We are delighted to announce that the four speakers for next year’s conference on nationalism and borders are the amazing lineup of Erin Jenne, Pieter Judson, Michael Mann, and Gordana Uzelac.
Erin Jenne
“The Rise of Sovereigntism in an Age of Crisis”
Abstract
It is useful to think of nationalism and populism as orthogonal technologies used to mark out the height and breadth of competing sovereign imaginaries. Sovereign imaginaries are subjective collectivities that contain logics for organizing and performing a sovereign self. They are articulated by political agents who use symbols and speech from their rhetorical toolkit to “hail” ordinary participants as a means of establishing and maintaining popular support. Each imaginary consists of a particular set of political logics that determine the membership in (and leadership of) each sovereign collective. They also contain instructions for the prescribed modes of policy-making, the appropriate forms of foreign engagement, domestic policy priorities, the legitimate political authorities and legitimate sources of political knowledge. In brief, nationalist leaders invoke a world composed of mutually exclusive territorialized space, rhetoric that is most likely to emerge during periods of state transition or rising regional instability. Populists also traffic in agonistic discourses, invoking images of nefarious, rapacious elites preying on a good and virtuous people.
Such contestation becomes particularly fierce during periods of crisis—when the dominant sovereign imaginary begins to lose its resonance with a sufficiently broad swath of the population. By drawing on and reinforcing these boundaries, political actors make identity claims to bond with their constituents. Sovereigntist projects fall on deaf ears during normal times, when their proponents are more likely be branded as “crazy” and extreme. By contrast, sovereigntism resonates with people more during periods of turbulence (debt defaults, currency crises, war, political crisis, or massive economic downturn). Their articulators seek to reframe the political “self” as one beset by nefarious internal and/or external forces, reinforcing collective perceptions of vulnerability and hence a demand for strong leaders to protect the “self.” The real power of nationalist or populist leaders everywhere thus transcends mere agenda-setting and executive decision-making powers conferred by their office. Instead, it lies in the ways that they “rewrite” the sovereign imaginary in the perceptions of their base, laying the ideological groundwork for a fundamental transformation of domestic and foreign policy.
Biography
Erin Jenne is professor and chair of the International Relations Department at Central European University, and specialises in ethnic conflict, minority politics, nationalism, populism, foreign policy analysis, and qualitative and mixed methods.
Among her many accolades are a MacArthur fellowship at Stanford, a Belfer fellowship at Harvard, and a Braudel fellowship at EUI. Her first book, Ethnic Bargaining: The Paradox of Minority Empowerment (Cornell University Press, 2007), based on her doctoral thesis, won the Mershon Center’s Edgar S. Furniss Book Award. She has published in International Studies Quarterly, Security Studies, Regional and Federal Studies, Comparative European Politics, Studies in Comparative International Development, International Affairs, Europe-Asia Studies, Journal of Peace Research, Civil Wars, International Studies Review, Research and Politics, Journal of Democracy, Research & Politics, PS: Political Science & Politics, Nationalities Papers, Ethnopolitics, and, of course, Nations and Nationalism.
Find out more about Prof. Jenne at her website.
Pieter Judson
“Territorializing the Nation in Habsburg Central Europe: the Birth of a Science of Borders from Below”
Abstract
In the last third of the 19th century, nationalist movements within the Habsburg Empire increasingly asserted their rights to political influence in specific territories. Combining a strange mix of statistical, cultural, historical, and legal arguments, nationalists struggled to normalize the idea that the national communities for which they claimed to speak occupied identifiable territories with clear borders. Nationalists then made it the task of the nation to maintain those borders against other nations. This in an era of increased mobility of peoples within the empire, and at the very moment when Austro-Marxists began to articulate theories of non-territorialized nations.
This nationalist science of border-making was highly situational in the reasoning it used and the alleged facts it cited. Nationalists of all kinds produced statistical claims regarding landscape, people, natural boundaries (rivers, mountains), and cultures, to argue for the recognition of informal borders within the empire. These imagined boundaries remained critical even after the collapse of the empire in 1918, helping to shape subsequent territorial claims made by the successor states against each other.
Biography
Pieter M. Judson is professor at the European University Institute in Florence. From 2014 to 2024, he held the Chair in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century History at the European University Institute. Before that he taught for 21 years at Swarthmore College as Isaac Clothier Professor of History and International Relations.
He holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University (1987). He has authored many articles and several prize-winning books on several aspects of the history of Habsburg Central Europe, as well as The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Harvard-Belknap, 2016), which has been translated into twelve European and Asian languages. For ten years Judson served as editor of the Austrian History Yearbook, and he is currently President of the Central European History Society of North America. He has received fellowships from Guggenheim, Fulbright, the NEH, the American Academy in Berlin, Phi Beta Kappa, and in 2010 he received the Karl von Vogelsang state prize from the Austrian government for Guardians of the Nation. Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Harvard 2006).
