework is particularly useful in explaining dependent variables with thick ontology as a process involves multiple stages with each corresponding to changes of a specific component of the discursive field. I further argue that recent methodological breakthrough achieved by Michael Beach and Tasha Fairfield enhances a processual argument’s falsifiability and validity. This paper ends by comparing the proposing framework with Andreas Wimmer’s theory of ethnic boundary making and Randall Collins’ theory of interaction ritual chain to demonstrate the former’s comparative advantage in applicability and the provision of sociological imagination.

“London’s actually the place that I feel most at home because of the otherness of everyone else.” – Interviewee ‘Hilda’

This paper forwards the proposition that there is a distinct approach to nationalism extant in contemporary large, capital and primate cities, characterised by dual opposing sentiment. First, large, and especially capital, cities quintessentially represent the nation. These representations are exported outside the nation, and this export effects how people living in these cities view their national identity. Second, however, is that the national identity of people in cities is often politically open to question. The nature of large city life, despite its indexing as national, is ‘inauthentic’ with respect to the ‘true’ nation, often politically represented as extant only outside cities.

Original fieldwork data is used to interrogate London’s relationship to Britishness and multiculturalism. Further examples are Paris and ‘La France Profonde’ and discourse around New York. Non-Western examples include Delhi and Istanbul, where cosmopolitan left-leaning city politics (with national aspirations) have been subdued by ruling right-nationalist parties.

Three ways of understanding this opposition will be presented. First, Therborn’s urban studies and sociology. Second, process nationalism as theory and civic nationalism as practice. Finally, a novel approach invoking metamodernism and hauntology will be advanced emphasising democratic, cosmopolitan identity responses to right-nationalism in large cities. This involves understanding individuals oscillating between civic conceptions of national identity and how these might uphold interpretations of political freedom, multiculturalism and diversity within cities, but which are often however contrasted with nationalism.

In contemporary Poland, conflicts over history and memory often redefine the meanings of freedom, democracy, and nationhood. The 2025 exhibition Our Boys. Residents of Gdańsk Pomerania in the Army of the Third Reich, organized by the Museum of Gdańsk, provoked heated public debates about the moral limits of Polish national belonging.
This paper approaches the controversy not as an artistic dispute but as a boundary-making process that reveals how Polishness is negotiated through moral judgments and emotional claims to loyalty. Drawing on Anderson’s concept of imagined communities, Brubaker’s relational understanding of the nation, Rothberg’s multidirectional memory, and Bernhard and Kubik’s politics of memory, I examine how the moral language of freedom, betrayal, and responsibility is mobilized to include or exclude groups from the symbolic community of the nation.
Methodologically, the study combines discourse analysis of media and institutional reactions with ethnographic interviews among Kashubian respondents conducted in 2025. The case study demonstrates how regional actors reinterpret official memory to reclaim marginalized wartime experiences and challenge dominant narratives of national purity.
By linking nationalism studies with memory politics and ethnographic inquiry, this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of how moralized forms of memory sustain contemporary right-wing nationalism in Poland. It shows that moral boundaries — rather than ethnic or cultural criteria alone — continue to shape who is considered a legitimate member of the nation in post-1989 Europe.

This paper tackles with group representation in non-democratic regimes, focusing on the Polish minority in Transnistria. When formal channels are limited, individuals/groups rely on informal representation and networks where some individuals act as “brokers”. By bridging, linking and mediating, they exercise representative functions and facilitate group access to resources and rights. Transnistrian Polish minority “ethnic brokers” are intermediaries between the Polish community, Poland and the Transnistrian authorities. Based on Bourdieu, the paper argues that brokers are those who have the capacity to cumulate different capitals (social, symbolic, economic) in (to access) the political fields of Transnistria and Poland, and to navigate in-between them. Based on in-depth fieldwork, the empirical part of the paper focuses on the trajectories and activities of two such ethnic brokers who advocate for the needs and rights of the Polish minority within their local administrative and social structures in Transnistria, while channelling support from the kin-state Poland. The research findings are threefold. (1) Since cumulating capitals in non-democratic settings is difficult and must be supported by long-term informal connections and practices, there is no turnover in individual minority representatives; they tend to be life-long self-appointed but legitimate brokers. (2) While providing the minority with (informal) representation and resources, ethnic brokers act as (unintended) “bridges” between the kin-state Poland and the otherwise not-recognized home-state Transnistria. (3) The latter tends to instrumentalize this “bridge” to legitimize its “statehood”.

