The paper explores the theme of the conference by focusing on what happens when a new curriculum is built ‘around the nation’ in a Welsh multicultural context. Wales is currently undergoing national curriculum reform, framing its latest curriculum ‘around’ and ‘for’ the nation. The new curriculum is said to be “made for Wales, for the people of Wales” (Williams, 2019). Praised for being increasingly relevant and adaptable, this paper interrogates some of the enablers and barriers when a curriculum is positioned in this way, especially in the context of a devolved multicultural nation. Wales has always been and is an increasingly diverse society, it has embraced and embodied, to varying degrees, this fact throughout history. Schools will be able to adapt the curriculum to suit their demographic, which of course gives the potential for schools to reflect their unique multicultural contexts. But, in a nation which sees varying geographical multiculturalism, this paper explores the tensions of positioning a curriculum in this way. On an everyday aspect, we see how the curriculum disseminates, upholds or dismantles knowledge and understanding around the nation. Furthermore, the paper connects these ideas with affective nationalism and belonging in a society. Post-structural and Foucauldian lenses of power and knowledge are used to explore the issue, questioning the sometimes ‘obvious’ nature that the new curriculum is to be organised around the nation. This paper uses work from discourse analysis and developing case studies to explore the topic contributing to the fast-growing research around the new Welsh curriculum.

University administrations and the state itself have made internationalization in Norwegian academia a priority since the early 2000s. This has been marked by a greater number of international hires within the university sector, but a decrease in the number of international students. Internationalization in Norway has been uneven in its advance and has been accompanied by much confusion as to what it entails. Not independent from societal debates about immigration, there has been a growing backlash against internationalization in recent years. This backlash is punctuated by periods of intense debate within academia and government resulting in institutional changes to curb international hiring and legislative changes to further limit international students.
This paper takes the internationalization debate in Norway as its focus, specifically the use of national framing among critics of internationalization. Using discourse historic approach, this paper focuses on the practical functions of national framing in the debate as well as the historical and bureaucratic contexts in Norway that shape meaning. This paper analyzes six of the most common functions of this national framing: national branding, prioritizing Norwegian language, economic protectionism within the academic marketplace, nationalizing authority on fields of knowledge, freezing individuals in time at the moment of their migration, and constructing cultures of academic and workplace difference. The functions of national framing in this debate in some cases mirror framing in broader debates about immigration and integration, yet there are several unique divergences as well.

Indonesia is one of the large multicultural countries in the world with no less than 1,340 ethnic groups. Because of this, various problems of multiculturalism occur, including problems that involving the young generation (generations Y and Z) that tends to increase due to the massive use of information technology. They also become the main targets of intolerant groups, because of their limited knowledge of the Indonesian struggle history. This paper tries to expose how Indonesian government (in this case the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology or Kemendikbudristek) overcomes this problem. Through document study, Kemendikbudristek started by equating perceptions about causes of development of attitudes of intolerance in the educational environment, so it can be understood as a serious problem by all parties, namely that intolerance is one of the three major sins in the field of education in Indonesia. The effort to improve is through the realization of the Pancasila Student Profile, one of which is to develop an attitude of global diversity (there are three key elements of global diversity: recognizing and appreciating culture, intercultural communication skills in interacting with others, and reflection on and responsibility for the experience of diversity). To strengthen this, in 2021 Kemendikbudristek also collaborate with the Ministry of Religion Affairs to develop learning materials on religious moderation to improve the existing curriculum.

When discussing the process of migrant children becoming part of society, we follow conceptualizations that go beyond the normative integration paradigm and consider the multidimensionality of the process and the diversity of migrants (Grzymala-Kazlowska and Phillimore, 2017; Schinkel, 2018), understanding it as a complex, multidimensional, and long-term process. However, this process is understood differently at different levels of society. On one hand, integration is on the policy level usually defined as a two-way process, involving migrants and the country of immigration, whereas researchers and experts are already pointing to the multidimensional character of the integration process. On the other hand, media and (populist) political discourses as well as everyday practice is using the term integration as synonymous to assimilation. Besides, the responsibility, the burden of being and becoming a member of society, is, following the governmentality and self-responsibility, transferred onto migrants themselves.

What is the approach in Slovenian schools? How do school workers understand and implement integration? On whom lies the responsibility of integration? The paper will present the results of the case studies in six Slovenian schools on different perceptions and approaches to integrating migrant children in the school environment, stemming from interviews with 54 school workers and 90 students obtained in the project “MiCREATE – Migrant Children and Communities in a Transforming Europe” (May 2019–October 2021) and from interviews with 30 school workers and 30 students obtained in the ongoing project “The child-centred approach to the integration of migrant children: the role of school in integration with regard to the parents’ aspect” (October 2022–ongoing).

Grzymala-Kazlowska, A. & J. Phillimore (2017): Introduction: Rethinking Integration. New Perspectives on Adaptation and Settlement in the Era of Super-diversity. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44, 2, 179–196.

Schinkel, W. (2018): Against Immigrant Integration: for an End to Neocolonial Knowledge Production. Comparative Migration Studies, 6, 1, 1–17

The (perceived) cultural homogeneity implied in the notion of the congruence of political and the national unit (Gellner, 1983) has been undermined by migration in recent decades. The relationship between migration and the nation-state is marked by tension in the nation-building processes, especially when migrants are perceived as foreigners lacking loyalty towards the state and ethnic diversity of the state’s population is seen as requiring governance in order to ensure social cohesion and optimal functioning of the state. Although migrant integration is often framed within the discourse of human rights and equality across different societal domains, the paper will discuss migrant integration (policy) as a nationalising practise that aims to homogenise multicultural societies by favouring and privileging the national language and culture. It will argue that contemporary integration practices aim to establish links between migrants, local communities and nation-state so that migrants develop a sense of belonging and loyalty, leading to a stable expectation of their behaviour and a degree of trust. It will show that migrant integration is about migrant identities and lifestyles, which are related to nationalism, especially when it comes to states of and for particular nations. Finally, the implications of such policies for multiculturalism will be discussed. Allusion will be made to Wallerstein (1997), who believes that the very concept of integration involves the assumption that there is a cultural norm into which migrants must be integrated, and that this norm is in some way superior to the (migrant) group that has to integrate.

The movement of people from developing to developed countries has been increasing compared to the 20th century. People migrate with their nationalities and ethnic identities; however, interaction and communication with other cultures cause them to adapt to the new culture. Values, attitudes, social interaction, spoken language and media consumption change due to acculturation and assimilation.
Language is the formation of national and ethnic identity. At the same time, second language acquisition, usage and proficiency usually show the acculturation level and assimilation in the host country. Being bilingual and dual/multiple identifications are the result of acculturation and contributes to the assimilation processes of immigrants.
Utilizing an online quantitative survey and 20 semi-structured interviews with three generations of Turkish Cypriot immigrants living in the UK, the aim of this research is to explore the ethnic identity and assimilation of Turkish Cypriots through language. How do three generations of Turkish Cypriot immigrants define their ethnic and cultural identity? Based on their language use, what are the levels of acculturation for three generations? The findings indicate some communalities as well as non-dynamic nature of the ethnic identity, particularly for the second and third generations. The first generation mentioned that their nationality and ethnic identity is Turkish Cypriot and their mother tongue is Turkish. Most of the second generation stated that their mother tongue was Turkish until they started school, but how they define their ethnic identity varied, while for the third generation’s being “British” was clearer.

The concept of “integration” occupies a prominent position in refugee policy across Europe, despite being a blurry and inconsistent, if not harmful, approach. The term is generally mobilized in neutral-sounding legal language, making it difficult to question (Shore & Wright 1997). Other concepts are deployed alongside integration; in Austria, the equally blurry concept of “fundamental values” is frequently mentioned, and serve to essentialize and idealize national identity. They emphasize the duty of incoming refugees to abandon any past identity and replace it with these “non-negotiable” values, thereby fitting in (or becoming invisible) with an idealized version of Austrian society as a step towards “social cohesion.”

The integrationist approach is frequently described as being the antidote to the past failures of multiculturalism. According to this narrative, the multiculturalism approach led to so-called “parallel societies” and supposedly “ghettoized” certain neighborhoods. This legitimizes tacking on further integration initiatives and requirements for refugees in Austria, such as tripling the duration of the mandated “values and orientation courses” in 2022.

Using ethnographic and qualitative examples from my MA and PhD research in Austria, this paper delves into the origins of the term “integration” and traces its emergence from the wreckage of multiculturalism as well as the Defizitdebatte (deficit debate) in Germany and Austria. This paper ultimately makes the case that the integration approach tends to play into nationalistic tendencies by overemphasizing an idealized homogeneity of the country’s national identity and, as a result, (re)produces refugees’ position as non-belonging outsiders.

Romanian elites reconstruct their political community following a utilitarian framework that includes immigrants as labour force. However, in doing so, they articulate a dominant discourse and institutional order that reproduces existing ethno-racial hierarchies, especially affecting minorities such as Transylvanian Hungarians and the Roma, and creates new ones to make sense of the foreign newcomers, with sometimes pernicious material consequences in their lives and experiences. In this paper, we revisit what has often been described as the 2020 Ditr?u/Ditró xenophobic and racist incident, in which two Sri Lankan bakers were expelled under the argument that their presence reduced the value of labour and threatened the culture and safety of the community, a situation epitomised as “black hands” kneading local “white bread.” This paper shows how the new Romanian political community is being envisioned in the hands of the national elites in their contestation with local actors, and responds to three research questions: 1) How is migration being treated in a context increasingly influenced by the perception that Romania might become a destination country for economic immigration, especially from the Global South? 2) What is the dominant perception of class and of the modes of boundary making (based both on economic utility, and ethnic and cultural differences) at the national (Romania) and the local (Ditr?u/Ditró) levels, comparatively? 3) What is the position of existing minorities such as Hungarians and Roma in the new political community in their intersection with the new waves of immigration?

Set against intensified ethno-nationalism, harsh border regimes, institutionalized racism and anti-immigration policies in Hungary aimed to protect the ‘white nation’ and prevent becoming “peoples of mixed-race” (Orbán 2022), the paper explores the everyday affects of being political (Closs-Stephens 2022). It examines the coalesce of state induced and personal/collective national affects, moods, sentiments and atmospheres around two consequent migration influx to Hungary, in 2015 and 2022 respectively and their impact on national identity understood as an affective force. Based on interviews with migrant rights experts, members of oppositional parties and volunteers and ethnographic observations at state- and civil society-operated migrant transit zones and shelters in Budapest, the argument is put forward that the cruel optimism of fighting for justice for migrants and refugees (Meer 2022) not only persists but constantly emanates despite knowledge of anticipated failure.

References

Closs-Stephens, A. (2022). National Affects. The Everyday Atmospheres of Being Political. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Meer, N. (2022). The Cruel Optimism of Racial Justice. Bristol: Policy Press.

Orbán, V. (2022). Speech by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at the 31st Bálványos Summer Free University and Student Camp. Available online:
https://miniszterelnok.hu/speech-by-prime-minister-viktor-orban-at-the-31st-balvanyos-summer-free-university-and-student-camp/

This article examines how the influx of African migrants, which has been fingered as partly the cause of xenophobic violence in South Africa, impugns multiculturalism. It hypothesizes that the absence of a concrete structure of integration, which perpetuates discrimination, not only provokes xenophobic violence but also hampers the mix of different cultures of African migrants in South Africa. As the majority of immigrants from other African countries coming to South Africa face xenophobic attacks from their fellow black South Africans, these immigrants are criminalized. This invariably destroys any meaningful possibility of fostering a healthy dialogue between people of different cultural backgrounds. Consequently, it has implications for a genuine multicultural society. This article contends that the continual xenophobic attacks on African immigrants in South Africa kill multiculturalism. South Africa would have been highly transformed if it had maintained a friendly migration policy, which, in the long run, could see the “other African migrants” as an active person who is ready to experience a process of mutual transformation through dialogue and respect for cultural difference. Indeed, many extant studies that have investigated migration and xenophobic violence in South Africa have largely focused on how the economy, national security, and peaceful coexistence have been adversely affected. Evidence is scarce on how stringent migration rules and xenophobic violence kill multiculturalism in South Africa. Drawing on a secondary qualitative research design, this article expands discussion on how xenophobic violence undermines multiculturalism in South Africa. It suggests means through which South Africa can optimize her migration policy in ways that could aid strategic efforts at promoting multiculturalism.

In the proposed presentation, I will discuss the patterns of practicing various visions of national identity in the face of the migration crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border in 2021-2022. This event electrified public opinion and caused the polarization of approaches proposing how to interpret the situation and what we as a nation should do. On the one hand, various groups and civil society organizations became actively involved in helping migrants at the border. On the other hand, a significant number of people supported the actions of border services by applying a policy of pushback.

In the presentation, I will use empirical material collected during ethnography of demonstrations expressing solidarity for the Polish army and demonstrations of solidarity with people imprisoned on the border. The focus of the presentation will be an analysis of the clothing elements, personal items, banners used by the participants to analyse what patterns of practicing national identity are reproduced by demonstrators in the face of a crisis that has been interpreted differently, as a humanitarian, political crisis, but also as a threat to the Polish national unity in the face of others who want to cross “our” borders.

The discourse around the described crisis was full of tensions around different and even contradictory ways of constructing the nation. In the presentation, I put forward the thesis that the described polarization could have been caused by contact with imaginary diversity, in the face of almost no close experience of living in a multicultural society.

Zionism notably occurred across three multinational empires: the “practical” and “political” branches emerging in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires respectively, and aiming to found a “publicly and legally assured home” in the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, this wording studiously avoids mention of nation-states. Diplomatic attempts by the movement’s founder, Theodor Herzl, within the Ottoman Empire also strategically abandoned statehood as an explicit goal. Moreover, Zionism consciously attempted to unite a culturally and geographically diverse population under one umbrella, and in reaction to both inter-communal violence and the failure of attempts to assimilate into homogenised national identities. Zionism can therefore be understood as an interaction of overlapping and conflicting approaches to multiculturalism as much as as a national movement.

This paper focuses on Austro-German political Zionists before the 1917 Balfour Declaration, among others Max Nordau, Moses Hess and especially Herzl. It firstly examines their perceptions of the Jewish position and supposed character in Diaspora and as minorities within the nation-state framework, including their understandings of antisemitism. Secondly, it explores how Zionists saw other countries, particularly using them as models to envisage future, culturally hybrid polities. Finally, it looks at how Zionists perceived and hoped to construct bonds between peoples and spaces, including proposed alternatives to Palestine, and I offer in particular an understanding of national identities, both within and between states, as constituted through perfomative demands. I conclude by asking if we can, at least partially, understand nationalism via performance, and international community as analogous to internal communal politics within multinational empires..

This paper focuses on Austro-German political Zionists before the Balfour Declaration of 1917, among others Max Nordau, Moses Hess and especially Herzl. It firstly examines understandings of the Jewish position and supposed character in Diaspora and as minorities within the nation-state framework, including their understandings of antisemitism. Secondly, it explores how Zionists saw other countries, particularly using them as models for imagined future, culturally-hybrid polities. Finally, it looks at how Zionists perceived and hoped to construct bonds between peoples and spaces, including proposed alternatives to Palestine, and I offer in particular an understanding of national identities, both within and between states, as constituted through perfomative demands. I conclude by asking if we can, at least partially, understand nationalism via performance, and compare the international community to the internal communal politics of multinational empires.

