Nation-states and reactions to Covid in Europe
2024-09-30 16:30 - 18:00 (Europe/Paris) | Online
How did and how do nation-states in Europe react to Covid – the virus itself, the vaccine, and the aftermath? Find out with Siniša Malešević (UCD), Lea David (UCD), Sarah Carol (UCD), & Gordana Uzelac (London Met), who have co-authored four papers on nationalism and Covid on Monday 30th September at 1630 UK time (check this time in your city) – as ever, we will be live on Facebook and YouTube.
Plotting against our nation: COVID-19, nationalisms, and conspiracy theories in five European countries
Pro-social attitudes towards ethno-religious out-groups during the COVID-19 pandemic: A survey experiment in five countries
“My Country First”: Vaccine Nationalism in England?
Heroes, villains and naked nations: micro-solidarity and grounded nationalism in times of crisis
Citations
Malešević, S., Uzelac, G., Carol, S., & David, L. (2024). Plotting against our nation: COVID-19, nationalisms, and conspiracy theories in five European countries. National Identities, 26(2), 141–171.
Carol, S., David, L., Malešević, S., & Uzelac, G. (2024). Pro-social attitudes towards ethno-religious out-groups during the COVID-19 pandemic: A survey experiment in five countries. International Sociology, 39(1), 113-137.
Uzelac, G., Carol, S., David, L., & Malešević, S. (2024). “My Country First”: Vaccine Nationalism in England? Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 30(3), 335–358.
David, L., Carol, S., Malešević, S., & Uzelac, G. (2024). Heroes, villains and naked nations: micro-solidarity and grounded nationalism in times of crisis. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1–22.

Nationalism: A World History
2025-01-15 16:30 - 18:00 UTC | Online
ASEN president Jonathan Hearn sits down with Eric Storm to discuss his new book, Nationalism: A World History for our first event of 2025. We’ll be live on 15th January from 1630UTC (check this time in your city) on Facebook and YouTube, and members will receive an invitation to join the Zoom call.
About the book
In Nationalism, historian Eric Storm sheds light on contemporary nationalist movements by exploring the global evolution of nationalism, beginning with the rise of the nation-state in the eighteenth century through the revival of nationalist ideas in the present day. Storm traces the emergence of the unitary nation-state—which brought citizenship rights to some while excluding a multitude of “others”—and the pervasive spread of nationalist ideas through politics and culture.
Storm shows how nationalism influences the arts and humanities, mapping its dissemination through newspapers, television, and social media. Sports and tourism, too, have helped fashion a world of discrete nations, each with its own character, heroes, and highlights. Nationalism saturates the physical environment, not only in the form of national museums and patriotic statues but also in efforts to preserve cultural heritage, create national parks, invent ethnic dishes and beverages, promote traditional building practices, and cultivate native plants. Nationalism has even been used for selling cars, furniture, and fashion.
By tracing these tendencies across countries, Storm shows that nationalism’s watershed moments were global. He argues that the rise of new nation-states was largely determined by shifts in the international context, that the relationships between nation-states and their citizens largely developed according to global patterns, and that worldwide intellectual trends influenced the nationalization of both culture and environment. Over the centuries, nationalism has transformed both geopolitics and the everyday life of ordinary people.
About Eric Storm
Eric Storm is associate professor of general history at Leiden University. He has been a visiting scholar at the University Complutense of Madrid, Oxford University, and the Free University in Berlin. He is the author of The Culture of Regionalism and The Discovery of El Greco and the coeditor of Writing the History of Nationalism, Colonial Soldiers in Europe, Regionalism in Modern Europe, and World Fairs and the Global Moulding of National Identities.

Mechanisms of National Solidarity
2025-02-06 17:30 - 19:00 UTC
Join us for a panel discussion on the recent themed section in Nations and Nationalism on ‘mechanisms of national solidarity’ with Danny Kaplan, Siniša Malešević, Lea David, Daniel Lainer-Vos, Jon Fox, and Hizky Shoham on 6th February from 1730UTC (check this time in your city) live on Facebook and YouTube – members will receive an invitation to join the Zoom call.
The themed section on ‘Mechanisms of National Solidarity’ explores key questions and challenges related to studying national solidarity as distinct from national identity. Focusing on the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’, this section highlights the importance of examining and theorising the social mechanisms that shape different manifestations of national solidarity. These mechanisms include interpersonal interactions, social networks, communicative processes, socio-political institutions and iconic material objects. Additionally, the introduction briefly outlines the six contributions in this section, which examines specific solidarity mechanisms within particular national contexts. The contributions offer valuable insights into the study of nationhood and nationalism in both everyday life and public events, helping to unravel the under-explored relationship between collective identity formation and the creation of solidarity.
The articles are:
Introduction – Danny Kaplan
Clubs and events: Two models of performance in studies of sport and national solidarity – Danny Kaplan
Between deep comradeship and nationalism: The social dynamics of solidarity on the battlefield – Siniša Malešević
The victims’ shoes trope and emerging solidarity in political protest – Lea David
Orchestrating National Occasions: The formation of the Irish American athletic league in New York City (1904–1920) – Dan Lainer-Vos
Clapping the nation, or, from a global pandemic to national imaginaries via local solidarities – Jon Fox
Performing national practices of solidarity-through-sameness – Hizky Shoham