What tools—concepts, theoretical frameworks, and research categories—should we use to study Central and Eastern European radical nationalisms at the turn of the 20th century? In my presentation, I propose the concept of a nationalizing relay. This phenomenon occurs when groups in national conflict mirror the practices, views, and institutions used as tools of nationalist struggle. It happens even when the relations between these two (or more) groups are unequal, that is, when one is dominant and the other subordinate. It is therefore a form of transfer of ideas in which, despite the inequalities between the actors, it is difficult to predict the direction of the transmitted content and practices. However, it is easy to see that both sides of the nationalist struggle, under the pretext of defending themselves against the other, gradually radicalize. I will illustrate this phenomenon using the example of the activities of Polish and German female political, literary, and educational activists with a radical nationalist profile on the eastern border of the German Empire before World War I. I will also consider how the nationalizing relay and the resulting radicalization influenced democracy in this region after the border changes of 1918, that is, after regaining freedom (according to the Polish side) and the loss of a significant part of the state (according to the German side).

What does ultranationalism look like? What happens when a postsocialist party attempts to rebuild the nation by stitching together the visual languages of two authoritarian pasts? And how do citizens of a fragile new democracy interpret and internalise these images? This paper examines the visual culture of the Greater Romania Party (PRM) during Romania’s first post-Communist decade, arguing that its nationalist appeal relied as much on a carefully curated visual repertoire as on ideology. The paper looks at how the PRM and its leader, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, presented themselves through imagery. In a context marked by economic uncertainty, democratic fragility, and unresolved political memory, the PRM reactivated symbolic fragments from Romania’s interwar fascism and Ceaușescu’s national-communism, transforming them into a new aesthetic for the 1990s. Drawing on front pages of the România Mare magazine, party emblems, electoral posters, televised performances, and press photographs, the analysis focuses on four interconnected domains: the sacred nation, the charismatic leader, rallies, and anti-minority attitudes. Maps of Greater Romania paired with Orthodox motifs, portraits of Tudor framed as a paternal protector, and rallies that echoed both Legionary rituals and socialist choreography, reveal a visual culture shaped by decades of authoritarian representation that felt familiar to viewers. Rather than claiming ideological similarities between the Legion of Archangel Michael, the national-communist regime, and the PRM, the paper argues that PRM and Tudor drew aesthetic power from older visual traditions. The party did not invent a new ultranationalist visual culture. Instead, it revived and combined already existing ones. By showing how the PRM made nationalism visible and emotionally resonant, this paper highlights the role of visual culture in Romania’s ultranationalist revival and in how today’s far-right mobilises inherited aesthetics across Europe.

The empirical puzzle of this study relates to Romanians’ support for Călin Georgescu during the first round of the 2024 presidential election, which was annulled after reports from Romanian intelligence agencies suggested Russian interference in the electoral process. Although reports show that his campaign was funded by external actors, including Russia, this does not fully explain why his discourse convinced more than 2,000,000 people to vote for him. This study argues that in order to better understand the unconscious and emotional appeal of Georgescu’s campaign, we should analyse his discourse using Lacan’s concept of political fantasy, which has been applied to nationalism studies. Focusing on the concepts of fantasy, trauma, identification and nostalgia, and incorporating a spiritual and esoteric dimension, this study will examine how Georgescu’s campaign constructed a political fantasy filled with esoteric and ritual symbolism. From a theoretical perspective, this study will contribute to the literature by using Lacanian psychoanalysis to illustrate how a populist discourse can work at the level of the subconscious to create a persuasive fantasy that appeals to and mobilises voters. From an empirical perspective, this study is the first academic analysis of Georgecu’s campaign for the 2024 presidential election, examining its discursive component.

“An active aristocracy, subject to common law, dedicated to public interests” would be “an incalculable good for the country”. “Since some [members of the aristocratic families] had previously held the highest offices of the state, they understood this mechanism [of government] better than the newcomers”. (Barbu Catargiu, 1862). Through these words, the first prime minister of Romania captures the essence of the process of adaptation of a significant part of the Moldo-Wallachian aristocracy to the principles and norms of the modern state, based on the “rule of law” and “constitutional regime” after the union of Moldavia and Wallachia in 1859.
Our paper will focus on a part of the Moldavian aristocracy that reacted differently to the discursive and constitutional building of the modern nation-state. We will analyze the discursive and political connections between the “separatist movement” in Moldavia that opposed the Union before 1859, the anti-Semitic trend that developed later, and the historical narrative present in some aridstocratic circles (located mainly in the former capital, Iași) regarding the incompatibility between the Romanian national character and Western democracy. Our approach will argue why we can speak of Moldavian aristocracy and will use concepts as parochialism (from the perspective of the relationship between people, power, and space), local power (a complex of political practices, institutions, and traditions embedded in the local mentality in relation to what good governance means), and a historicism that places the boyars of medieval and early modern Moldavia in the center of the discussion on the shaping of the national character.