Extant critical scholarship on nations and nationalism distances itself from liberal theories of the nation that view it as functioning on affects of belonging to theorize the way nations continuously generate figures of exclusion against which they can be rendered relevant. However, whilst the majority of this scholarship theorizes nationalism as ‘the making present of the iconic ethnic absence’ (Valluvan, The Clamour of Nationalism), I want to suggest that “race” needs to be handled differently particularly in postcolonial nations that have adopted the banner of multiculturalism. Through a close reading of archival records, political biographies, and laws, I examine how, instead of “race”, heteronormativity functions as the defining force that propels nationalism in postcolonial independent Singapore. I am not suggesting ignoring the problematic of “race” in the constitution of the nation nor that heteronormativity is to be substituted for racism. Instead, I adopt a theoretical understanding of heteronormativity as not operating purely along the axis of sexuality but multiplying across axes of race, gender, class, and more. I argue that in Singapore, where multiculturalism is made a constitutive political rationality, heteronormativity and the governance of relations of desire offer alternative modalities for nationalism’s expression.

Turkey, like many other countries, has seen a surge in populism since the turn of the millennium, which has eroded diversity and boosted nationalism in all parts of the Turkish governmental body, including the judiciary. In addition to the rise in populism, this study will contend that the prospect for multiculturalism in Turkey has been disrupted by the Turkish nationalistic attitudes that have formed during the historical process from the foundation of the Turkish Republic and affected governing body. By concentrating on the contemporary situation and its historical background, the research will focus on the Turkish judicial system to assess its nationalistic characteristics and acceptance of diversity. The role of the courts in reproducing Turkish nationalism and discrimination against non-Turkic, non-Muslim identities will be examined by concentrating on the hermeneutical examination of Turkish constitutional law doctrine produced by Turkish authors from the foundation of the republic in 1923 to the present, and by using a collection of a statistical data concerning the current structure of the judicial system. Additionally, 26 in-depth interviews conducted with judges during my master’s thesis on the Turkish judicial system will be utilised. By combining my studies on nationalism and judicial law, I will attempt to investigate the chance of multiculturalism in Turkey both now and in the near future, paying attention to both the present situation and the historical processes that influenced the discrimination in Turkey.

In the last decade the scholarly interest in Europe’s radical left parties has been relatively on the rise, leading the literature on the European radical Left to consolidate. Yet, there is an important area of research that remains mostly omitted in the existing scholarship, namely how the radical Left engages with national belonging and pride. Despite being largely overlooked in academia, this is a relevant aspect when studying radical left parties’ identity and concrete politics, because it intersects with their ideological positioning and their strategic reflections. It is an academic shortcoming that this paper tackles by focusing on the patriotic discourse of the Portuguese Communist Party, a radical left party that was founded in 1921 and is still present in the Portuguese national parliament. Although there is scholarly consensus that national pride is far from being a common trait of the European radical Left, there are some actors of this party family that do lay claim to patriotism. Among them, Portugal’s Communist Party stands out for being a relevant parliamentary force that has historically displayed a clear-cut patriotic discourse, as their long-standing party slogan “for a patriotic and leftist politics” already evocatively indicates. But how exactly does the party articulate patriotism? What are the meanings that Portuguese pride assumes in its radical left discourse? Through a thorough qualitative discourse-theoretical analysis on leaders’ speeches and party’s official communications, this paper presents and discusses the patriotic discourse of the party, focusing on its meanings and relevance.

This research focuses on militarised childhood within the context of the Cyprus problem and analyses how Turkish (Cypriot) nationalism renders militarised childhood to defend the homeland during the conflict. To understand how childhood is moulded to embrace militarism, this research provides a discourse-theoretical analysis of the media exclusively targeting children with a sample of a Turkish Cypriot children’s magazine, Çocuk Dergisi, published by the Cyprus Turkish Board of Education between 1955-1961.

In the twentieth century, Cyprus captured international headlines with the armed conflicts shaped by two ethnic-nationalist movements of Greek and Turkish Cypriots. These movements materialised in two paramilitary organisations in the 1950s. Afterwards, the inter-/intra-communal conflicts profoundly influenced the lives of people in Cyprus. Children’s magazines of this period reflect the intense violence, the nationalist and militarist discourses that exacerbated the conflicts, and the ways in which militarism intersects with childhood.

This research mainly relies on Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory (DT) which approaches the concept of discourse using a macro-textual/contextual position (Carpentier, 2017) that sees discourse as a framework of intelligibility that provides meaning to social phenomena. Accordingly, this study approaches militarism as a discourse, or in Enloe’s (2004) words, “a package of ideas” (p. 219).

This research analyses children’s magazines published during the times when the armed conflicts, supported by ethno-nationalist movements, gradually escalated and left their mark on the social body, with war becoming internal to society. For the analysis, this research employs an analytical variant of DT, the discourse-theoretical analysis (DTA), and multimodal analysis techniques.

Drawing on digital nationalism (Mihelj & Jiménez-Martínez, 2021), commercial nationalism (Volcic & Andrejevic, 2016), diaspora and transnationalism (Faist & Bauböck, 2010) we propose a discussion on the emergence of a nationalist discourse in Romanian music, especially in manele, a Balkan music genre. Each year more Romanian music producers exploit a growing market, launching songs that explicitly address the homeland nostalgia of Romanian migrants, the difficulties of living away from loved ones and amongst “foreigners”, highlighting in particular the emotional ties. We argue the latest manea titled “Mare e lumea. Romania mea” [The world is big. My Romania] launched on YouTube just before the National Day of Romania in December 2021, goes beyond the established formats and allows us to problematize several phenomena. We are analysing this on multiple levels distinguishing between the sociologic context, the discourse of the song that instrumentalizes national values, the diaspora thus constructed, as well as the transformation of a Balkan genre into a nationalist song, but recontextualized to reach a diasporic global and transnational public. We also show how the government discourse in nation branding campaigns is appropriated in this song: not only does the song not distance itself from the nationalist discourse of the government, but it reinforces it, reproducing and reimagining the nation along the same symbols and key words. Diaspora is, at the same time, an actor given a voice to reconstruct an idyllic past and homeland and a target of critique formulated collectively by “the ones who remained”

The emergence of the far-right in Spain has taken by surprise many analysts who considered the country as an exception to a seemingly ever-growing European trend. The last few years have witnessed the proliferation of literature concerning the party’s supply and demand dynamics, leadership, voting patterns and turnout, and policy priorities.

But despite the growing academic attention on those aspects, Vox’s discourse concerning multiculturalism seems to either be ignored or unwittingly associated with the stances of other European far-right parties. And yet there seems to be something specific about Vox’s stance towards multiculturalism (understood as the respect and subsequent preservation of cultural differences within a polity, in this case a nation-state) which in its turn mirrors a specificity about Spain’s ambiguities regarding such form of integration. Indeed, it is possible to identify differences concerning the party’s attitude towards Romanies, Latin-Americans and Muslims who live in the country. Through a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) methodology and by exploring Vox’s party literature and the declarations of its most prominent members concerning those three minorities from 2014 to 2021, this conference seeks to show how the Spanish far-right simultaneously incentivizes ethnic pluralism (even though within the frame of a homogeneous form of nationalism) for Romanies and Latin-Americans and assimilation for Muslims and other immigrants from Muslim-majority countries.

Why do Igbo nationalists subscribe to the view that Igbos are one of the Lost Tribes of Israel and thus descend from Jewish people despite evidence against such genealogical and cultural ties? This problematic is largely underexplored in the copious literature on ethnonationalist agitations in Nigeria. Drawing on ontological security theory, I contend that Igbo nationalists employ the analogy of Jewishness to posit the Igbo as a unique ethnoreligious and ethnoracial group whose identity is under existential threat in postcolonial Nigeria and to draw global attention to their separatist cause. Further, I argue that although belief in the similarities between Jews and Igbos predates postcolonial Igbo nationalism – there are scores of racialist writings advanced by European colonizers in precolonial times to undermine African cultures (the so-called Hamitic hypothesis) – it was particularly invoked by Igbo nationalists during the gory Nigerian Civil War
(1967–1970), a defining moment in the social construction of Igbo identity. Igbo nationalists appropriated the Jewish experience of persecution in Central and Eastern Europe to make their case for the ontological security of Igbos. Whilst this political strategy was partially successful, it did not halt the Nigerian state from extirpating Biafra. Despite the reincorporation of Biafran territory into Nigeria, Igbo nationalists still see themselves as
Jews and Jewishness has mutated into something of a pristine Igbo identity in postcolonial Nigeria

The departing point of this study is to understand the implications of ‘nation-building’ as a Western initiative in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (2004–2021) particularly in terms of the local conceptualisation of nation or millat. Based on this larger question, the goal of this study is to reveal the idea of nation as presented in the discourse of education constructed by the state of Afghanistan. To this end, the study employs three major primary resources: official state documents, school textbooks and expert interviews conducted at the Ministry of Education in Afghanistan. Pursuing a qualitative research methodology, the study uncovers four major elements that make up the idea of the ‘nation of Afghanistan’ or the millat-e Afghanistan: (1) Islam, (2) watan (homeland), (3) qawm and (4) Afghaniyat (Afghanness). Reflecting a very specific understanding of nation that is peculiar to the context of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, this study concludes that the Western-imposed form of nation has a local content which struggles hard to keep the idea of nation together.

(This article was published in Volume 28 of Nations and Nationalism journal and received the Dominique Jacquin-Berdal Essay Prize in 2022.)
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/nana.12842

Authors: Maria Kanal (Jagiellonian University, Cracow), Funda San, Ph.D. (Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul)

The aim of the presented paper is to analyze the identity shift occurring in three generations of the Alawi minority of Hatay, the southern province of Turkey, formerly belonging to Syria. As social identity is constructed through our engagement with others in places and spaces, meaningful relationships with previous generations constitute a crucial part of this process. However, without the most important mean for intergenerational communication, the shared language, the possibility of transfer of social identity is lost. Unlike Syrian and Lebanese Alawites, the Alawi community which continued to live in Hatay after its incorporation into the Turkish Republic was subjected to an intensive Turkification. This process was strengthened by the values inherent to the Alawi culture like precautionary dissimulation of religious belonging (taqiyya) and secretiveness of the group, resulting in abandoning the usage of the Arabic language in younger generations. This linguistic disconnectedness led in turn to restricting the new generation’s access to the religious and cultural
resources of the community and the observed change in perceiving the core of Alawi identity shifting it towards political standpoints (eg. supporting secularism, republican values and Kemalism as a new way of expressing the historical fear of Sunni domination). Methodology: Our study is based on a series of semi-structured interviews with Alawites of Hatay conducted in 2019 and 2020. The sample contained participants coming from three different generations.

Late nineteenth-century producers of culture faced a staggering dilemma in establishing a solidary nation. The two regions that had fought each other in a horrifically destructive Civil War were still stridently at odds. Peace on the battlefield had not led to a laying down of cultural arms. Magazine editors in particular, such as Richard Gilder at the Century and Henry Alden at Harper’s, saw a possibility that, at first blush, was counterintuitive. Rather than uniting North and South into a single cultural body, they chose to model American national identity on the same representative structure of the country’s political bodies. Instead of insisting on a centralized American culture, they fostered through their nationally circulating magazines a set of multiple regional cultures, each with its particular dialect, folk characters, and unique social arrangements. This presentation argues that this cultural project of e pluribus unum—mirroring the nation’s political motto: out of many, one—lay the groundwork for the twentieth-century American project of multiculturalism. It demonstrates that the producers of culture who developed the model of the US as a nation of regions were later instrumental in working with immigrant authors, artists, entertainers, and social activists—such as Emma Lazarus, Jacob Riis, and Wong Chin Foo—to incorporate immigrant peoples into the American national body. The presentation concludes by noting how this project was essential to the socially and politically disastrous twentieth-century American creation of two divisive racial taxonomies—one based on color, the other based on ethnicity.

Ever since its accession to the European Union in 2007, Romania was considered to be an exceptional case among Member States given the unwavering high levels of support for the EU. So favourable was public opinion about the European Union that Romanians came to be considered Euroenthusiasts ‘by definition’. However, the most recent parliamentary elections saw the emergence of AUR (Alliance for the Unity of Romanians), a far right populist party that positions itself against the European Union, denouncing multiculturalism as nothing but a “neo-Marxist plague”. Its shocking, uncommon discourse for Romanian politics propelled AUR from an obscure party to the fourth largest political force in the country.
The current paper examines the degree to which AUR’s appeals against multiculturalism influenced Eurosceptic attitudes in Romania. In doing so, the present research pursues two distinct, but complementary goals. The first is to perform a content analysis of narratives disseminated by AUR in the media, highlighting frames related to multiculturalism. The second goal is then, using unique data collected through an online interactive survey, to test which of the narratives that refer to multiculturalism mattered the most in shaping Eurosceptic attitudes in Romania. Results include, among others, perceptions over Ukrainian refugees, LGBTQ+ rights, and EU enlargement. The study seeks to develop a nuanced understanding on how much the issue of multiculturalism actually mattered in the change of heart vis-a-vis the European Union that characterised a significant part of the Romanian electorate.

Western scholars have exaggerated Ukraine’s regional divides and mistakenly used the term diaspora to apply to Russian speakers outside the Russian Federation. The 2014 crisis in Ukraine was never a ‘civil war’ between Russian and Ukrainian speakers but a war between civic Ukrainian and trans-national Eurasian identities (drawing on Soviet, Tsarist, Russophile, and linguistic-cultural factors). During the 2014 crisis, the overwhelming majority of Russian speakers in Ukraine remained loyal to Kyiv and only a minority, backed by Russian military intervention, supported trans-national Eurasian identities.
The identities of Russia and the USSR were integrated and most Russians viewed the Soviet Union, not the Russian SFSR, as ‘Russia.’ Since 1991, a civic understanding of Russian identity has been unpopular because Russians continue to view ‘Russia’ as bigger than the Russian Federation and encompassing the former USSR, Tsarist Empire, Eurasia, CIS, and the Russian World. Russia’s trans-national Eurasian identities are coupled with primordial views of history and language that lay claim to Russian speakers outside the Russian Federation, coupled with an innate inability to comprehend Russian-speaking Ukrainian patriotism.
The paper will show how these factors explain why Russia invaded ‘Little Russia’ (Ukraine) populated by ‘Russians’ (Russian-speakers), a view conflating eastern Slavs with a mythical pan-Russian nation. Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians were born together a millennium ago and, denying non-Russians agency, their providence is to always remain united with Russia. The paper will also show how the 2014 crisis and 2022 invasion has resulted in the opposite of that intended; instead of unification of a mythical pan-Russian nation there has been an irredeemable braking of ties between Ukraine’s Russian-speakers and Russia.