Find out more about Prof. Judson at EUI.
Michael Mann
“Explaining the Industrial Revolution”
Abstract
The Industrial Revolution is universally seen as the most fundamental transformation of human societies — in Gellner’s terms from agraria to industria. I will argue here that the revolution was caused by the development and conjunctures of and between four sources of social power – ideological, economic, military and political. Each of these had a certain logic of development which we can theorize, but each also had conjunctural relations with the others and this makes an overall explanation of the revolution difficult — Gellner said it was impossible. The major causes of an industrial revolution are likely to be economic, yet economic changes were necessary but not sufficient causes of the revolution, for they did not offer an escape from the Malthusian trap of agraria. This escape required conjunctures of economic with other forms of power. Colonies won by naval power boosted mercantilist international trade, and wars decided where nationally the breakthrough might occur – first the Netherlands, then Britain. Political power relations provided variable boosts, but not in the forms suggested by Institutionalists. What mattered most in political terms was where states emerged representing the solidarity of the propertied nation. For ideological power I draw especially on Weber and Gellner, for the revolution rested on both Christian and scientific ideologies, and I produce new data on the religious afiliations of the inventors in Britain whose machines made the actual breakthrough to industrial production. I thus present a quadrilateral explanation of the Industrial Revolution.
Biography
Michael Mann is distinguished research professor in sociology at UCLA. He has a BA and D.Phil. from Oxford University, and has been awarded three honorary doctorates (Hon.D.Litts.) from McGill University, Montreal, University College, Dublin, and The University of the Aegean. After graduating from Oxford he worked at Cambridge University, The University of Essex, the London School of Economics, and (from 1987), the University of California at Los Angeles. He was Visiting Research Professor at The Queens University, Belfast, during 2003-2007, and in 2004-2005 he was the Visiting Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University. In 2008 he was awarded an Honorary Professorship at Cambridge. In 2015 he was elected a Fellow of both the American and British Academies.
His major publication project is the four volume The Sources of Social Power. Volume 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to 1760, was published in 1986; Volume 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation-States 1760-1914, was published in 1993; Volume 3, Global Empires and Revolutions 1890-1945, was published in 2012; and the fourth and final volume, Globalizations 1945-2012, came out in 2013. His other works include Fascists (2004) and The Dark Side of Democracy (2005).
Find out more about Prof Mann at UCLA.
G
ordana Uzelac
“National Traitresses: Estrangement and Redefinition of National Moral Boundaries”
Abstract
The foundation for understanding nationalism lies in the distinction between “Us” and “Them.” Since Gellner (1983), nationalism has been conceptualised as an interplay between political borders and cultural/ethnic boundaries. While the national “We/Us” is often defined through genealogy, culture, history, citizenship, or a combination of these factors, the “Other/Them”—the stranger, foreigner, coloniser, or ethnic minority—is often perceived as an enemy or, at best, a threat. National traitors are one of “Us” who are, through the process of estrangement, turned into “Them”. Unlike the traditional stranger (Simmel, [1908] 1950) who has never belonged, the estranged figure is someone who was once integrated within cultural and ethnic boundaries but has since been ousted for breaching national trust and loyalty. The presence of the stranger questions the reliabilities of orthodox orientation points, whereas the process of estrangement dismantles old orientation points, shifts them, and ultimately (re)draws new moral boundaries. In this presentation, the mechanisms of redefinition of national moral boundaries will be examined in the case of nationalism’s estrangement of feminist values and morality. It considers whether the success of nationalism as an ideology can be attributed not only to the flexibility of its discourse but also to its capacity to expel —sometimes brutally—competing ideological systems of value and impose its own moral boundaries as absolute.
Biography
Gordana Uzelac is a Reader in Sociology at London Metropolitan University, where she is the course leader for the BSc in Psychology and Sociology.
Gordana obtained her undergraduate degree at the Department of Sociology, University of Zagreb, Croatia, and her MSc degree in Sociology from the Central European University, Prague, Czechia. In 2002 she obtained her PhD degree in Ethnicity and Nationalism at the London School of Economics, London. Her interests focus on theories of nation and nationalism, nationalism in Croatia and the Balkans, and qualitative and quantitative research methods. She is the author of The Development of the Croatian Nation (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006) and, with Atsuko Ichijo, co-editor of When is the Nation? Towards an Understanding of Theories of Nationalism (Routledge, 2005). With Lea David and Siniša Malešević, she is currently working on Historical Sociology and European Nationalisms (Cambridge University Press, 2026). Gordana is an editor of the journal Nations and Nationalism. Besides her interest in nationalism, in cooperation with the Child and Women Abuse Studies Unit (CWSU, London Metropolitan University) she is contributing to research on rape and violence against women in the UK.