The study examines how the boundaries of national belonging are reinterpreted in the Kazakhstani public sphere through the case of naturalised athletes who represent the country while having different ethnic backgrounds or citizenship. Drawing on Craig Calhoun’s conception of the nation as a dynamic practice of distinguishing between “us” and “them”, we analyse the conditions under which such athletes are incorporated into the symbolic category of “ours” within Kazakhstan’s multiethnic context.

The empirical basis consists of a corpus of comments from digital media and social networks discussing athletes from various disciplines who have represented Kazakhstan in different periods. The selection of figures with diverse career trajectories—from consistently successful athletes to those who have provoked more ambivalent or contested reactions—allows us to trace shifts in public attitudes and to identify the mechanisms of symbolic inclusion. Particular attention is paid to how sporting achievements, the frequency of appearing with national symbols, and public statements referencing Kazakhstan shape perceptions of an athlete as belonging to the national community.

We assume that high performance often facilitates a pragmatic form of acceptance in which origin becomes secondary. However, such inclusion remains partial and contingent on current sporting success, media framings, and prevailing discursive moods. The case of naturalised athletes thus offers a lens for observing which criteria are regarded as legitimate for recognising national belonging, how society negotiates between ethnocultural expectations and civic identity, and how sport functions as an arena in which the boundaries of Kazakhstan’s national “we” are continuously reassembled.

Much scholarship in mainstream political science focuses on the hot and ethnic expressions of nationalism, casting nationalism as opposed to liberal values, democracy, and cosmopolitanism. This narrow view obscures the full complexity of nationalism—especially its banal, environmentalist, majority, and progressive forms—thereby leaving us still without systematic, quantifiable, and comparable ways to operationalise nationalism within parties.

I argue that much banal, environmentalist, majority, and progressive nationalism operates at the frame level, which helps explain why it has been overlooked: many liberal forms of nationalism appear as frames rather than explicit topics. The paper’s goal is to make these forms more visible by developing a whole new coding approach—the Nationalist Frames Database (NFD)—a scheme of over 500 codes capturing topics and framings, applied to all mainstream parties in the 2019 UK and Spanish elections (over 8,000 quasi-sentences).

The paper makes four contributions: (1) formulating five criteria that any database operationalising nationalism in political parties should meet; (2) demonstrating that nationalism as a frame is as relevant as—if not more frequent than—nationalism as a topic; (3) showing that much banal, majority, and progressive nationalism occurs at the frame level rather than the topic level; and (4) developing the concept of “nationalist environmentalism,” in which environmental policies are framed as benefiting national security, the economy, the landscape, and international leadership. While much literature highlights conflict between nationalism and environmentalism, a focus on frames reveals a more positive and mutually reinforcing relationship.

Mixed couples in Central and Southeastern Europe live within minority-rights regimes that seem generous, but are deeply embedded in nation-building projects. Their everyday lives expose how these frameworks—intended to promote inclusion—often reinforce the assumption, present in both nationalist discourse and administrative practice, that ethnic belonging must be singular, inherited, and clearly classified. Drawing on ongoing research this paper examines how mixed couples navigate the practical consequences of divergent minority-rights protections in countries such as Hungary and Serbia. Based on more than 25 interviews with Hungarian-Serb couples in both Hungary and Serbia, the study shows that partners must negotiate everyday decisions shaped by (unequal) access to linguistic rights, education in the minority language, citizenship policies, and bureaucratic procedures that require ethnic categorisation. These structural inequalities shape how couples raise their children, choose schools, interact with state institutions, and manage expectations from both majority and minority communities. The paper argues that mixed families make visible the unintended effects of minority-rights regimes: while designed to safeguard cultural diversity, they can simultaneously reproduce ethnic boundaries, create hierarchies of “legitimate” identities, and impose pressures to align with one national community over another. Through the lens of mixed couples, the paper highlights how minority-rights systems continue to operate as tools of everyday nationalism, structuring intimate life even within families that transcend ethnic divisions.