Many Western political science and security studies scholars have been pondering the sensibility and true purpose of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. However, this aggression was foreshadowed by two essential documents published in 2021: the new National Security Strategy of Russia (for the first time, Ukraine and Belarus were not mentioned) and Vladimir Putin’s programmatic article ‘On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians.’ In both documents, the return of the Russian power elite to Russian nationalism was evident. For this nationalism, the fundamental ideological assumption is the idea that there is only one Rus’ nation in the Rus’ lands, whose centre of identity is the Russian language and culture. A consequence of this nationalism is the denial of the independent existence of the other Rus’ peoples, that is, Ukrainian and Belarusian, and the rejection of the possibility of their political independence.
The paper aims to analyse the distinctive elements of Russian nationalism contained in Russian documents announcing the Russian-Ukrainian war and in statements made by Vladimir Putin and other representatives of the Russian Federation authorities after the outbreak of the war. This analysis leads to the question of why, from the ideological and historiosophical point of view that is so important to Putin, the recognition of the national identity and political sovereignty of Ukraine (and, by extension, Belarus) is unacceptable. In this context, it is also possible to point out the main elements that make up the Russian national identity in the Kremlin’s current ideology.

Thirty years after independence, contemporary Lithuania (and the region overall) has started to show increasing tensions between the nationalist project pursued by the political elites and memories held by the public. While state-led memory initiatives have focused on commemorating national suffering and resistance against the Soviet regime, other forms of public memory were more ambiguous, playful and ironic. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has changed these dynamics yet again, evoking past memories of Russian/Soviet past violence and strengthening national sentiments among Lithuanians.

By conceptualising media as a tool of remembering, this project investigates national memory formation and mobilisation amid the Russian invasion in Ukraine. Empirically, this study focuses on the memory content produced by the Lithuanian public broadcaster LRT, which is particularly important in memory construction in Lithuania. I focus on the special film collection of “Freedom Films”, created as a direct response to the invasion in Ukraine. It holds 27 films on the interwar period, occupation, or independence with one key theme – freedom. The collection films were partially or fully funded by the government. Thus, to understand representations of the past at the official level, a narrative analysis of the film collection produced by the Lithuanian public broadcaster will be presented.

By focusing on the intersection of memory and media – the presentation will aim to show that films based on collective memory are powerful, although also somewhat predictable, tools for national memory transmission. It will investigate and challenge symbols employed and will systemise commonalities and differences between them. It will ask the question whether nationalism in Lithuania will be strengthened in the context of war or will the cooperation and multiculturalism in relation to Ukraine and the West will dominate the narrative provided by the film collection. It will also investigate the functionality of nationalism in these settings and will argue that these films used as a protectionist tool against the Russian threat.

Exploiting the increased prominence of migration-related debates, right-wing political elites frame migrants as threat for national societies (Schmidt-Catran and Czymara 2022; Lubbers and Coenders 2017). As especially ethnically charged exclusionary conceptions of nationhood are found to be associated with anti-migrant sentiments and, hence, far-right voting, national identity supposedly builds the breeding ground for vote gains of these parties. Paradoxically, national identities tend to be latent and stable, while far-right voting is far more volatile. Previous studies, thus, suspected political elites’ messaging to activate national identities for vote choices (Garand et al. 2020; Thompson 2021; Bonikowski et al. 2021; Schulte-Cloos 2022). However, the presence of migration-related news in mass media alone may serve as a situational trigger to think about the national in-group and thus increases the relevance of national identities for voting decisions. This work tests this relationship: It investigates whether national identity can be activated for political behavior through migration-related issue salience in mass media. In doing so, I use panel data for the first time to test this activation hypothesis.
Linking individual-level panel data from the Short-term Campaign Panel of the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES 2019) with a media salience measure of migration-related news based on news articles, I investigate the role of migration-related issue salience in public discourses on the relationship of national identity and vote intentions. Preliminary results indicate an activation effect, especially for individuals with exclusionary conceptions of nationhood to be drawn to far-right parties in times of increased media salience of migration-related news.

This presentation is concerned with the cultural significance of high-profile international sport mega-events to audiences (re)production, embodiment, and creation of ‘Englishness’. It presents a doctoral research project that examined the everyday practices and spaces in which the boundaries of an imagined national community are enacted. It begins with a postcolonial reading of Englishness that considers the interplay of imperialism, nationhood, and sport viewership. This serves as the entry point for discussing a methodological approach that produced broader consideration about the sensory experience of participant households/families watching international sport mega-events. Incorporating ‘goggle-box’ style recording sessions, artefacts, participant dialogue, and observational field notes, this presentation will present a picture of mundane experience in which the inequities brought about by imperialism continue to be enacted all around us. The result was a more complete account of experience that focuses attention on the network of imperial interdependencies in which participants found themselves, instead of merely criminalising their individual action. Particularly evident in the analysis of data was the affective life of imperialism, English exceptionalism, and the motivated ignorance of consumption. It is argued that participants, unconsciously or otherwise, were both maintaining and (re)production social hierarchies of belonging based on arbitrary characteristics of an imperially defined principal identity – White, Christian, and Male. This research then, joins the growing call on individuals to not just practice indifference, but recognise our collective responsibility in actively dismantling contemporary conditions of belongingness.

Modern political science theories recognise the important role of media in the national identity construction, however, without elaboration. To address this gap in literature, this case study will combine qualitative and quantitative methods (content analysis, cognitive mapping) to analyse Croatia’s entering the eurozone as a case of a mediatized national identity construction.

The digital era has transformed the way in which the contemporary field of national identity construction unwinds. The range of actors has expanded, citizens have gained new symbolic capital by using digital media while new cognitive schemes are being mediatized. Based on Bourdieu’s field theory (1991), the study will first establish the modern context of national identity construction by identifying relevant groups of actors, their media capital and nature of interactions in times of Croatia introducing the euro (July-December 2022).

Secondly, the study will deploy an analytical matrix of national identity based on three levels of national identity negotiation derived from modern theories of nationalism, particularly Anderson’s imagined communities (2006) and Billig’s everyday nationalism (1995). Using Ingelhart’s and Welzel’s (2005) classification of values and cognitive mapping each of the levels will be assigned national categories and value distribution.

Based on the aforementioned insights, the study will finally look into the role of media in national identity construction as actors that today represent one of the main channels of human experience as well as primary channels of social communication. It will also identify whether they encourage the development of civic or ethnic components of national identity.

Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: New Left Books.
Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. London: Sage.
Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and Symbolic Power. Oxford: Polity Press.
Inglehart, R., & Welzel, C. (2005). Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Using a combination of topic modeling, social network analysis, and critical discourse analysis, this study discusses the tensions between Japanese identity and multiculturalism, particularly at their intersection with gender. I focus on the long-standing legislative debate over “selective separate surnames” [sentakuteki fȗfu bessei] that has highlighted a clear ideological divide between those who support the bill and those against it. If the bill passes the National Diet, it will allow married couples (in most cases, wives) to choose not to give up their own family names. The backlash against the bill has reproduced the rhetoric that revising the marriage system will “destroy” Japanese traditions, specifically family bonds unique to Japan and its citizens. An empirical analysis of tweets surrounding the issue suggests that xenophobic sentiments could motivate certain users—from conservative lawmakers to everyday people—to denounce those who promote the bill for being “un-Japanese” or “unpatriotic.” In this seemingly simple legislative debate on granting more options for married couples, we can see the reproduction and reinforcement of conservative (cultural) nationalism that emphasizes the “distinctive” or even “superior” nature of the Japanese tradition/system. It resonates with the logic that legitimizes the patriarchal system operating unfairly against women. Some users also try to appropriate the ideas of “diversity” and “multiculturalism” in a way that rationalizes their refusal of what they regard as feminism and the global trend toward redressing institutionalized structural discrimination and inequality.

To the Western far right, demographic changes are not only a threat to white people and their way of life but the result of deliberate action from governments and global elites. ‘Great Replacement Theory’ (GRT) originated in far-right movements in Europe, and asserts that immigration and the growth of minority communities will render white populations a minority group by the designs and policies of the powerful. This conspiracy theory has been cited in the manifestos of mass shooters and discussed in mainstream media spaces such as Fox News and The Spectator. However, the gendered aspect of GRT is largely missing from the literature on far-right movements. Drawing on a six-month online ethnography of the British far-right group Patriotic Alternative, I explore the links between racist discourses on demographic change and gender. More than an article of faith for ethnic nationalists railing against demographic change, I argue that GRT is a framework through which this racism is linked to other far-right ideologies of gender, including misogyny, homophobia, and understandings of masculinity and family. In painting demographic change as a government-enforced existential threat to the white race, far-right movements justify attacks on feminism and abortion rights, and the upholding of gender roles as a moral imperative. While this is far from a new concept in far-right movements, under GRT this misogyny is inexorably weaved into racism, homophobia, anti-authoritarianism, and existential threat in a manner that is simple to understand and provides a straightforward rallying cry to harness even mainstream social anxieties.

The ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ has been the unifying slogan of the numerous minorities in the recent protests in Iran. This piece will first give a brief historical background to the early stages of the formation of the Iranian nation from the late 19th century until the 1979 Iranian revolution and then after the revolution until the recent potential revolution in Iran. The thread of nationalism and sense of belonging will be the core argument of this piece in order to explain how, when and why this movement has not so far shown lenience towards any ethnic identity and that is not likely to do so either. In other words, the aim of the paper is to answer the questions of what is the nation and when is the nation in these protests. This paper will be a great contribution to the field of nationalism studies in the sense that it would be a piece on an overtly understudies area of the world at a turning point in its history and would clarify a small part of the hidden social psychological aspect of these protests that might not be visible at the first sight.

In recent years, there is a rising genre of female influencers on Chinese social media platforms, who produce content focusing on their transnational romantic relationships. They and their content are often subject to scrutiny, censorship, and vitriols triggered by nationalism and misogyny. Most of these content creators update their content on various platforms simultaneously. These platforms, however, function with different features and consist of different audiences and communities. Therefore, the same content can generate varying levels of nationalism and misogyny in comments on different platforms. By conducting semi-structured in-depth interviews with 20 female influencers of this genre on Red, Douyin, Bilibili, and Sina Weibo, this research presents their struggles in coping with such nationalistic and misogynistic scrutiny and vitriols in their daily production practices of authenticity.

Contemporary faces of Polish multiculturality can be seen from the perspectives
of old and new diversities. The old diversities are associated with long-existing
national, ethnic, regional, and religious minority groups. The new variations are mainly associated with the appearance of people or groups mostly of migrant origin.
In this presentation, we are going to discuss the situation of old minorities, which are groups linguistically, culturally, or religiously different from other members of society, and that have acquired minority status for historical reasons (e.g., changes to state borders) or political ones (e.g., they have not achieved the status of a nation-state). The main aim is to show these groups’ challenges and describe the main strategies undertaken in these communities to negotiate their position in majority-minority relations. Strategies they undertake depend, among others, on the history of a given group, cultural resources in their hands, the goals of minority leaders, and their specific location in majority-minority relations nowadays and in history. They can be placed on the axis between acceptance of assimilation processes in groups and the fight to get recognition of their ethnicity. We are going to reconstruct these strategies to show their universality resulting from the logic of interethnic relations as well as their specificity being the outcome of the location of these minorities in an almost nationally homogenous society. We will illustrate these issues using examples of four minority groups: Silesians, Kashubs, Lemkos, and Tatars. Our considerations are based on qualitative research which has been conducted in the last two decades.

Why do ethnically diverse states enfranchise certain outgroups over others? Central Eastern European states experienced nation-state consolidation in conjunction with democratization during the long and gradual first wave of democratization, which saw the threshold of inclusion lowered slowly over time. Using historical process tracing, and evidence from the democratizing Kingdom of Hungary (1867-1922), I systematically show how nation-building factored into elites’ enfranchising calculations. Using newly digitized archival evidence from 12 months of fieldwork, I demonstrate how elites’ national, political and economic preferences resulted in the enfranchisement and disenfranchisement of various national outgroups. I provide an assessment of the various group-level factors which affect the (dis)enfranchisement of minority groups: decisiveness and cohesion, which together determine group organization. The evidence presented shows that while well-organized minority groups organized politically, the poorest (and worst organized) of the ethnonational minorities were enfranchised to manufacture a majority for the incumbent party as they posed less of an electoral risk. The paper demonstrates how elites used electoral law and “democratizing” reforms, not to democratise but rather to maintain their national hegemonic control over an emergent state.

The question of minority representation was always in the focal point of multiculturalism or multinationalism. (Kymlicka, 1996; Kis 1996) Even some critics of additional (cultural) minority rights (e.g., interculturalists) highlight, how the input of the minority may be more important in terms of decision-making on the national level. (Meer, Modood, 2013) Considering their own interests and (social) perspectives (Young, 1990) may be essential in a multinational society.

While Hungary today is well-known for its contradictory approach towards migrant minorities and even refugee-seekers, it seems more of a supporter of national minorities living in the country for decades. Hungarian Parliament introduced preferential national minority representation in 2014. However, due to the circumstances and legal conditions, minorities are most likely not to reach the preferential quota, thus, sending ‘advocates’, a representative without voting rights to the Parliament.

Systematic analysis of the advocates’ speeches is in itself very revealing about the functioning of the institution. However, this research aims to unfold two outstanding cases, the case of the most populous Roma minority, and the case of the German minority which is the most successful one in terms of political mobilization.

The key concept of the research is efficiency. Relevant international documents highlight that participation of members of minorities and their representation is ought to be effective. (Lund Rec.; FCNM; Kymlicka 2007) While in practice it is very difficult to grasp efficiency, unfolding the institutional setup and analysing the work of the representatives are possible, common approaches. Thus, the research presents both: focuses on the activities of the representatives and highlights the underlying conditions regarding the development of their representation.

In recent years, the Canadian far-right has been relatively active in the streets, from anti-Islam and anti-immigration movements to far-right actors joining Canada’s yellow vest protesters and the so-called “Freedom Convoy”, attracting much media attention. Studies highlight that news media’s coverage of far-right movements can have two potential impacts, depending on how they are portrayed. Specifically, news media can contribute to normalizing and publicizing far-right movements in society (Mondon and Winter 2020), and they can contribute to far-right actors’ perception of news media as biased, partisan, and deceitful, thereby reinforcing their willingness to consume alternative sources of information (Figenschou and Ihlebæk 2019; Thorbjørnsrud and Figenschou 2020). It thus seems crucial to gain insight into the way news media cover and represent far-right movements. In this article, we investigate news media’s representation of far-right movements in Canada from 2015 to 2022. Drawing on a content analysis of articles published by four of the most read newspapers in Canada, namely the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the National Post, and Le Journal de Montreal, as well as the Canadian far-right media Rebel News, we explore newspapers’ coverage of far-right movements, including the level of attention accorded to these movements and their portrayal. Our research questions are as follows: 1) In what way have Canadian media paid attention to the development of the far-right since 2015?; and 2) To what extent has this media attention and coverage changed between 2015 and 2022?

The far right is one of the most researched phenomena in political science, more so than any other party family. Despite significant progress, however, the field suffers from a Eurocentric and electoralist bias, with studies disproportionally focused on Western Europe and on party politics. With the far right increasingly mobilizing globally and on the streets, it is necessary to turn our attention to the diversity of the phenomenon and its expansion beyond (Western) Europe and the electoral arena.
Recent research has aimed to integrate far-right scholarship with social movement studies, which has traditionally focused on progressive movements. Social movement studies can indeed expand the party-centered discipline. Yet, the challenge of Eurocentrism remains: social movement research has also paid more attention to consolidated Western Democracies, which means that we know less about movement dynamics in hybrid regimes, where findings from Western democracies may not necessarily apply.
As the far-right is often conceptualized as an antithesis to (liberal) democracy, one could expect hybrid regimes where democratic institutions are less consolidated to grant more space to such movements. The cases of Georgia and Ukraine contradict this expectation. Indeed, regime type seems to have implications on the way far-right movements mobilize and the way parties engaged in electoral processes interact with social movements mobilizing on the streets. Thus, by focusing on far-right mobilization in hybrid regimes, the paper aims to move the discipline beyond Eurocentric and electoralist studies and link electoral and protest politics – often examined in isolation – with one another.

As in several European countries, the general elections held in Israel on November 1, 2022, brought back to power a bloc of ethno-nationalist populist political parties, including three proto-fascist ones. As I understand it, populism is not a coherent ideology, not even a “thin” one, but rather a rhetorical device of political mobilization in formally democratic societies. The key concept populism shares with nationalism is “the people.” In nationalism the people are defined through vertical inclusion and horizontal exclusion – by formal citizenship or by cultural-linguistic boundaries. Populism on the other hand defines the people through both vertical and horizontal exclusion, by ascriptive markers as well as by class position (“elite” vs. “the people”) and even by political outlook.
Ethno-national populism normally feeds on economic and/or cultural insecurity caused by immigration or by the empowerment, real or imaginary, of an outside group characterized by ascriptive attributes. The power of Israel’s right-wing populism has persisted through bad and good economic times for its base, made up mainly of working- and lower-middle-class Mizrachim (Jews originating in Moslem countries), and Israel does not accept non-Jewish immigrants to any significant extent. My argument, based on an attitude survey conducted right before the elections, is that, unlike in the US and Europe, in Israel right-wing populism does not feed on economic deprivation or cultural fear of immigration, but primarily on two political emotions: resentment against the Labor party, which governed at the time of the Mizrachim’s arrival in the country, and fear of the Palestinians.

European contemporary cities are getting increasingly multicultural. Migration, nomadism, and tourism are some of the forces entangled in this changing. In this scenario, faces, skin colours, ordinary habits, cultural values and so on multiply and live together, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not so. Portugal’s capital city Lisbon is a good example of those changes.
The idea of citizen and/or the ideal citizen as a concept are a relevant part of these transformations. If in the past being Portuguese and being a Portuguese citizen could be considered almost as synonyms, as multiculturalism goes deeper, the gap between being a citizen and being Portuguese seems to grow deeper too. These cleavages are usually well explored by extreme-right discourses especially on digital and social media.
To better understand these dynamics and the threats associated with them, we analyse the representations of citizenship and nationalism articulated in the political program of Chega, considered the most representative extreme-right party in Portugal’s parliament. Digital and social media discourses, and their roles in leveraging visibility and amplifying the reach of these representations, are also considered in this analysis.
We consider the concept of “citizenisation”, proposed by Anne-Marie Fortier, as an important contribution to understanding the idea and possibility of a truly multicultural citizenship in this digital media age.
The theoretical and methodological approach adopted in this paper relies heavily on culture and media studies, by one hand, and critical discourse studies, on the other.

The French state offers a singular case to consider the relation between nationalism and multiculturalism. Most notably, the French state has no policy when it comes to cultural, national, religious or racial minorities. It does not recognize their existence.
At the same time, and like many other states, the French police is constantly confronted with a number of minorities, whose relationship to the state is difficult or contested. It is no exaggeration to claim that the police is in fact the main face of the state in its relation to minorities, cultural, racial or other. In this paper, I draw on a body of interviews conducted with French Jews and Muslims of North African origin in order to explore the significance of relations between police and minorities. I seek a more granular understanding of the interaction between the state and citizens, between nationalism and multiculturalism. The French case is important, and perhaps representative. It testifies, in any case, that even when minorities are, as it were, absent (in this case, unrecognized), the state must negotiate their presence, their claims, or their resistance to its authority. I will emphasize that police trust and legitimacy are contingent on the conditions and expectations of minorities, with the meaning and value of their citizenship, as they interact with the state, the national majority, and confront issues ranging from rights and recognition to personal security.

Despite a series of paradigmatic shifts in Ottoman historiography, nationalist teleology and state-centered analyses preserve their hegemonic power to explain the dynamics of political contentions in the Ottoman frontiers during the long-nineteenth century. This paper argues that these tendencies brought about an ignorance of the varieties in the forms and patterns of the political contentions, which were rooted in different strategies and interests of the multiple actors unassignable to constant, ex-post, national identities. As an important example of this fallacy, the Albanian Rebellions between 1909-1912 are considered a nationalist movement or awakening either against Balkan irredentism or for national self-determination and separation from the Ottoman Empire. In the face of this problem, this historical research will offer an alternative theoretical framework to analyze the characteristics of the rebellions without invoking “the nation” and “the State” as a category of analysis. Instead, building on the historical-materialist and strategic-relational analysis of the nationness and state-formation as dynamic processes, the research will focus on the diversity and complexity of the political conflicts depending upon a complex set of boundary conditions and strategies of different tribal and class groups in the Albanian provinces. The research will propose that a proper understanding of the divergent dynamics of political conflicts and different responses in the Albanian frontiers, which articulated in the rebellions between 1909 and 1912, requires focusing on the dynamic interplay between social-property relations, state-formation, international geo-political competition, and nationalization.

This paper investigates political turmoil related to why a democratic country with a Muslim majority has Morality Police and Sharia criminal offences, while others do not. The presence of Morality Police, having the authority to arrest individuals who violate Syariah Criminal Offenses such as ‘khalwat’ or close-proximity has been intriguing many quarters, particularly due to claims that it encroaches on personal freedom and violates human rights. This paper employs process tracing for theory-building and conducts comparative history in Malaysia and Indonesia as a case-study. The author argues that the regime in a democratic country with a Muslim majority is more likely to impose a religious-restriction policy when confronted with the vulnerability of political survival, which is a combination of two threats: intense political rivalry between religious parties and weak social capital in the community to promote religious inclusivity. The authors’ findings from the Malaysia case show that the electoral competitiveness between religious parties and weak social capital to promote religious inclusivity pushed the ruling regime to set the most accessible alternative policy – imposing sharia restrictions. Meanwhile, the authors’ findings from the Indonesian case show that the competition among religious parties that is more dynamic has reduced the electoral competitiveness and combative Islamic politicization, and strong social capital in Indonesia to promote religious inclusivity has provided many options for the ruling regime to not impose Sharia-restriction policy.

Given a “multiculturalism backlash” (Vertovec & Wessendorf,2010), interculturalism has emerged as an alternative to multicultural approaches, especially in Europe. It has been promoted by institutional European documents, as a new form of governmentality (Dean,1999) that better responds to the call for democratic governance of cultural diversity and for the promotion of social cohesion in our increasingly diverse society. Multiculturalism is attacked and criticized for weakening collective identity and communal values, for jeopardizing national identity in order to creating “parallel society”, and for social fragmentation (Council of Europe,2008; Zapata-Barrero,2017;2022). Because of this rhetoric, interculturalism has been gaining ground as an alternative to multiculturalism and has been touted as a new way for countries to “deal” with “diversity dynamics”. Interculturalists claim that their conceptual innovations focus on “intercultural dialogue and interaction between individual of different cultures”, “diversity”, and “social cohesion” (Zapata-Barrero,2016; Cantle,2015;2016).

Hence, interculturalism focuses on the “micro-level of individual” to promote integration and social cohesion (Pica-Smith, Contini,Veloria,2019; Modood, Contini,Pica-Smith,2020).
Currently, the rise of anti-immigration, xenofobic institutionalized discourses as well as ethnic and racial systemic discrimination, and “rampant nationalisms”, the question is: could focusing alone on the micro-level of individual intercultural dialogue be sufficient to face the issues of integraton and to ensure equal recognition to cultural minorities and majority groups?
This presentation argues that the focus of multiculturalism paradigm and policies about the “recognition” of diversity at the macro-level of public sphere of laws is an effective conceptual tool and political principle of intervention to help “the cause of diversity”.

Japan does not permit dual citizenship in theory – Article 14 of the Japanese Nationality Law stipulates that dual citizens “shall choose either of the nationalities before he or she reaches nineteen years of age.” However, Article 16 merely requires dual citizens to “endeavor to deprive himself or herself of the foreign nationality.” No known penalties exist for failing to renounce foreign citizenship, placing the dual citizens in an ambiguous state similar to the state of ‘liminal legality’; a “legal limbo” such as the status of the immigrants state as “ambigu(ous), as it is neither an undocumented status nor a documented one but may have characteristics of both” (Menjivar, 2006).

Observation of laws that led to the current legislation on dual citizenship makes evident the intent of the Japanese government, as well as the tasks left to be demanded by the lawmakers. Through the sudden opening of its borders, Japan was rushed to accommodate the increased international marriages and bi-national children legally. Even in such a hurry, Japan’s different attitude toward the East and the West becomes evident. While renunciation of Japanese citizenship for US-born Nikkei children to protect them from the US Immigration Act of 1924, the Japanese government revoked the citizenship of former colony members to avoid liability. The two attitudes are relevant today, posing a challenge to take a clear stance on dual citizenship. There can be no one rule that would accommodate both of their position- racism toward the East and admiration toward the West.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Eurasian land-based empires carried out imperial political and institutional reforms that contributed to redefining their subjects’ relationship with the state. State-led reform led to new institutions of representation and enfranchisement, transforming the classic relationship of imperial subjects in favor of new vertical and horizontal ties of imperial citizenship. Modern public education systems were set up with the purpose of saving the empires and socializing populations into these newly inaugurated ideas of citizenship. Rather than viewing empires as “prisons of nations” whose heterogeneity doomed them to collapse, this study proposes to consider individuals, groups, and debates contributing to a multicultural citizenship discourse. Accordingly, this paper will compare the project of imperial citizenship in the Ottoman, Qajar, and Qing empires, focusing on the revolutions, decades-long reforms, institutional changes, the growth of a public sphere, and changing ideas of belonging that gave rise to the idea of multicultural citizenship.

The paper combines three citizenship analytical frameworks to examine Palestinian experience of Israeli citizenship. The first framework is based on an argument presented by David Theo Goldberg whose concept of a racial state helps to understand that citizenship as such is a racialized construct, that differs in scale from state to state. Race is integral to the conceptual and material emergence of the modern nation state, and to its ongoing management. The second framework is inspired by Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, who studies citizenship as form of accumulation by dispossession, within the settler colonial paradigm. Sabbagh-Khoury sees citizenship as a double paradox in this context. It regulates rights and mobilities but simultaneously cements further loss of collective rights and other claims. This fits to the third framework, argued by Will Kymlicka, about the relation between citizenship and membership ethics. The notion that democratic policies are tied to the idea od loyalty to a shared society, that is viewed as common possession of its members, can be especially complicated within a settler colonial context. In case of Israel, Palestinians that are not officially considered sovereign in the state, but still can hold Israeli citizenship, must perform their loyalty to the “Jewish state”, but the state decides what it actually means. On 21 July 2022 the Israeli Supreme Court delivered a ruling upholding the courts of administrative affairs right, to revoke the Israeli citizenship of persons who have committed an act that constitutes a breach of loyalty to the state of Israel.

This paper recognizes that the problem for the state in pluralist multicultural societies is that it has to be be proactive in protecting the status of minority identities if those identities are not to be judged against the normative majority culture and found wanting. At the same time, there are dangers in adopting proactive policies that seek to promote cultural pluralism by effectively reifying culture as a concept and then privileging cultural identities that are assumed to represent the “authentic” versions of those cultures.

At the heart of this problem is a tension between universalist concepts of culture based on the essential similarity of humankind (human rights) and exceptionalist concepts that privilege supposedly essential differences between groups (nationalism). It is this tension that lies at the heart of problems in pluralist nation-states over how to respect the rights of cultural minorities while at the same time recognizing the primacy of individual human rights.

By contrasting how two Japanese municipalities (Oizumi-machi and Hamamatsu-shi) have pursued different approaches toward multiculturalism, I will highlight the pitfalls associated with policies based on the reification and essentialization of culture. The alternative is to view culture as the product of ongoing social processes, a psychological and behavioral link between individuals and the communities within which they exist. This suggests that a more positive way forward for multicultural policy is to adopt the “Interculturalist” paradigm, under which it is easier to view multiculturalism as the norm and mono-culturalism as the historic aberration.

This paper aims, on the one hand, to inquire theoretically about the relations between nationhood and multiculturalism in international sports and, on the other hand, to present Kosovo’s path to international sports as an insightful case study that approaches many angles of such relations. In the first part, it will be argued how sports offer a valuable field to study everyday nationalism because, differently to other domains of popular culture, their structures and competitions anticipate a formal relation between the representative (national teams) and the represented (nations) in a way that provides ontological security to global audiences by being worldwide scalable and standardizing/reifying cultural complexity. Paradoxically, such normalization of the world of nations contrasts with the fact that, internally, societies are increasingly diverse, and dual/multiple citizenship is becoming more frequent. In this regard, the case of Kosovo will be presented following four tropes: (1) Kosovo as a non-full recognized state that nonetheless managed to join international associations and then became identifiable as a “country among the many” (sports sovereignty), (2) Kosovo as a young state that attempts to develop an allegiance to their brand-new institutions at an emotional level (nation-building), (3) Kosovo as a multiethnic society and a part of a polycentric nation –Albanian cultural belonging– in which the Us/Them divide in discourses may not necessarily mirror existing political boundaries (multiculturalism), and (4) Kosovo Albanian diaspora as a transnational space that maintains emotional bonds with declared motherland though they can play for a different national member (e. g. Germany, Switzerland, etc.)

Bouchard’s seminal work on national myths suggests that myths can be used to impact the course of collective life over a long time. Social myths can feed identities and belongings, set visions of the past and future of a society, promote symbols that allow collective mobilisation, and reinforce social ties (Bouchard, 2013). Through changes within a matrix of master and derivative myths, collective identities can be altered to accommodate new social contexts. One case which exemplifies this phenomenon, yet remains relatively understudied, is the introduction of multiculturalism in Australia.
Since its federation in 1901, Australia has undergone many changes concerning its national identity, largely dictated by conscious policy choices. While early policies such as the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 emphasized a predominantly Anglo-Celtic ethno-cultural identity, this vision of a “White Australia” was eventually replaced with one which valued multiculturalism.
During the years following the abolishment of the Immigration Restriction Act, there was a conscious effort to embrace multiculturalism through implementation of new policies. This study will focus on the discourse surrounding this time, positing that change was impactful because of national myths: alterations in the myth matrix regarding Australian-ness and multiculturalism allowed for a lasting change in the country’s identity.
National myths were utilised to recontextualise Australian national identity without outright changing it, allowing multiculturalism to attach to the notion of “Australian-ness” without issue. This suggests that myths have a significant role in moulding and creating new social paradigms, raising the potential of this theory for future sociological enquiry.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Eurasian land-based empires carried out imperial political and institutional reforms that contributed to redefining their subjects’ relationship with the state. State-led reform led to new institutions of representation and enfranchisement, transforming the classic relationship of imperial subjects in favor of new vertical and horizontal ties of imperial citizenship. Modern public education systems were set up with the purpose of saving the empires and socializing populations into these newly inaugurated ideas of citizenship. Rather than viewing empires as “prisons of nations” whose heterogeneity doomed them to collapse, this study proposes to consider individuals, groups, and debates contributing to a multicultural citizenship discourse. Accordingly, this paper will compare the project of imperial citizenship in the Ottoman, Qajar, and Qing empires, focusing on the revolutions, decades-long reforms, institutional changes, the growth of a public sphere, and changing ideas of belonging that gave rise to the idea of multicultural citizenship.