This paper critically examines the Raise the Colours campaign in the UK by engaging with recent debates on banal and everyday nationalism (Duchesne, Skey, and Fox 2018). Drawing on Billig’s (1995) distinction between the “waved” and “unwaved” flag, and Skey’s notion of the “heating” and “cooling” of nationalism, the paper analyses how the widespread appearance of national flags on roundabouts, lampposts, and other public infrastructures complicates established binaries while showing how national symbols are mobilised to express contested ideas of freedom and democratic belonging.
The UK’s political landscape in 2025 has produced both highly visible “waved” flags and newly politicised “unwaved” ones. The Unite the Kingdom rally led by far-right activist Tommy Robinson offered an open display of heated nationalism, while the Raise the Colours campaign drew attention to everyday flagging that usually goes unnoticed. These “unwaved” flags became politically charged and sparked debate over whether they show inclusive patriotism, exclusionary nationalism, or something more ambiguous. This controversy raises questions about who takes part in these acts of national symbolism, for what reasons, and with what effects on democratic norms and minority inclusion.
The paper argues that the common distinction between banal and everyday nationalism hides the complex interaction between structure and agency, and between top-down mobilisation and grassroots activism. Using empirical analysis of news and social-media coverage, the paper shows how different actors frame the campaign as defending freedom, threatening democratic equality, or expressing harmless national pride. Overall, it demonstrates how contemporary nationalist practices shape ideas of freedom, citizenship, and political participation in a context of rising populism and increasingly contested democratic values.

The introduction of nationalist ideas in the nineteenth century and their combination with the fragmentation of Iranian society resulted in the emergence of a robust religious element alongside politics in Iran. As the Shiite clergy assumed greater influence in Iran, political Islam, particularly Shiite political Islam, came to exert control over the political structure. Following the triumph of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Iranian identity, which had been in a state of dynamic interplay with religion since the Constitutional Revolution, underwent a process of fragmentation. The rigidity of Iran’s political structure, based on Shiite political jurisprudence, has created centrifugal forces among ethnic identities and distanced religious identities associated with Islam. The erosion of religious tenets in contemporary Iran has resulted in the attenuation of religious and national identities, concomitant with the ascendance of ethnic identities. The process of secularization in Iran’s fragmented society, coupled with the rise of regional nationalism and the rejection of sub-identities, has significantly weakened the unifying religious nature of the country. This process has resulted in the emergence of ethnic movements that are detached from a unified religious identity. As Iranian society becomes increasingly secular, it is simultaneously undergoing a process of identity radicalism. This paper hypothesizes that the ongoing integration of nationalism and political Shiism has caused religious minorities in Iran to gravitate toward ethnic identities, which increases centrifugal forces and intensifies ethnic radicalism both domestically and internationally.
**Keywords:** Iranian identity, Ethnicity in Iran, Nationalism in Iran, Religious identity, Secularism and Islamism, Shiism in Iran, Post-revolutionary Iran, Ethnic radicalism, Constitutional Revolution, Ethnic fragmentation, Political Shiism, National disintegration, Cultural identity, Identity

In the framework of modern nationalism, happiness is frequently portrayed as a national task, notably articulated in the American Declaration of Independence’s charge for the “pursuit of Happiness.” Yet research on happiness – particularly studies emphasizing the historical and cultural mutability of emotions – has mostly focused on modern happiness as an emotional ideal pursued by the individual. This paper shifts the gaze to the national construction of happiness, asking: What version of ‘happiness’ underpins the nation-building process? And what forms of happiness – or other emotions – are excluded from it?
I examine the Jewish national revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries within the Zionist movement, deeply influenced by European nationalism. Zionism rejected Jewish diasporic life as passive and weak – a “gloom” to be dispelled by the “happiness” of the homeland. Yet, the Zionist “pursuit of happiness” was intertwined with ideals of sacrifice and suffering. What, then, was the content of Zionist happiness?
Drawing on a discourse analysis of diverse sources, such as ego-documents, literature, and press materials, I argue that Zionist discourse targeted specific “emotional demons,” primarily fear and shame, as obstacles to happiness. What distinguished “living with dignity” and “without fear” was their framing as fundamental conditions for freedom. Crucially, these became the concern of the national entity as it gradually assumed responsibility for the security of its members. This highlights the entanglement of happiness, as an individual emotion, with the national framework: the nationalization of security is the nationalization of freedom – and thus the nationalization of happiness.

The paper explores how foreign policy events and conflicts are communicated domestically in ways that help produce and mobilize national identity. The analysis focuses on how international developments are narrated for a domestic audience and how these narratives generate affective investments in particular understandings of the nation.
Drawing on discourse analysis of Hungarian government communication and state-aligned media between in recent years, the paper examines how key international issues—such as EU-relations, migration governance, and the war in Ukraine—are translated into emotional narratives that position Hungary and the nation as either embattled, heroic, or betrayed. The focus is not on identifying predefined emotional categories, but on reconstructing the emergent emotional repertoires that shape how national belonging is felt, imagined and exhibited.
The paper argues that these emotional repertoires produce political lock-in effects. Once a foreign policy issue becomes framed through emotionally charged narratives, stepping back from confrontation, reaching a consensus begins to resemble capitulation and de-escalation becomes politically costly. In this way, the domestic communication of foreign policy does not merely reflect national identity, it actively reproduces it, while simultaneously narrowing the range of viable diplomatic options.
The contribution of the paper lies in showing how the emotional framing of foreign policy communication feeds back into the national imaginary, creating a self-reinforcing dynamic between external events and domestic identity politics. It also offers a model of affective lock-in, showing how nationalist emotional investments in foreign policy narratives can harden political positions and make retreat or compromise domestically untenable.

This paper challenges the assumption that dealing with the past fosters a more peaceful, democratic future. Instead, it argues that difficult heritage can become a powerful resource for new forms of exclusionary nationalism. The paper centres museums, which memory studies understand as important agents of memory for national identity. While scholarship examined glorifying national narratives in museums, more subtle forms of nationalism which gain their power from difficult heritage remain understudied.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Bosnia and Herzegovina in September 2025, the paper examines how the difficult heritage of the Srebrenica genocide has been mobilised within contemporary Bosniak identity politics and how museum exhibitions mediate this process. Through in-depth ethnographic analysis of the new “Museum of Genocide” exhibition and interviews with curators, the paper investigates how curatorial narratives, spatial design, and affective strategies frame victimhood, collective belonging, and political agency. While the Memorial Center, like many museums dealing with difficult heritage, plays an essential role in acknowledging past atrocities, it also contributes to narratives that reinforce ethno-national boundaries.
The paper shows that memory institutions, often celebrated as democratic spaces of reflection, can simultaneously cultivate narratives centred on national resilience rather than inclusion. This has major implications for transitional justice approaches. By tracing how difficult heritage is curated, the paper captures the tensions between nationalism, confronting the past and democracy.
In doing so, the paper contributes to debates on how national identity and democratic futures are shaped in everyday institutions, and how memorialisation can both sustain and constrain reconciliation.

The ‘war of robots’, as former AFU commander Valerii Zaluzhnyi proclaims, explains how Ukraine has resisted its materially superior invader. Drones’ entry into the common kit of the frontline soldier has fundamentally uprooted the course of the war. This paper submits a two-fold argument. First, drones in Ukraine function as both expressions of Ukrainian identity and extensions of Ukrainian resilience. Second, Ukraine’s systematic adoption of drones invites re-investigation into the notion of the nation-in-arms. This paper relies upon the author’s field interviews with Ukrainian soldiers 2024-2026.
Organisationally, Ukraine’s armed forces are the first globally to inaugurate an Unmanned Systems Forces Command, elevating drones as co-equal to the traditional triad of armies, navies, and air forces. Economically, drone start-ups and companies are soaring in both value and production. Operationally, Ukraine’s use of drones to resist invasion have effectively frozen the frontline and prevented Russian domination of the Black Sea. Cumulatively, Ukrainian soldiers uphold these aspects as manifest proof of a unique national identity that rewards innovation, decentralised ingenuity, and increasing military prowess.
Drones’ modular character spur decentralised involvement by civil society for their production. Multiple women-only drone units on the frontline coincide with mass mobilisation of men into the army. Most importantly, the Armed Forces of Ukraine actively market drones as instruments to economise the lives of its own soldiers at the direct expense of the enemy’s. Drones at once serve to edify claims of Ukrainian national distinctiveness both narratively and military.

As Lithuania’s two most popular team sports since the interwar era, basketball and football have been widely intertwined with its national identity, as demonstrated by their role in the small country’s anti-Soviet struggle for freedom and its close interaction with domestic politics during the post-Soviet era of regained independence and Euro-Atlantic integration (Cingiene & Laskiene, 2004; Butautas & Čepaitienė, 2006). As elsewhere throughout Central and Eastern Europe, the Russo-Ukrainian conflict since 2014, and especially the full-scale war since 2022, has reignited Lithuanian fears about Russia’s “neo-imperial” revanchism, leading to the re-politicization of numerous spheres in society, including its sports fandom.