Although investigations on the South African national narrative may present an inclusive multicultural discourse with a cosmopolitan flavour, everyday life reveals a different picture of xenophobia, socioeconomic inequality, spatial, and social divisions often reflecting ethnic/racial lines. However, both in theorising challenges and providing solutions, the literature on national questions mostly centres around formal state institutions and conventional national symbols by overlooking the centrality of the other agents. Given the administrative challenges and widespread distrust towards the government, this paper focuses on civil society organisations (CSOs) as more visible and increasingly credible agents of the nation-building process in South Africa. Therefore, this research examines how CSOs contribute to (or undermine) the vision of a unified and multicultural nation while investigating how, and why – if at all – civil society engages with diversity, social cohesion, solidarity, and hence democratic values, tolerance, and trust. The paper investigates a case-study of CSOs in one part of Cape Town, using document analysis, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and a mini-survey of participants. By focusing on CSOs, this study not only provides insights into the plurality of national and multicultural narratives in everyday life but also presents a significant difference between formal and informal manifestations of “the nation”. Besides, this research argues that although CSOs are vital agents to spread national norms and culture by promoting a shared public sphere, they have the potential to institutionalise and deepen social divisions.

The public debate on multiculturalism and interculturalism is important in Catalonia since it is related to the forms of public management of immigration and its accommodation in the context of a multinational state, such as Spain. The interaction between migration and the nation is relevant because the configured political model has theoretical and practical implications for the forms of national imagination takes in this territory. Currently in Catalonia, there is a trend towards the framework of intercultural policies. This determination is originated from the idea that interculturality, as a more convincing paradigm, can replace multiculturalism. On the other hand, it can be interpreted as a praxis of the Catalan political will to set itself apart from the accommodation model of the central State. This paper is based on the ideas that the authors are developing in a research on the situation of migrant communities in Catalonia that are minority nations in their country of origin: very different from each other, sometimes with coinciding demands, but also with differentiated religious, linguistic or cultural rights. Our proposal aims to offer a discussion about the public discourses of the political and representative actors of the migrant groups in Catalonia. In order to do this we will 1) evaluate the fundamentals of regional policies, and the elements of discussion between discursive practices and the existing political practices; 2) underline how the characteristics of the Catalan sociopolitical context can favour the recognition of certain demands by these groups and their pressing resettlement in Catalonia.

In social and political theory, multiculturalism, interculturalism and cosmopolitanism are often presented as incompatible or at least in tension with each other. For example, multiculturalism is usually described as a state-level nation-building strategy and mode of integration, whereas interculturalism is mainly concerned with local-level policy and cosmopolitanism, with supra-national governance. In addition, leading theorists of multiculturalism such as Tariq Modood and Will Kymlicka have expressed principled support for a degree of border control, seen as necessary for the cultivation of progressive forms of nationalism, whereas cosmopolitans tend to advocate for greater freedom of movement. However, are these theoretical cleavages reflected in politics, or do policymakers and activists rather pursue a combination of multiculturalist, interculturalist and cosmopolitan aims? This paper will address this question by drawing on recent policy documents and civil society statements produced in the UK, as well as interviews with leaders of UK-based organisations active in the field of cultural diversity and anti-discrimination. In a first step, we will call into question the announced death of multiculturalism by demonstrating the persistence of multicultural measures alongside intercultural ones in the UK Government’s latest integration strategy. We will then turn to the views of four prominent civil society organisations which similarly display a simultaneous endorsement of multiculturalism and interculturalism. Finally, we will discuss aspects of (multiculturalist) cosmopolitanism in civil society discourses around asylum seekers and the involvement of the EU in the protection of the rights of Muslims.

British imperial nationalism remains a divided field, with scholars researching this phenomenon either during imperialism or post-decolonisation; as two separate concepts, with no apparent overlap. Historic imperial nationalism is characterised by attempts to ‘nationalise’ the empire, establishing one overarching identity throughout. Contemporarily, definitions centre on imperial nostalgia and attempts to recapture the grandeur of the imperial ‘golden age’, but beyond this lack clarity as to what this concept entails and its implications for modern Britain. I argue that instead of treating these definitions as distinct, our understanding of imperial nationalism today can be enriched by considering the characteristics of imperial nationalism during empire. To demonstrate this, my paper explores the discursive parallels between Global Britain and Greater Britain, two exemplary manifestations of imperial nationalism during their respective periods. Dubbed ‘Empire 2.0’, the Global Britain policy outlines the Conservative Party’s post-Brexit foreign policy ambitions, with the prevalence of colonial references and related promulgation of the CANZUK alliance reflecting an imperial nationalist agenda. Greater Britain, on the other hand, refers to the nineteenth century imperial nationalist campaign to incorporate the White Dominions into British nationhood. Although this differs greatly from the goals of its contemporary counterpart, the legacies of race and hierarchy have persisted, along with the theoretical incoherence of emphasising sovereignty while simultaneously endorsing imperialism. Comparing these two narratives thus presents a unique opportunity to study the evolution and nature of imperial nationalism, highlighting several continuities and their implications for the ways in which it manifests today.

This presentation aims to outline an empirical contribution to the theoretically heavy literature on the relationship between Englishness and Britishness. Based on 13 in-depth interviews, conducted with London commuters in the South-East of England during the summer of 2022, this research explores how the relationship between Englishness and Britishness is articulated in national identity talk. Drawing on an everyday nationhood approach, I demonstrate that how participants conceptualised the relationship did not necessarily correspond to how they expressed it when talking ‘about’ and ‘with’ Englishness and Britishness. Thus, it appears that competing arguments over the ability of individuals to distinguish between Englishness and Britishness (McCrone & Bechhofer, 2015), or not (Barnett, 1997, 2013), may simplify and overlook the multiple, messy, and even contradictory ways that individuals in England conceptualise this relationship. Ultimately, this presentation aims to demonstrate the benefit of using in-depth qualitative interviews in national identity research in multination states, and specifically, for exploring the relationship between multiple identities.

National ideologies often employ notions of cultural homogeneity of nations, where “all its adult members are supposed to share cultural knowledge, skills and meanings equally” (Šumi 2000, 176), we are all supposed to received it and “radiate” it in equal share. This is closely related to Herder’s understanding of cultures; as Welsch (1999) puts is, understanding of culture emerging from Herder’s Volksgeist, is in monocultural terms, thus defined by three elements: social homogenization, ethnic consolidation and intercultural delimitation, or what Brubaker calls “groupism” and nations are not “monochrome ethnic, racial or cultural blocs” (2002, 164). In the world, organised in an assemble of nation-states, national ideologies “flag their homelands daily”, as Michael Billig’s (1995) would say, which position us daily as national subjects – and reminds us of that. Thus, following Hobsbawm (1990, 10) that nationalism cannot be understood unless also analysed from below and the discursive turn in nationalism that questions how the nation is discursively narrated and reproduced (Antonsich & Skey 2017) the paper discusses the results obtained in the case study of Slovenian Istria (telephone survey (October 2014 (N=715)) and interviews ((life stories) (February–June 2015 (N=30)), focusing on inhabitants’ understanding, experiencing, and making sense of their national and (trans)cultural identity. Namely, how inhabitants of this border and multicultural area, at the fringes of the nation-state with the imposition monocultural visions of nationhood, understand and generate meaning of their everyday nationhood, identities, and how they understand their common and daily experience of multiculturalism (Pocecco 2016, Wise 2014) and transculturality (Welsch 1999).

Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage.
Brubaker, Rogers. 2002. Ethnicity without Groups. European Journal of Sociology, 43 (2): 163–189.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1990. Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pocecco, Antonella. 2016. Everyday Multiculturalism: Individual Experience of Cultural Diversity. In: Practical rationality in political contexts: facing diversity in contemporary multicultural Europe, G. De Anna and R. Martinelli (eds.), EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, pp. 163–177.
Antonsich, Marco & Skey, Michael. 2017. Introduction: The Persistence of Banal Nationalism. In: Everyday Nationhood: Theorising Culture, Identity and Belonging after Banal Nationalism, Skey, Michael & Antonsich, Marco (eds.), pp. 1–13.London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Šumi, Irena. 2000. Kultura, etni?nost, mejnost: Konstrukcije razli?nosti v antropološki presoji (=Culture, ethnicity, boundary: constructions of diversity in anthropological perspective). Ljubljana: Založba ZRC (ZRC SAZU).
Welsh, Wolfgang. 1999. Transculturality – the Puzzling Form of Cultures Today. In: Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, Featherstone, M. & S. Lash, (eds.),194–213. London: Sage.
Wise, Amanda. 2014. Everyday multiculturalism. In :Migration: A COMPAS Anthology, M. Anderson, B. & Keith, M. (eds.), pp. 161–162.

Brazil’s history is interspersed by authoritarian regimes, including two dictatorships, one from 1937-1945 and the other from 1964-1985. Both promoted a monocultural and monolinguistic approach to Brazilian identity through legislation and policy. With the country’s (re)democratization and enactment of the 1988 Constitution, which has pluralism and diversity as its foundational principles, legislation and policy, such as the National Policy for the Sustainable Development of Traditional Peoples and Communities (2007) and the National Inventory of Linguistic Diversity (2010) were enacted. Several of these policies were systemically quashed during the 2019-2022 government. Multiculturalism was not outlawed per se (as it was during the dictatorial regimes) but was drained out of policymaking and policy implementation. This paper seeks to map, through bibliographical and documental research, the weakening of the legal safeguards from 2019 to 2022 of a social, economic, and environmental approach to Brazil “diverse modes of creating, making and living” – a protection formula stated in the 1988 Constitution. Moreover, the paper explores, through discourse analysis, how the two opposing 2022 presidential campaigns addressed the issue of a monocultural vs a multicultural Brazil. Lastly, considering the results of the election, the paper accesses the challenges to the recovery of multiculturalism through existing legislation and policy and the demands brought about by the setbacks of four years of a monocultural approach to policymaking and policy implementation but also by current social developments that foster diversity and multicultural approaches to contemporary governance and engagement.

This paper looks into the potential of a multicultural South Korea and the progress of state-led multicultural policies focusing on high and low-skilled immigrants’ integration into South Korean society. My main research question is ‘to what extent (high and low-skilled) immigrants have defined a multicultural South Korea and challenged the nationalist discourse.’ To answer this question, I will focus on the evolution of government policies from the 1990s until today and articulate the inclusion and exclusion mechanisms of the state toward immigrants. Although the policies initially had a limited sphere of influence, this has changed throughout the years as Korea adopted a more inclusive approach and incorporated international human rights norms in policymaking for the integration of minority communities living in South Korea. The findings of this research will help explain the intersectionality and complex layers in adopting multicultural policies for immigrant integration in South Korea. In other words, there are different value systems attached to certain multi-ethnics in South Korea when state-led policies, public opinion and immigrant experiences are explored. As multicultural policies took initiative in the late 1990s, due to the influx of migrants, this paper will look into the initiation of these policies until today in South Korea. Multiculturalism may have failed in Western societies, but the South Korean case demonstrates that the shift from ethnic nationalism to multiculturalism is possible.

When and why do parties wrap their policy proposals in nationalist language? Are environmental policies defended because of cosmopolitan principles or for the benefit of the nation?
This paper proposes a new framework to analyse nationalism in political discourse by developing a new content-analysis framework on manifestos. The framework goes beyond ethnic vs civic distinctions and focuses instead in understanding nationalism as a frame through which to justify positions on different policy areas such as multicultural or gender policies. It focuses on the temporal dimensions of nationalism and on how nationalist tropes and frames have been used to justify a particular vision of a better future by political parties.
The framework aims to go beyond current databases covering party positions (CHES, GPS, Manifesto Project, Kriesi et al. (2008, 2012)) which treat nationalism only in its most conservative, explicit and ethnic forms and exclude liberal or multicultural nationalisms. The project aims to become a useful database to scholars interested in comparing nationalist platforms across countries.
The paper will illustrate this framework through the case of how mainstream parties frame and justify environmental policies. As such, it speaks to a very small but growing literature on nationalism and the environment. This literature has mostly focused mostly on minority nationalist parties (Conversi and Hau, 2021) or on green parties (Kernalegenn, 2022) but has left mainstream parties underexplored. The paper will show how mainstream parties have nationalised environmentalist concerns (traditionally described as inherently cosmopolitan) and included them into their nation-state frameworks.

My research assesses how Chinese national identity is discursively (re)generated by multifarious socio-political actors (especially ordinary users) on the Chinese Internet. A further investigation into how Chinese national(ist) discourses are daily (re)shaped online by diverse socio-political actors can contribute to not only deeper understandings of Chinese national sentiments on China’s Internet but also richer insights into the socio-technical ecology of the contemporary Chinese digital (and physical) world. I adopt an ethnographic methodology with two China-based digital platforms Sina Weibo and bilibili as ‘fieldsites’. My primary data collection method is virtual ethnographic observation of everyday national(ist) discussions on both sites. If data obtained from digital observations cannot answer research questions, I will conduct in-depth online interviews with ‘key actors’ identified from observations in discursively (re)producing Chinese national identity on each ‘fieldsite’, to complement observational data. Critical discourse analysis is employed to analyse data. From November 2021 to October 2022, I conducted 30 weeks’ observations with 30 sets of fieldnotes. Based on fieldnotes of the first week’s observations, I found multifarious national(ist) discourses on both ‘fieldsites’. Second, Sina Weibo and bilibili users have agency in interpreting and deploying concrete national(ist) discourses despite the leading role played by the government and the two platforms in deciding on the basic framework of national expressions. Third, the (re)production process of national(ist) discourses on Sina Weibo and bilibili depends upon not only technical affordances and limitations of the two sites but also, to a larger degree, some established socio-political mechanisms and conventions in the offline China.

This paper focuses on how the state actors promote nationalism by constructing Eileen Gu, the US-born naturalized athlete who won the gold medals for China during the 2022 Winter Olympics, as a national idol, and how the netizens renegotiate the national identity and redraw the boundary of Chinese collective by reinforcing or resisting the idolization of Eileen Gu. Thematic analysis and critical discourse analysis are used to examine over 2500 social media posts (scraped from Weibo and Zhihu) about the discussion on Eileen Gu. During and after the Winter Olympics, the state actors legitimize the naturalization and idolization of Eileen Gu by celebrating Eileen Gu’s excellence in the 2022 Winter Olympics and her acculturation of Chinese culture (eg. Chinese food, language, Chinese lifestyle, and Chinese ancestry). By constructing Eileen Gu as a national idol, the state actors inspire nationalism among Chinese people and brand China to international audiences. Civic nationalism and ethnocultural forms of nationalism dominate the seemingly playful state discourse regarding the discussion on Eileen Gu. However, netizens also embrace civic nationalism and ethnocultural forms of nationalism to reinforce or resist the idolization of Eileen Gu. Those who support Eileen Gu emphasize her winning gold medals for China; while those who resist the idolization of Eileen Gu suspect her dual citizenship and her loyalty to China, criticizing her as an opportunist who cooperates with official nationalism and framing her as a privileged who is distant from ordinary Chinese people.