Based on a qualitative research methodology, composed of an in-depth analysis of relevant textual sources and semi-structured interviews with members of the fandom serving as the primary data collection method and occasional participant observation as the accessory one, this case study aims to examine in detail the main political manifestations of Lithuania’s organized club fandom’s support for Ukraine during its war with Russia. It will demonstrate that, much as anticipated by previous scholarship of similar entities elsewhere (Doidge & Lieser, 2018; Kossakowski, 2021), the main groups of Lithuanian organized professional sports club fans – the ultras – have been prominent and effective in these endeavours. Contrary to previous studies, however, they thus succeeded in becoming a national role model, followed by the broader society. As their differing political affiliations (right vs. left wing) were set aside due to a common threat, this trend mirrored their Ukrainian counterparts’ wartime evolution.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 triggered one of the fastest large-scale refugee inflows into Central Europe since WWII. Within two years, the Czech Republic – now hosting one of the highest numbers of Ukrainian refugees per capita in the EU – has become a key site for observing an accelerated process of diaspora formation. Building on theories of diaspora, transnationalism, and migrant incorporation, this paper analyses how a refugee population originally expected to remain temporary has begun to institutionalise itself, develop collective capacities, and transform into a new diaspora community.
Methodologically, the paper draws on several quantitative sociological surveys conducted by the author between 2022–2024 (research on communication channels, socioeconomic integration, income and remittances, N≈1,000–3,000) combined with other datasets (UNHCR Protection Profiling; nstitute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences). These data provide a unique longitudinal perspective on integration trajectories, identity formation, and emergent transnational practices.
Analytically, the paper argues that diaspora-building in the Czech Republic is driven by three interrelated mechanisms: (1) rapid stabilisation through labour-market incorporation and improving linguistic competence; (2) strengthening social infrastructures, including information networks, civic initiatives, and support organisations; and (3) long-term settlement intentions, which have grown significantly over time (more than 65 % now intend to stay).
The contribution of the paper is twofold: it conceptualises a unique “compressed” diaspora-formation process under refugee conditions and demonstrates how forced migration can generate durable diasporic fields even in the absence of initial long-term migration plans.

The Great War’s outbreak in 1914 prompted Britain to mobilize its colonies, urging Canada to defend the Empire. As French Canadians had a contentious history with the Crown, recruitment posed a challenge. Propaganda exploited certain forms of French Canadian nationalism to resolve contradictions in fighting for the Crown. Through discursive and iconographic analysis of war posters, this paper will unveil the ideological strategies that portrayed French Canada as a nation within an Empire at war. Imperial legacies were reinforced, appropriated, and subverted to assert nationalist ideals during Canada’s nation-building process.

Posters initially portrayed the collective self within the Empire. Through the Union Jack, imperial discourse permeated imagery and slogans in French-language posters, reinforcing loyalty to the Crown. In 1915, posters began blending imperialism and French Canadian nationalism as the Union Jack flew alongside the Tricolore. Calling upon cultural ties with France, this imagery reconciled quarrelling motherlands in the name of the Franco-British alliance. By 1916, imperial iconography had gradually disappeared as autonomous nationalism became more prominent. To display the Dominion’s burgeoning identity on the global stage, posters portrayed the war effort as distinctly Canadian through the use of the Maple Leaf. French Canadians were henceforth represented as members of a binational Canadian community—one seeking political autonomy within the Empire.

Posters depict how French Canadian posters negotiated the image of the national self in the Empire’s shadow. This propaganda highlights the fading visual legacy of imperialism. French Canadians were shown as British subjects, allies with France and, ultimately, citizens of the Canadian Dominion.

Econationalism now presents itself as a global phenomenon (Margulies, 2021). As it presupposes the incorporation of ideas and identities developed notably within the “global sphere” (Falkner, 2021) into a national identity, it can be described as a process of “frame bridging” (Conversi and Hau, 2021; Snow et al., 1986), or even “scale bridging.”

The Québécois econationalism that emerged in the 1990s was for a long time primarily championed by certain members of the French-speaking Canadian province’s Francophone cultural and political elites. They saw it as an opportunity for a convergence between identity issues specific to Quebec’s recent history and the environmental concerns discussed on a global scale.

In June 2024, the Canadian federal government, blaming the alleged inaction of the Quebec government regarding the protection of woodland caribou (and pursuing its own Canadian “green-identity-building” enterprise), announced its intention to adopt a decree halting forestry activities in a Quebec region to preserve the ecotype’s habitat. Given the serious economic consequences for the affected region, local resistance quickly formed.

Rather than becoming a site for the rejection of the Québécois elites’ econationalism and the link it establishes between Quebec identity and the environment, ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted in 2024 and 2025 revealed that the citizen mobilization prompted by the federal announcement provided an opportunity for a popular and localized rearticulation of a Québécois econationalism. This local version was rooted in, and more receptive to or comprehensive of, the realities of a remote forestry community–therefore instantiating a more “democratic” identity-building process.