Part of the democratisation process in post-conflict countries is a recognition of ingroup war-time atrocities, a prerequisite for intergroup reconciliation. An example of public recognition in the region of the former Yugoslavia was the initiative #sedamhiljada. It was launched on Twitter in 2015 by a Serb journalist to pay tribute to the victims of Srebrenica. This paper studies intra-ethnic interactions on social media and in face-to-face encounters regarding this initiative to understand if/how different communicative environments shape the ways in which people interact about the war legacy and, consequently, if/how it affects their willingness to recognise ingroup responsibility for war crimes. Over 20 years after Yugoslav wars ended, the dominant discourse is still one of denial – denial of the nature, scale or intent of events. With democratic backsliding in the region recently and the rise of nationalism, the questions of this past remain as pertinent as ever. Human rights activists have been increasingly using social media to raise awareness about the war legacy and mobilise public support. Visibility that social media afford has been discussed in positive terms to date. However, what this paper finds, drawing on focus groups and discourse analysis data, is that people are less willing to recognise ingroup responsibility of war crimes on social media compared to face-to-face interactions because of the fear of being stereotyped negatively by foreign audiences because of their ethnic identity and their group’s war conduct. People find a negative nation’s image threatening to their reputation on an international stage.

Existing literature on nation branding tends to mainly focus on how a nation brand is devised and promoted by governmental agencies, economic institutions, and branding experts. This has led to a lack of focus on more bottom-up perspectives of nation branding generated by ordinary people, and to what extent ordinary people contribute to creating more diverse representations of the nation. In addition, much of the existing attention in the field of nation branding is paid on production studies and media texts. However, the reception within the communication circuit of nation branding is still poorly understood.

To address these gaps, this paper first introduces the concept of ‘user-generated nation branding’ to capture the bottom-up dynamics of nation branding. It refers to the practices of promoting a nation initiated by online users in their everyday lives. Empirically, it focuses on two popular user-generated accounts – ‘Abroad in Japan’ and ‘Liziqi’ – in Japan and China respectively, by adopting semi-structured interviews with their audiences. More specifically, it investigates how audiences with different national and cultural backgrounds engage with user-generated nation branding in their everyday lives, and to what extent they consider user-generated nation branding to help promote an alternative Japan/China that is different from the stereotypical imagery used in top-down campaigns. Implications regarding whether and to what extent user-generated nation branding contributes to more diverse imaginations of the nation will be provided in the presentation.

It goes beyond evidence that recent migration wave shed light over the cultural composition of present societies pushing the political sphere to explain and find solutions. However, my point is that the political is just a recipient of a ready-made case, manipulation itself being possible only inasmuch as seeds had been previously there.
After scrutinizing cases and histories in Eastern Europe, I claim that there is no binary nationalism/ multiculturalism opposition at work but a large scale with several intermediate steps, like plural (consisting of two maximum three groups), diverse (including a wide array of groups) and divided societies turning into nationalists ones. Multiculturalism might work well enough in diverse societies but will always be attacked in the other two: from the side of a certain group considering itself less privileged in contrast to the other(s); from the promoters of separation and secession in the second case.
Having such a palette of variants, discussion on migrants, conflict resolution or legal pluralism might benefit from the outcomes of proper comparisons while the “transition to diversity” might get ground precisely to the point. I will show that each “level” on this scale has strong and weak points while facing newcomers and there will never be any golden remedy at play. The final result will always come out from the confrontation between the resilience of the traditional society and the determination of the newcomers.

It has long been understood in nationalism studies that the distinction between civic and ethnic nations and nationalism, though useful, has the capacity to oversimplify. Nations and nationalism cannot be neatly divided into civic and ethnic forms; all have civic and ethnic elements that can be deployed in voluntaristic and organic ways. However, I argue that a particular pattern of interaction between these elements can be identified as characteristic of the modern nation. Nations aspire to be wholly voluntary communities of common fate built around shared political institutions. But certain signifiers of culture, broadly defined, are nonetheless necessary to enable seamless communication and mobility in a diverse and complex society: common language, history, shared values and/or totemic symbols. Indeed, ‘the Nation’ could be defined as the narrative that resolves this essential contradiction between the civic ideal and the ethnic reality. Using the method of cognitive-affective mapping (CAM) I demonstrate how the principle of emotional coherence causes these narratives to coalesce into certain characteristic patterns, examining two opposing such patterns in depth: the populist narrative that identifies the nation’s civic values as the unique cultural heritage of the dominant ethnicity, and the multicultural narrative that elides the contradiction by downplaying the necessity of unifying cultural signifiers. While both narratives contain logical inconsistencies, their capacity to maintain stability can nonetheless be measured using CAM by their emotional coherence in a given socio-political environment. CAM can also help us to measure these strategies ethically, effectively factoring emotion into utilitarian calculations of social wellbeing.

During the late 19th century and the early 20th century several concepts emerged to suggest a possible national territory of Poland. These concepts not just determined the so-called “geo-body” of the emerging Polish state but also had a huge influence on the relationship to neighboring nations. The Polish national movement was characterized by a conflict of an ethnonationalist and a multicultural ideology. My presentation analyzes these concepts by examining the spatial concepts attached to them. The understanding of these concepts is possible by examining cartographical works and textual works regarding the imagined national space. In my research, I concentrate on influential figures of the national movement who created maps and defined the national territory. The analysis of the Polish national movement by concentrating on its spatial concepts is an approach that can bring new perspective to the study of nationalism. Moreover, it also helps to understand the foreign policy of the contemporary Polish state and its relationships in Eastern Europe concerning the Baltic States, Belarus and Ukraine.

This paper will concentrate on the management and shifting patterns of interethnic relations in the Serbian autonomous province of Vojvodina. Primary attention will be paid to Vojvodina’s and Serbia’s largest and politically organized minority group, the ethnic Hungarians. The main question here is: How do the developments in the inter-state relations between Serbia and Hungary shape the patterns and management of interethnic relations in Vojvodina?

Of particular interest is to highlight whether, how, and why the improvement of Serbian-Hungarian inter-state relations, since the 2010s, has upgraded the political representation of Vojvodina’s ethnic Hungarian minority on the regional (Vojvodina) and national (Serbia) levels of authority. This will entail a contextual analysis of ideological catalysts and political processes. The former will clarify the broader commonalities in the patterns of leadership shared by Hungary’s PM Viktor Orbán and Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vu?i?. The latter will focus on the active engagement of domestic political actors, namely the Alliance of Vojvodina’s Hungarians (VMSZ), in facilitating communication between the two leaderships and the subsequent developments in the patterns and management of interethnic relations in Vojvodina.

From a theoretical angle, this case study will critically outline how developments on the level of institutional politics can combine with and influence the readjustment of identity frameworks inside specific contexts. This becomes particularly relevant with regard to the malleability and shifting patterns of interaction between: (a) mainstream Serbian and ethnic Hungarian political actors in Vojvodina and Serbia as a whole; (b) the Serbian and Hungarian governments on the inter-state level.

The civic/ethnic dichotomy is no doubt the most influential conceptual framework for making sense of nationalism’s contradictions. It is associated with such illustrious names as Karl Marx, Ernest Renan, Friedrich Meinecke, Hans Kohn, and Ernest Gellner. Yet a proper understanding of the emergence and development of this dichotomy is still lacking. By reconstructing a critical genealogy of the civic/ethnic dichotomy, this paper makes three contributions. First, it problematises the widespread view that the civic/ethnic dichotomy has been a longstanding feature of nationalism studies. In fact, none of the aforementioned scholars refer to “civic” or “ethnic” nationalism. The earliest discussions of a civic/ethnic dichotomy do not appear until the crisis of modernisation theory in the 1980s. While dualistic conceptions of nationalism have a much longer history, the civic/ethnic dichotomy itself is a product of the late Cold War. Second, the paper problematises the assumption that civic nationalism has been seen as the “good” kind of nationalism and that ethnic nationalism has been seen as the “bad” kind. Instead, I show that the polarity of the civic/ethnic dichotomy has always been doubled, such that each pole functions as both cure and poison for the other. The third contribution of the paper is to recast the recent debates about the validity of the civic/ethnic dichotomy as part of the history of that dichotomy. Rather than emanating from an entirely detached vantage point, the critiques of the civic/ethnic framework are a response to a particular historical moment: the disorientation of the Eurocentric international order.

When and how do ethnic majoritarian states undergo de-majoritarian constitutional changes? Most of the existing literature on the politics of constitutional change in ethnically diverse societies focuses on multi-ethnic states rather than ethnic majoritarian states. Where some authors rarely engage with majoritarian states, they tend to dismiss these cases as instances of states in permanent conflict due to ‘majoritarian intransigence.’ Drawing upon my doctoral research and challenging these assumptions, this paper illuminates, via process tracing, causal factors that drive de-majoritarian constitutional changes in ethnic majoritarian states. Focusing on the ethnic majoritarian states of Pakistan (dominated by Punjabis), Indonesia (dominated by Javanese) and Sri Lanka (dominated by Sinhalese), I present a comparative analysis based upon a causal mechanism of three factors: 1) Intra-ethnic civil-military institutional tensions, 2) social movements combining social and political elements from within the dominant and non-dominant ethnic groups, and 3) cross-ethnic political consensus. I argue that ethnic majoritarian states (Pakistan and Indonesia) are highly likely to undergo de-majoritarian constitutional changes when the dominant ethnic group in them faces internal fragmentation (e.g., power struggle) and when this fragmentation combines with intra-ethnic civil-military institutional tensions, social movements and a politics of cross-ethnic consensus. Using the Sri Lankan case, I show how the absence of these factors, both individually and collectively, explains the failure of various political processes of de-majoritarian constitutional changes. This paper thus makes a major contribution to the study of the politics of ethnic conflict resolution, including a constitutional movement away from majoritarian frameworks to multi-ethnic systems.

About the author: Dr Salman Rafi is an Assistant Professor of Politics at the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Science, the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan. Before joining LUMS in 2022, he was based at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London where, funded by the highly prestigious ‘SOAS Research Scholarship’, he read for a PhD in Politics. His dissertation focused on – and compared – the intra-ethnic sources of ethnically de-majoritarian constitutional shifts in Pakistan, Indonesia, Fiji and Sri Lanka. Dr Salman is also the author of The Genesis of Baloch Nationalism: Politics and Ethnicity in Pakistan, 1947-1977 (Routledge, 2018).

The paper presents the key findings of three years of doctorate sociological research on Cypriotism in the Republic of Cyprus, an ideological position opposing Greek and Turkish Cypriot nationalism, aspiring instead for a common Cypriot identity that aims to transcend the ethnic divisions connected to the de-facto partitioned island of Cyprus. Methodologically, the research rests on qualitative thematic analysis, utilising as its data political documents, as well as qualitative surveys carried out with individuals active in the grassroots politics of the Republic. The paper argues that Cypriotism is characterised by the rejection and/or downplaying of existing ethnic identities, the claiming of cultural pluralism as inherent to Cypriotness, and by its commitment towards bi-communalism, reflected in visions over the structure of a potential reunified Cypriot state. Nonetheless, exclusionary dynamics are also highlighted, including the absence of migrants and Turkish settlers from this imagined Cypriotness, as these demographic groups remain situated as outsiders, despite a commitment to multiculturalism and anti-racism in Cypriotist politics. Thus, Cypriotism formulates its own national imagined community, with its corresponding limited membership, attachment to topography and desired form of statehood. While Cypriotism is often viewed as a form of civic nationalism, the paper argues that it better corresponds to the concept of ‘multicultural nationalism’ proposed by Tariq Modood. However, as Cypriotism entails the demand that cultural/ethnic heterogeneity internal to the imagined community should be formally entrenched in the state, the paper concludes by discussing whether a new sub-category should be proposed to capture the phenomenon being described.

Following World War II, approximately 200,000-225,000 Ukrainian displaced persons refused Soviet repatriation despite considerable pressure by occupation forces, national governments, and international welfare agencies. These Ukrainians were made up of a diverse population from rural and urban regions throughout Ukraine, with different socio-economic backgrounds, varied degrees of education, different political and religious traditions, and their own unique experiences of the war. Using the United Nations’ UNRRA archival collection, this paper examines the ways Ukrainian displaced persons resisted repatriation by utilizing a specific form of ethno-cultural nationalism and, in the process, redefined Ukrainian national belonging for those living outside the confines of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. On the one hand, Ukrainians utilized cultural nationalism by defining themselves as a distinct national group, separate from Russians and Poles, with their own unique language, history, and cultural traditions. This was largely accomplished through the creation of self-administered Ukrainian DP camps, the establishment of social organizations, and partnering with Ukrainian humanitarian agencies in the United States and Canada. On the other hand, Ukrainian DPs claimed refugee status based on the political circumstances in the Soviet Union and actively fought to be classified as stateless Ukrainian citizens that had been forced to escape the Soviet occupation of their homeland. While Soviet atrocities committed against ethnic Ukrainians had historical roots, espousing anti-Soviet attitudes worked in favor of Ukrainian DPs hoping to immigrate to North America and the focus on victimization and anti-communist in favor of democracy became a defining mode of self-identification in postwar Ukrainian diaspora communities.

While much recent research focuses on the attractiveness of global cities to minority groups, there has been much less work on how majority group members perceive and experience them. This paper explores the varying ways in which people, from different parts of Britain discuss their experiences of the capital city, London, with a particular focus on its demographic diversity. This would include the views of people that have lived in London and moved away, individuals who live in other places but visit London on a more or less regular basis and those who rarely come to the city and, therefore, primarily ‘experience’ it through media representations. In order to make sense of these varying viewpoints, an analytical framework is developed that draws on the concepts of home and home-making, belonging, and the politics of belonging and multicultural encounters. Above all, there will be an interest in exploring how certain attitudes and beliefs can be tied to the individual’s position within a wider hierarchy of national belonging in Britain.

With the proliferation of smartphones, social media mobile applications have been playing an important role in our day-to-day communication. For immigrants, social media platforms afford them to ‘stay’ with their social networks in home countries. WeChat as a Chinese social media has overwhelmingly dominated Mandarin speaking population. It enables immigrants to stay in touch with family and friends back in mainland China wherever and whenever, making their mobile phones a portable homeland. Standing in-between the virtual homeland and physical dwelling, how can we understand Chinese immigrants’ sense of nations and belongings in everyday life?

This paper aims to look into immigrants’ everyday engagements with WeChat platform in order to understand the meaning making nations and belongings. It argues that such sense of belongings is produced through digital national atmosphere, which is generated through an entanglement of human users, hardware, software, and other nonhuman participants. By unpacking the digital atmosphere, we can understand how Chinese immigrants experience and respond to the fusion of portable homeland and psychical dwelling. Taking the sociomaterial aspect and theoretical framework of Science and Technology Studies (STS), this paper will focus on how the senses of ‘nation’ and ‘belonging’ are experienced, practised, and reproduced through interacting with digital infrastructures on digital platforms.