Since the Republic’s inception in 1923, Turkey has been struggling to build a robust democracy. While there have been ups and downs along this journey, the Turkish state’s treatment of its minority citizens has been consistently exclusionary, based on and justified by an ethnoreligious imagining of the nation. This paper explores how minorities talk about the nation by focusing on Armenians born and raised in Turkey, and who now live in Canada. Drawing on in-depth interviews, the paper examines how they compare these two very different landscapes.

Situated inside the everyday nationhood literature, the discussion focuses on how Armenian emigrants to Canada remember and make sense of their encounters in Turkey with Muslim-majority individuals and state institutions, and how these narratives compare to those from the hostland. In comparing these contrasting social and political landscapes in Canada and Turkey, participants’ accounts reveal their conceptualizations of nationhood, belonging, citizenship, and living with difference. The examination highlights how their notions of nationhood constitute a significant challenge to the Turkish state’s imagining of the nation as well as its construction of (nationalist) history around ruptures and discontinuities. The discussion further highlights the significance the participants place on a particular (restrictive) formulation of secularism as the foundation of a civic national landscape situated inside a strong democracy. Overall, their nation talk on Canada and Turkey underscores the complex and often paradoxical ways of drawing the nation’s boundaries.

This article explores how the Kachin ethnic movement constructs autonomy as a political vision through narratives of homeland and national belonging. The Kachin minority in northern Myanmar lacks what is typically understood as territorial autonomy, an institutional arrangement of self-rule granted by the central state. Although autonomy was once promised, it never materialised. Consequently, they began fighting for greater self-determination, first for independence, and since the 1980s for autonomy within a federalised Union of Myanmar. Yet, even without granted self-rule, territory remains central to how autonomy is understood within the Kachin. Assuming that autonomy is a political idea constructed through language, I argue that territorial autonomy has a symbolic and affective meaning tied to aspirations of freedom from military repression and violence. Since the 2021 coup in Myanmar, ethnic minorities have expanded their territorial control through their armed organizations, including the Kachin Independence Organisation. Understanding their political vision of autonomy is crucial to gain a deeper awareness of the conflict in Myanmar. Drawing on published elite interviews, personal life-story narratives, and conducted interviews, I use interpretative content analysis guided by the sensitizing concepts autonomy as a political vision of self-rule and territory as symbolic homeland. Through inductive coding and intertextual reading, I trace the meaning of territorial autonomy by Kachin actors. This article offers context-sensitive insights into minority resistance and bottom-up visions of political self-rule in Myanmar. More broadly, it contributes to debates on self-determination and minority resistance by showing how symbolic homelands shape political meaning-making in conflict settings.

Why does the relationship between minority nationalism and democratic aspirations vary so markedly across the different states inhabited by multi-state nations? This paper addresses this question by examining how Kurdish political actors navigate the competing demands of self-determination, democracy, and security in Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. While much scholarship presumes that minority nationalism naturally complements democratic projects, the Kurdish case shows that this relationship is neither inherent nor stable. Stateless nations operate within multiple, asymmetrical state fields that differently shape the possibilities and limits of nationalist mobilization.
Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic insights combined with comparative-historical analysis, the paper traces systematic divergences between nationalist claims and democratic ideals. In Iraqi Kurdistan, de facto autonomy elevates self-determination over democratic governance. In Turkey, the PKK’s dissolution has pushed Kurdish politics toward civic-democratic frames and away from self-determination ideals. In Syria, prolonged war renders security the overriding priority, sidelining both nationalism and democratic projects. In Iran, Kurds and other minorities view democratization—or regime overthrow—as a more urgent emancipatory horizon than ethnic self-rule.
The paper argues that these trajectories reveal that minority nationalism and democratic ideals do not form a unified or mutually reinforcing political project. Instead, their relationship is contingent, situational, and frequently contradictory, shaped by the coercive environments and institutional structures in which stateless nations are embedded. By theorizing this divergence, the study contributes to broader debates on nationalism, democratic sequencing, and the political sociology of freedom.

This paper investigates the intellectual and political trajectories of Azerbaijani émigré activists in Europe during the interwar period by situating their work within the broader legacies of the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (April–May 1918) and the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (May 1918–April 1920). Drawing on theories of diaspora nationalism and transnational political mobilization, the study centres on Kurtuluş (Liberation), the principal organ of the Azerbaijan National Liberation Movement, published in Berlin from 1934 until the onset of the Second World War.
Taking Kurtuluş as a point of departure, the paper addresses three core questions. First, how did the so-called Caucasus Confederation Council operate in Europe in the mid-1930s, and what forms of coordination, lobbying, and ideological activity defined its work? Second, how did Azerbaijani intellectuals collaborate with émigrés from other regions of the former Russian Empire, and how did these transnational networks circulate political concepts, resources, and strategies? Third, and crucially, did the renewed project of a Caucasus Confederation advance Azerbaijani national aspirations, or did it pose conceptual and political challenges to their vision of sovereignty?
By analysing how these actors articulated freedom and national self-determination in the context of exile, the paper argues that interwar Caucasian émigré thought was shaped by a persistent negotiation between federalist ideals and exclusive national claims. This reassessment contributes to the historiography of diaspora politics, post-imperial transitions, and the intellectual history of national liberation movements.