This paper will explore the conflicting and multi-layered (national) identities of the young overseas Croatian diaspora “returnees” through the intersection of language education and citizenship practices by using the case study of Croaticum, a Croatian language school for foreigners of the University of Zagreb. The analysis will be conducted by looking both at Croatia’s state practices and their real-life effects through a bottom-up approach, based upon qualitative semi-structure interviews with Croaticum’s lecturers and diaspora students carried out in Zagreb between June and September 2021. The subjects of this article will be the young Croatian diaspora students from South America who relocated to Croatia through a scholarship granted by the Croatian government, which allowed them to study the language, discover their roots and eventually stay in the country. The study argues that, if placed in the homeland policies’ framework, the formula “citizenship plus scholarship” represent(ed) for Croatia an important policy tool of “invitation” (Štiks 2010) in order to attract social capital to a country which is facing a severe demographic decline, although by keeping an ancestral line. At the same time, this article aims to examine how, by taking into consideration the different positionalities, background and complex identities of the sample of the population interviewed, how the expected results and the actual outcomes of this formula may be affected, especially after the amendments applied to the Croatian citizenship law in 2020.

This paper will focus on a core element of nationalism in its most direct form – membership of a nation-state as a ‘British Subject’. The process of naturalisation was an arduous one, which relied on meticulous background checks. Written references of at least two individuals who were longstanding British citizens, substantial police reports, and payment were prerequisites. This had the consequent effect of ostracising working-class migrants. All non-British subjects were subjected to the recriminating ‘Aliens Acts’, which were constantly renewed during the period. Racism was entrenched within society, as witnessed by the port riots of 1919, and widespread Antisemitism. Overall, the naturalisation certificates in the archives offer a rich source to analyse national identity. The use of British referees also demonstrates the social inter-connectedness and solidarities of multicultural communities. Most sociological interpretations of migration and multiculturalism in Britain focus on the post-1945 era. However, this belies the intricate and detailed social history of Britain in the first half of the 20th century. Honing in on a geographic basis of the North-West of England, this paper will signify how the construction of the local was essential to the adoption of national identities. Furthermore, these new identities took on a legalistic framework and were also imbued with cultural, occupational, and ethnolinguistic characteristics.

In 1923, the Council of Ambassadors ultimately approved the eastern border of the Second Polish Republic and recognised its sovereignty over Eastern Galicia. Despite its statehood, the area had a specific nationality structure – it was inhabited by about 60% Ukrainians and only 30% Poles. Mutual relations were tense from the very beginning – Ukrainians considered the Polish administration as a temporary occupier, while the Poles sought to strengthen their position.

Although the government created the principles and main directions of the development of the national policy, the degree of their implementation and enforcement depended on the administrative divisions, assisted by other Polish institutions. The rivalry between them and Ukrainian political parties as well as cultural and economic organizations had an impact on direct contacts. Schools, institutions, churches, offices and the press became the center of conflicts between the inhabitants of villages and towns in everyday relations. Growing nationalism on both sides led to their inflammation. Mutual complaints, disagreements, a struggle to gain advantage, as well as growing nationalism of radical groups led to an escalation of conflict and affected mutual day-to-day relations.

During my presentation I will attempt to answer the question to what extend nationalism influenced everyday relations between Polish and Ukrainians. What were the main points of the dispute? Have there been attempts to reduce conflicts or, on the contrary, have they been fueled? The presentation will be based mainly on official documents created by Polish authorities as well as Polish and Ukrainian nationalist organizations, press and memoirs.

When peace returned in the war-torn Belgian country in 1918, the tourist association ‘Touring Club de Belgique’ (TCB) was eager to restart its activities. Relying on the extensive membership assembled since its foundation in 1895, the Club turned into an influential vehicle of national fervor: excursions, guidebooks and maps encouraged Belgians to honor their homeland by exploring its regions. The Touring Club explicitly performed as the mouthpiece of the entire, unified Belgian nation. Its aspirations, however, were audaciously challenged from 1922 onwards, when the Flemish Tourist Association (Vlaamsche Toeristenbond, VTB) was founded. The VTB adopted methods and strategies of its counterpart, but not without fine-tuning them. Though officially not politically involved, the ambition to teach Flemish people how to travel – and thus emancipating them – was an ideological one. While the TCB was backed by the government and as such a catalyst of state nationalism, the VTB was an exponent of a so-called sub-state or ethnic nationalism. This presentation will question this clear-cut dichotomy by focusing on differences as well as similarities in their ideas, strategies and practices. By emphasizing the plethora of different national identities that co-existed in these two tourist associations, the essay will be able to nuance the traditional perspective on the connection between tourism and (competing) nationalisms in a multicultural state, and highlight how these tourist associations, rather than extending one distinct national identity, induced the development of myriad national identities in their organization.

Despite a series of paradigmatic shifts in Ottoman historiography, nationalist teleology and state-centered analyses preserve their hegemonic power to explain the dynamics of political contentions in the Ottoman frontiers during the long-nineteenth century. This paper argues that these tendencies brought about an ignorance of the varieties in the forms and patterns of the political contentions, which were rooted in different strategies and interests of the multiple actors unassignable to constant, ex-post, national identities. As an important example of this fallacy, the Albanian Rebellions between 1909-1912 are considered a nationalist movement or awakening either against Balkan irredentism or for national self-determination and separation from the Ottoman Empire. In the face of this problem, this historical research will offer an alternative theoretical framework to analyze the characteristics of the rebellions without invoking “the nation” and “the State” as a category of analysis. Instead, building on the historical-materialist and strategic-relational analysis of the nationness and state-formation as dynamic processes, the research will focus on the diversity and complexity of the political conflicts depending upon a complex set of boundary conditions and strategies of different tribal and class groups in the Albanian provinces. The research will propose that a proper understanding of the divergent dynamics of political conflicts and different responses in the Albanian frontiers, which articulated in the rebellions between 1909 and 1912, requires focusing on the dynamic interplay between social-property relations, state-formation, international geo-political competition, and nationalization.

Keywords: Ottoman Empire, Albanian provinces, frontiers, political contentions, multiple identities, nationalization

West Papuan musicians in Melbourne, Australia are few in number but are prolific, skilled, and strategic. Woven into their musical practices and public performances are carefully crafted and intentional claims to an ethnic-national West Papuan identity, deployed to build support and recognition from other Melbournians for the West Papuan independence movement. Music is a key mode through which West Papuans engage with others in multicultural Melbourne. As Joseph, a young West Papuan musician and dancer, says: ‘All the gatherings, fundraisings we have, people’s faces start to glow when we start singing. They don’t understand but they recognise it. Music is powerful.’

During performances, musicians embody West Papuan nationalism through their choices of attire, song lyrics, projections, and interstitial speeches. More implicit references include the genres of music (indigenous island reggae and hip hop, among others) and the use of ‘traditional’ instruments, rhythms, and bodily accessories. Together, these strategies contribute to a nationalist narrative intended to generate an affective reaction among audiences. The centrality of this affective nationalist engagement reflects West Papuan conceptualisations of the power of music to move people and aligns with recent theorising on nationalist sentiment.

Building on existing literature on the social construction of ethnic nationalism, this paper explores the uses of music as a mediating tool between West Papuan musician-nationalists and Melbournians to show the powerful affective potentials of nationalist narratives. Paying attention to West Papuan musicians demonstrates how these narratives can be strategically and intentionally crafted to engage non-national others affectively and productively.

Concomitant with the growing debate over state legitimacy, the 2011 uprising witnessed a rising menace of intolerance at the social, political and religious level in Syria. The Assad regime mobilized both print and electronic media to further mass support for the state. Perhaps the above became evident in the decision to ban a television drama produced and funded by a state institution for two years. Torgman El-Ashwak (?????? ???????) tells the story of three friends who after embracing leftist though get separated. While the first embraces Sufi thought and the second keeps to his leftist thought which brings him trouble, the third emigrates outside the country. The case is especially interesting as it showcases the pervasive tension between nationalism and nation on the one hand and multiculturalism and its dialogue of diversity, on the other hand. And while multiculturalism rests upon tolerance of the other, nationalism carves out a homogenous image for itself that “all-at-onceness” remains far from achieved. We seek to address the participatory role of media in general and television in particular in crafting everyday identities. We moreover argue that television drama of post-war Syria, more than any time before, has grown intolerant of others hence toned down the rhetoric of multiculturalism. As a result, television-polyphonic in nature- has become xenophobic about any other ideological position than the one authorized by the state. The long-time agent of social change (TV) is now not only a state tool which creates, reinforces, and normalizes hierarchies but also an interpreter of modern-age censorship.

In Modood’s (2019) theorization of multicultural nationalism, multiculturalism is a much forward-looking mechanism as “a mode of integration” that “proves incomplete without the re-making of national identity” that provides the sense of belonging for all citizens (p.233). In Taiwan, multiculturalism goes both ways as a mode of integration and a mode of decolonization, a recovering and a reimagining of a space and a place where identities of different ethnicities and nations relate with each other from the past to the present.

Taiwan’s multiculturalism has much to do with the utterances of different languages and the dialogized heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 1981) that is often represented through characters in cultural texts or experienced by Taiwanese people who speak languages more than Mandarin. However, this multiculturalism was suppressed under and beyond KMT’s Martial Law rule from the end of the Second World War until 1993 when native languages of Hoklo and Hakka were listed as elective courses in elementary school, and in 2000, when native language courses were included in the formal curriculum. In 2018, the Development of National Languages Act was passed in “recognizing the multicultural nature of the nation, and to spur the transmission, the revival, and development of national languages” (Development of National Language Act, article 1). This effort of reviving the multiculturalism in Taiwan makes a prominent progress in 2022, when three out of the Best TV drama nominations of Taiwan’s Golden Bell Awards (equals to Emmy Awards of U.S. television) are multi-linguistic with Mandarin spoken less than 50%. Two of them are historical dramas.

Through textual and conversation analyses of some of the multicultural interactions in these dramas, this paper locates the process and agency of integration in multiculturalism and examines how relational identities are formed and realized both in the past and in modern everyday lives.

Multiculturalism as factuality of cultural practices is a social fact of Kazakhstan’s modern society, due to historical evolution, and political and cultural realities.
Analytical framework: our methodological orientation is the concept of the Bristol School of Multiculturalism, as its program reflects the main aspects of Kazakh ethnic practice, in which the legitimacy of multiculturalism comes not from a set of political principles, but from the real situation of people as representatives of their cultural groups, striving for recognition and inclusion in their societies as they are. Culture and identity are dynamic, diverse, dialogic practices ( Meer, 2010: 55–106; Modood, 1998, 2007: 87–116; Parekh, 2000?: 142–176). National identity, providing a sense of belonging to all members of the political community, is applicable to the state, connecting political institutions and cultural attributes (Parekh, 2008: 56–57; Uberoi, 2015b: 14, 2018: 49).
We understand multiculturalism as a practical principle that characterizes our society, and which can be seen through the prism of everyday cultural practices of the population, even if at the level of public opinion the problem of reintegration of citizens in Kazakhstan is an urgent task of its political agenda. And we demonstrate this fact through a case study of everyday eating practices (Tashkent tea, pilaf in a box), trends in artistic creativity in clothing design (the ethnic style in a modern interpretation), language practice (pidginization) of the country’s population, which will be conducted within six months.

Conference 2023:
Nationalism and Multiculturalism

Colonialism, Racism, and Cosmopolitanism in Aimé Césaire’s Political Writings

In her book, _études littéraire françaises: Aimé Césaire le terreau primordial_ (1993), Jacqueline Leiner argues that Césaire’s “inventory of words is a total account of the world. His geography, which begins from the island [of Martinique] (Basse-pointe, Diamant, Tartane, Caravelle) includes Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas” (18). This transnational quality of Césaire’s intellectual life is also apparent in his attempts to understand the consequences of French colonialism and World War II on Martinique. While documenting these consequences, Césaire reflects a salient cosmopolitanism that resists the racism and fascism that France perpetrated against blacks of Martinique and Africa during slavery and colonialism. As Césaire shows, French colonial oppression contradicts the fair, cross-racial, and humanistic cosmopolitanism that both he and the metropole considered as keys to world peace. Discussing these dynamics, this paper will show that Césaire’s poetry, political essays, and his 1955 book, Discourse on Colonialism, reflect unsettling ambivalence within both personal and collective black conceptions of identity and relationships to hybridity. The roots of this dualism are in the colonial and postcolonial ambivalence that black intellectuals have historically expressed toward Western cosmopolitanism. Reflecting this dualism, Césaire denounced Western cosmopolitanism even though he firmly desired a balanced world in which Europe and America could harmoniously coexist with other societies through hybridity, mutual respect, and inclusion rather than fascism, colonialism, and racism.

Russia’s strategic narratives concerning its aggression against Ukraine exploit the concepts of “nationalism” and “Nazism” as complementary or even interchangeable. The paper addresses the problem of the equalization of these two concepts through the postcolonial theoretical framework because it has implications for the security of countries once being part of the Russian Empire and/or the Soviet Union. By equalizing nationalism and Nazism, Russia challenges the right of self-determination of its neighboring countries and creates a pretext for aggression. The paper aims to answer the research question: How does Russia relate the concepts of “nationalism” and “Nazism” in its strategic narratives about ex-Soviet countries? To answer the research question the thematic analysis of the speeches of Russian officials, reports, media publications, expert opinions, and other sources that provide an in-depth understanding of nationalism and Nazism from a Russian perspective will be conducted. The time frame of the study is limited to a period from 2014, when Russia started a hybrid warfare against Ukraine, till 2022 when Russia’s aggression against Ukraine turned into full-scale high-intensity warfare. A comparative perspective with other ex-Soviet states is expected to provide insight how the strategic narrative of the equalization of nationalism and Nazism is being used in Russian foreign policy in relation to the so called “near abroad” countries.

Recent research conceptualizes the old USSR as having been a colonial empire – and in turn, post-Soviet states are now in a postcolonial situation. In this paper, I take up postcolonial nationalism in Estonia, a state that dates to 1918 but became newly independent in 1991 after declaring the illegality of what has become identified as the ‘Soviet Occupation.’ By developing a corpus of Estonian newspaper articles and academic research papers from 1989 to 2021, I investigate how the new Estonian nationalism identifies and categorizes Russian communities who continue to live in Estonia. These materials provide insight into how concepts such as “assimilation” and “integration” are politicized to legitimate Estonian nationalizing policies, while simultaneously delegitimizing older Soviet nationalizing policies as mere Russification. This has the further effect of identifying current Russians as settlers, and Russian institutions in Estonia as colonial. Drawing on research from nationalism, postcolonialism, and the sociology of worth, I find that within the postcolonial discourse of Estonia, the justification of nationalizing policies simultaneously works to legitimate an indigenous Estonian identity while delegitimating Soviet approaches. I draw on these findings to suggest that recasting the social meaning of assimilation and integration thereby inverts the relations of power between settlers and indigenous people, with settlers now occupying a dominated space in the political sphere. In so doing, I advance research that demonstrates the complexity of postcolonial politics, and with it how postcolonial theories may be used in contradictory ways that reproduce oppositions between Colonial and Indigenous groups.