Over the last decade Christian nationalism has been thrust to the forefront of American politics. The recent re-election of Donald Trump was in no small part a result of cultural and political populism; the President and his surrogates consistently denounced “woke-ism,” secularism, and “the Deep State” while promising to bring America back to its Judeo-Christian roots. An abundance of recent scholarship has also unpacked Christian nationalism as a conservative, theocratic, or fascistic style of politics. However, these analyses have two significant blind spots. First, Christian nationalism is too often discussed as a late-20th century backlash to neoliberalism and global political developments. Second, Christian nationalism is defined narrowly as an American political movement.

The following paper explores how present-day American Christian nationalism is only one – albeit visibly dominant – expression of Christian politics and national identity in North America. This begins by redefining the present brand of American Christian nationalism that’s aligned with “Trumpism” as a New Religious Movement (NRM). By making this analytical shift, we can revive the typology of “Christian nationalism” from its exclusive association with American conservative politics. As an example, this paper offers an assessment of an alternative “Christian nationalism” in North American history – a progressive (perhaps radical) Christian social gospel movement in early 20th century Canada. This case study illustrates that the alignment of Christianity and nationalism does not necessarily beget illiberal politics. On the contrary, a millennialist concern with building the “Christian Kingdom” drove progressive policies in Canada– including a national pension scheme and a single-payer healthcare system.

This empirical study explores why Americans who once sojourned in Ukraine as Peace Corps Volunteers mobilized with such conviction in support of Ukraine’s resistance to Russian imperial aggression. Based on eighteen semi-structured interviews with American supporters of Ukraine, both with and without a sojourn background, the study examines what drives people to sacrifice time, money, energy, and even personal safety for another country’s struggle. Democracy, freedom, and national self-determination are part of the answer; interviewees overwhelmingly see these at stake in both Ukraine and the United States. Yet direct participation in Ukraine’s post-independence nationbuilding cultivated a connectedness among former sojourners that differentiates their motivations from those of other Americans.
Interviews were conducted in early 2025 as new U.S. leadership altered policy toward Ukraine. This shift was noted by all interviewees, but those who had lived and worked in Ukraine additionally described a personal stake in its nationhood. Both groups viewed Ukraine and the United States in intertwined struggles for democracy, and U.S. retreat as a moral injury that threatens the nationhood of both countries. Many spoke of defending Ukraine as inseparable from defending a vision of America anchored in freedom and democracy. Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, in particular, described a lasting sense of belonging forged through shared civic endeavor—teaching in schools, collaborating with local governments, and joining communities defining their national future after empire. These experiences situate RPCVs within a transnational social field that makes Ukraine’s anti-imperial struggle personal.
This study contributes to research on democracy and nationalism by showing how democratic nationalism can emerge through transnational civic experience rather than ancestry, and how anti-imperial solidarity abroad can reinforce democratic commitments at home.

In 1948, during the negotiations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt confidently affirmed that ‘minority questions do not exist on the American continent’. In 1965, Edgar Friedenberg, an American scholar of education studies, claimed that ‘the minority group is a special American institution’. This paper examines the tectonic conceptual shift that the transition from the first to the second quote above represented for American understandings of diversity. Indeed, minority was not a guiding concept in discussions about difference in the United States (and broadly in North America) during the interwar period. Yet it came to dominate them in the 1960s. This shift is even more remarkable if one considers the parallel decline in the salience of the same concept in Europe. Minority questions were ubiquitous in interwar Europe. However, after the Second Word War nobody wanted to hear about minorities or minority rights anymore. Combining Begriffsgeschichte, political history and the quantitative analysis of broad corpora of text, the paper traces the key steps in the process of adaptation of the European interwar understanding of minorities to the US context. It concludes that, between the mid-1930s and the mid-1960s, minority, as a category of practice, underwent a geographic and semantic expansion – although a contested one – that still informs contemporary Western democratic debates. More broadly, studying changing understandings of the term minority in Euro-American conceptual crossings can help us track major shifts in social perceptions of difference.