This study examines the deep-rooted tensions between Japanese nationalism and multiculturalism. The myth that Japan is an ethnically/racially homogeneous nation has historically served as a logic that marginalizes minority communities and individuals and obscures existing inequalities in Japanese society. Economic and cultural globalization has made the country face its “multicultural coexistence” [tabunka kyôsei] future and problems such as interpersonal and systemic racism, exploitation of immigrant workers, and other forms of human rights violation. Media coverage of and public response to the global diffusion of antiracist movements (e.g., BLM) indicate that the issues of race and racism, to some extent, draw attention in Japan. Still, it is difficult for the message to maintain its relevance not merely because of people’s ignorance but also because of the dominant myth that Japan is racially/ethnically homogeneous and/therefore, a “racism-free” nation. The myth remains a powerful ideology that helps racism, including the bloodline-based citizenship laws that narrowly define the condition for being Japanese, operate. It can also be found in the government’s reluctant response to international criticism of the discriminatory treatment of ethnic Koreans, Okinawans, and Ainus in the country. Applying the approach of critical discourse analysis, I mainly analyze the roles played by the four major news outlets (Asahi, Mainichi, Sankei, and Yomiuri) in reinforcing or challenging the hegemonic discourse about racism. It focuses on the following research questions: What do major Japanese newspapers report about racism and racial discrimination? How does their news coverage legitimize or delegitimize particular interpretations of national identity?

The Bloque Nacionalista Galego’s electoral success in the last regional election in 2020 brings new hopes to Galician nationalist movement. However, such political revival contrasts with a lack of academic interest in what we could call an understudied nationalist phenomenon. The current rise, under Ana Pontón’s leadership, poses questions about how the BNG will be able to integrate the representation of voters with a clear dual national identity under the nationalist organization. In order to tackle this issue, we intend to study the discursive and symbolic production of the BNG to observe whether the political party changed the civic-cultural narrative when in opposition, in comparison with their government experience. By doing so, we will discover if we stand before a new Galician nationalist stage or, rather, a continuation of its institutional praxis. To achieve this, we start from a constructivist epistemology that understands nationalism as political movements in charge of producing the nation, and discourses as a constituted social practice with a constituent capacity. We rely on a theoretical-discursive approach focused on the ideological construction of national identities by using novel primary data and also secondary sources corresponding to the periods 2005-2009 and 2016-2022. The former time frame represents their government experience, while the latter represents the period where the party obtained the best electoral results. This research aims to contribute to the study of sub-state nationalism and provide new insights about a long-established nationalist project immersed within Spanish multicultural context.

Scottish people who live in London present a distinct case for problematising multiculturalism and its relationship to nationalism. This paper presents preliminary data analysis of ongoing fieldwork among this population, where semi-structured interviews are raising themes of multiculturalism and national identity. Scots in London present a unique, and under-researched, site of inquiry into these themes. Their perception of multiculturalism in the multinational United Kingdom and their idiosyncratic place means their experience of the diversity of London is worthy of examination.

This paper argues that this group’s perceptions of the salience of cultural and national difference are changed by living in London, but that this, perhaps paradoxically, reinforces separatist nationalism and the desire for Scottish independence.

Compelling initial findings show that some interviewees do not see themselves as contributing to London’s multiculturalism, despite avowing a separate national identity. The data presented here also shows the effect of multicultural diversity on national identities that exist in contention with each other, in this instance Scottishness, Englishness and Britishness, as well as ‘London-ness’. Key themes from interview data that will be presented: how Scottish people understand diversity in London; how they imagine multiculturalism would feature in an independent Scotland; and how they relate themselves, and their Scottish national identity, to the British capital city.

The interviewees to date tend to support independence, which is a finding in itself. This unique situation allows the deployment, and complication, of some theories of ‘migration’: notably Brubaker’s triadic nexus, and of ‘migrant assimilation’.

National ideologies often employ notions of cultural homogeneity of nations, where “all its adult members are supposed to share cultural knowledge, skills and meanings equally” (Šumi 2000, 176), we are all supposed to received it and “radiate” it in equal share. This is closely related to Herder’s understanding of cultures; as Welsch (1999) puts is, understanding of culture emerging from Herder’s Volksgeist, is in monocultural terms, thus defined by three elements: social homogenization, ethnic consolidation and intercultural delimitation, or what Brubaker calls “groupism” and nations are not “monochrome ethnic, racial or cultural blocs” (2002, 164). In the world, organised in an assemble of nation-states, national ideologies “flag their homelands daily”, as Michael Billig’s (1995) would say, which position us daily as national subjects – and reminds us of that. Thus, following Hobsbawm (1990, 10) that nationalism cannot be understood unless also analysed from below and the discursive turn in nationalism that questions how the nation is discursively narrated and reproduced (Antonsich & Skey 2017) the paper discusses the results obtained in the case study of Slovenian Istria (telephone survey (October 2014 (N=715)) and interviews ((life stories) (February–June 2015 (N=30)), focusing on inhabitants’ understanding, experiencing, and making sense of their national and (trans)cultural identity. Namely, how inhabitants of this border and multicultural area, at the fringes of the nation-state with the imposition monocultural visions of nationhood, understand and generate meaning of their everyday nationhood, identities, and how they understand their common and daily experience of multiculturalism (Pocecco 2016, Wise 2014) and transculturality (Welsch 1999).

Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage.
Brubaker, Rogers. 2002. Ethnicity without Groups. European Journal of Sociology, 43 (2): 163–189.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1990. Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pocecco, Antonella. 2016. Everyday Multiculturalism: Individual Experience of Cultural Diversity. In: Practical rationality in political contexts: facing diversity in contemporary multicultural Europe, G. De Anna and R. Martinelli (eds.), EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, pp. 163–177.
Antonsich, Marco & Skey, Michael. 2017. Introduction: The Persistence of Banal Nationalism. In: Everyday Nationhood: Theorising Culture, Identity and Belonging after Banal Nationalism, Skey, Michael & Antonsich, Marco (eds.), pp. 1–13.London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Šumi, Irena. 2000. Kultura, etni?nost, mejnost: Konstrukcije razli?nosti v antropološki presoji (=Culture, ethnicity, boundary: constructions of diversity in anthropological perspective). Ljubljana: Založba ZRC (ZRC SAZU).
Welsh, Wolfgang. 1999. Transculturality – the Puzzling Form of Cultures Today. In: Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, Featherstone, M. & S. Lash, (eds.),194–213. London: Sage.
Wise, Amanda. 2014. Everyday multiculturalism. In :Migration: A COMPAS Anthology, M. Anderson, B. & Keith, M. (eds.), pp. 161–162.

In contemporary multinational states, different nationalisms tend to compete in the political, social and cultural realms. In Spain, Spanish nationalism competes with Catalan, Basque and Galician nationalisms. This research, located between the fields of Nationalism Studies and Sociology of Education, is aimed at shedding some light on how competition between nationalisms occurs in primary education. It assumes Michael Billig’s banal nationalism thesis and analyses the banal transmission of Basque and Spanish identities observable in textbooks currently used in Basque schools. More concretely, this research compares, through quantitative and qualitative content analysis, three 6th grade (that is, 11-12 years) Social Science textbooks in Basque language produced and distributed by different publishers: Santillana – Zubia, Ikaselkar and Anaya – Haritza. Quantitative analysis includes counting and classifying maps, chronograms and pages into different categories, depending on the territorial scale that these icons or contents reflect. Qualitative analysis includes such indicators as the use of banalising linguistic practices (deixes, ellipses and euphemisms), symbology, logoisation of maps, otherness, (re)construction of the nation’s genealogy, etc. Special attention has been given to the ambivalent nature of Basque identity, which can be represented either as a regional identity within Spain or as a national identity on its own. The findings reveal that each publisher aligns with a single national identity. This way, most publishers paradoxically banalise Spanish nationalism through the Basque language, and reproduce Basque identity in a regionalist way. Ikaselkar is the only one that represents Basque identity as a distinct national identity.

China’s unique residency system (hukou) has divided the population into two categories- city people and rural people. With the recent reforms in the system, there are fewer restrictions in the citizenship rules. Will this also bring change to how rural and city people conduct their lives? Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Chinese city school and a rural school, this paper will map out the connections between the city-rural divide, education, and everyday nationalism. Weber’s concept of “status groups” is used to analyse the collective actions, struggles, and contradictions in these two schools. This paper will start by introducing the background of the fieldwork, proposing that in the Chinese education context, exam marks are the “prestige” that students, families, teachers and schools strive for. Next, specifically, the city school shows a high consensus on the value of this prestige and patriotic education, as well as everyday nationalism, serving the overall aim to seek higher grades. On the contrary, in rural schools where students are less advantaged in academic excellence, more explicit nationalism appears to be an alternative to justify the value of students who do not possess the same educational prestige.

Under the conditions of social pluralisation, tendencies towards national closure (Bauman 2017, Boym 2001, Brown 2017) are becoming increasingly noticeable. History textbooks reflect this tension: On the one hand, they are part of nationally shaped educational systems and support routines through which nation states are reproduced on a daily basis (Billig 1995). On the other hand, ‘diversity’ finds its way into educational media, which can also be read as resources for inclusion (Lücke 2016). In this sense, reproductive, but also “critical” and “subversive” practices can be identified in educational media production (Macgilchrist 2011).
In order to work out the mechanisms by which the construction of ‘nation’ and ‘pluralisation’ or of national-ethno-cultural groups (Mecheril 2015) is promoted in history textbooks, this paper examines (1) how educational media producers position themselves in the context of social pluralisation and (2) how they construct social pluralisation and national closure in history textbooks. For this purpose, interviews with 17 actors from four German educational media publishing houses were subjected to a poststructural discourse analysis.
The paper maps the results by firstly showing to what extent and how non-coherences (Law et al. 2013) shape the positionings of actors in educational media production in relation to ‘nation’ and ‘pluralisation‘: Nationalism is criticised in a differentiated manner and rejected, while at the same time national-ethno-cultural differences are stabilised. Second, the paper uses a concrete example (the creation of the topic of migration history in educational media) to illustrate how the interviewees identify limiting conditions in their professional activities and how they negotiate leeway in order to construct ‘migration as opportunity’. The further question is raised as to what extent a ‘mainstreaming of migration’ (also) contributes to the persistence of the national in history textbooks.

Canadian multiculturalism signals that regardless of race or ethnicity, everyone can find spaces of belonging within the Canadian mosaic. The province of Quebec unapologetically rejected this narrative of multiculturalism in favour of interculturalism promoting Quebec as a distinct nation within Canada. From Quebec’s perspective, its Francophone identity is under threat of extinction by virtue of its location on the North American Anglophone continent. Within these two conceptualizations of the nationhood, the question is asked about the extent to which each facilitates the acknowledgment of systemic racism which resulted in the racial disparity in educational attainment observed among Black youth in Canada. Multicultural education is considered the vehicle through which the ideals of multiculturalism belonging are transmitted to citizens and newcomers. What are the ideals transmitted when interculturalism is pursued? Interrogating Quebec’s interculturalism in education as a case study using the framework of Critical Race Theory and Black Crit, an analysis of the progress towards addressing anti-Black racism in the school curriculum is undertaken. Document analysis is performed on the Broad Areas of Learning of the current Quebec Education Program (QEP). This analysis is compared with the analysis of archival data of 1960s from Black community newspapers and the archives of the Negro Community Center. The trend reveals increasing calls from the 1970s to address anti-Black racism in education, but it is not reflected in the QEP to date. It is argued that despite its liberalism, Canadian nationalism defined by multiculturalism provides more opportunity for addressing anti-Black discrimination in education than interculturalism nationalism in Quebec.

Key word: Multiculturalism; Interculturalism; Critical Race Theory; Black youth education

Sanjana Hazarika
Intersectionality in India has been largely championed by Dalit Feminist thought that pulls to the centre the knowledge claims of Dalit women and emphasises their epistemic positioning produced by the intersections of caste, class, and gender. The inherent understanding is that it is brahmanical patriarchy that structures Indian society and renders Dalit women as the most oppressed and violated, vertically (along caste and class hierarchy) and horizontally (along the gender axis), not only to maintain caste/class hegemonies but also to reproduce social inequality. However, this prevailing discourse on intersectionality fails to acknowledge the difference of women from North-East India, whose lives in post-colonial militarised societies in geopolitical borderlands/peripheries are punctured by continuing histories of state-sponsored violence and ripples of ethno-nationalist and insurgent movements on the one hand, and political and racial marginalisation leading to targeted violence and discrimination outside these peripheries, on the other. The patriarchal structuring of
tribal societies also prevents the exercise of any meaningful socio-political power by tribal women. This paper argues for a self-reflexive rethinking of the feminist-intersectional framework to find ways through which the standpoint of tribal women of North-East India, which in itself is a heterogeneous category, can be incorporated, such that theoretical bridges not only aid better empirical understanding of ethnic lives but also help forge feminist alliances.

Since 2011, the City of Toronto has been co-implementing commemorative projects in Nathan Phillips Square with Indigenous communities, people, and organizations that holistically recognize the historical presence of Indigenous people and promote their resilience and vibrant contemporary existence. Drawing on qualitative analysis of these initiatives and autoethnographic work, along with interviews with relevant actors, this paper presents Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square as a case study in understanding the direction of reconciliation in Canada. I argue that despite the current reconciliatory relationship between the municipality and Indigenous people being premised on accepting and equitably including the latter in decision-making processes, these commemorative projects are imbued with settler-colonial essentialist understandings, presenting Indigenous cultures in acceptable, appealing, and ‘authentic’ ways to settler audiences. These initiatives operate within Canada’s multiculturalist praxes, promoting a past chiefly characterized by cultural genocide. I suggest that the politics of recognition limits possible ways of challenging discourses about Indigenous experiences, histories, and voices in public spaces and reinforces cultural recognition as the primary means for reconciliation. How does this reconciliation strategy affect discourses of Indigenous peoples’ contemporary existence within public spaces? What important questions have yet to be imagined, and asked, about reconciliation? And how will this strategy affect future national and urban policy as a whole?

In 2009, by means of a new constitution and as a result of long term indigenous struggles and social movements, Bolivia officially became a ‘Plurinational’ State recognizing 36 indigenous nations within its territory. Since then, the Andean country has been the scenario of significant institutional, political and social transformations.
Plurinational is the political project emerging from the indigenous notion of ‘interculturalidad’. ‘Interculturalidad’ differs from ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘interculturality’, as these refer mainly to the recognition and celebration of cultural diversity (descriptive). Instead, ‘interculturalidad’ presents a demand to transform (neo)colonial structures and the intercultural reconstruction of a more equal society (transformative). Hence, Plurinationalism constitutes a project of decolonization and state transformation, an amalgamation between western political theory and the indigenous knowledges that seeks to overcome the historical colonial indigenous subordination.
The papers draws from over 10 years of interdisciplinary research (cultural anthropology, political science and history) in and on Bolivia with indigenous actors, and the review of secondary sources. It discusses how plurinationalism has been successful in imagining a mulnational community, although not without resistance. It points to the theoretical contradictions of seeking indigenous emancipation and political recognition through the state. Lastly, it discusses the concrete advances made and limitations encountered in everyday practices, on three levels: legal, political, and cultural linguistic. In this way, the paper offers a succinct assessment of one of the most ambitious political projects in search of indigenous emancipation and the accommodation of multinationality within the borders of the nation-state, looking both to practical and theoretical implications.