From Empire to Nation-State: Minority Rights in Estonia in the First Half of the 20th Century
2025-02-18 17:30 - 19:30 UTC | PAN 9.04, LSE
This year’s Anthony D. Smith Visiting Fellow, Timo Aava, speaks on his research on non-territorial autonomy. We’ll be live on Facebook and YouTube or you can join us in person in room PAN.9.04 at the LSE.
The talk will discuss new findings on the theoretical discussions and the implementation of non-territorial minority self-government in Estonia during the first half of the 20th century. Based on the principle of non-territorial autonomy, Estonia introduced legislation in 1925 allowing minorities to establish self-government bodies to administer their cultural and educational affairs. This legislation was widely regarded as the most minority-friendly in interwar Europe. The talk will argue that this legislation and the debates surrounding it were a continuation of earlier discussions on the organisation of empires and the rights of nationalities, with which theoreticians and politicians had intensively engaged in the Habsburg and Romanov empires. The talk will offer a fresh interpretation of the emergence and functioning of this minority protection system and show that the Estonian case was part of a transnational debate over the nature of modern statehood and the rights of nationalities.
Timo Aava is a historian of modern Europe focusing on the history of political thought and minority rights. He holds a doctoral degree in history from the University of Vienna. He has held research positions at the Jacob Robinson Institute for the History of Individual and Collective Rights at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the University of Vienna, and the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies. In addition to the Anthony D. Smith Visiting Fellowship at LSE, in the 2024-2025 academic year, he will hold academic positions at Yale University and Harvard University.

Nationalism and cosmopolitanism in China
2025-03-12 16:00 - 17:30 UTC | Violet Laidlaw Room, 6th Floor, Chrystal MacMillan Building, 15a George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9LD, United Kingdom
We join the University of Edinburgh School of Social and Political Science on March 12th from 1600UTC (check this time in your city) for a presentation by Dr Canglong Wang on nationalism and cosmopolitanism in China. We’ll be live on Facebook and YouTube, or you can join in person at the Chrystal Macmillan Building in Edinburgh or on Zoom (registration required for both).
About the talk
In this talk, I explore the intricate relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism and how they influence the discourse and practice of citizenship, especially within Confucian education. I investigate the theoretical underpinnings of Confucian classical education and share insights from the teaching practices at a specific Confucian school, showing how these elements come together to shape students into Confucian cosmopolitan citizens with a strong sense of Chinese national identity. Through this discussion, I offer an insider perspective on how civic identity is nurtured within the Confucian tradition, contributing to the broader shift toward post-orientalist understandings of citizenship. Ultimately, I argue that Confucian education has the potential to enrich global conversations on citizenship by providing nuanced perspectives on the relationship between national identity and global awareness, all within the unique context of China’s political and cultural environment.
About the speaker
Canglong Wang is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Edinburgh and has previously taught at the University of Hull and Birkbeck, University of London. His research extensively explores the cultural, social, and political implications of the revival of Confucian education in contemporary China. He has a persistent research interest in the topic of Confucianism and citizenship in China. His work has been featured in many leading journals and edited volumes. He is the author of “The Rise of Confucian Citizens in China: Theoretical Reflections and Empirical Explorations” (Routledge, 2023) and “Cultivating the Confucian Individual: The Confucian Education Revival in China” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). As a guest editor, Dr. Wang has successfully completed three Special Issues of journals, including “Reconsidering Chinese Citizenship” for Citizenship Studies (2023), “Beyond the State’s Reach? Education and Citizen Making in China” for Social Transformations in Chinese Societies (2023), and “Reinventing Confucian Education in Contemporary China” for China Perspectives (2022).

'Doing Nation' in a Digital Age: Banal Expressions of Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Polymedia Environments
2025-04-07 17:30 - 19:00 (Europe/Paris) | Online
Sanja Vico discusses her new book, ‘Doing Nation’ in a Digital Age Banal Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Polymedia Environments, with Mirca Madianou, Sandra Obradović, and Birgül Yılmaz. We’ll be live on Facebook, YouTube, and Zoom on 7th April from 1730 – registration is required to join us on Zoom.
This is a joint event with the Centre for European Studies at the University of Exeter.
About the book
This book introduces a new theory of national identity, arguing that the nation does not only represent an abstract “imagined community” but also represents embodied cultural and discursive practices.
Drawing upon a detailed case study of Serbian Londoners, this truly interdisciplinary study positions media as constitutive of national identities. The author contends that nations come into being and are sustained through everyday interpersonal communication practices that have increasingly become mediated, especially for migrants. She develops the concept of “doing nation” to argue that we should think of the nation as a dynamic process. Situated first within a particular migration context, the concept is then applied more broadly as everyday communication practices are becoming increasingly mediated worldwide.
Covering a breadth of key theories and concepts in this field, including diaspora, ethnicity, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, social media affordances and polymedia, this book will appeal to scholars and students researching digital media, migration, identities, nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the social science disciplines.
Sanja Vico
Sanja Vico is a Lecturer (E&R) in Communications and Digital Media at the University of Exeter, and a collaborator on the ERC-funded project Justice Interactions and Peacebuilding at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She received a PhD in Media and Communications from Goldsmiths, University of London, having previously graduated from the LSE and the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Belgrade. She has published on issues of digital media in contexts of migration, identity, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, post-conflict justice and reconciliation. Her monograph titled “‘Doing Nation’ in a Digital Age: Banal Expressions of Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Polymedia Environments” was published with Routledge in December 2024. She was awarded for her article “‘Globalised Difference’: Identity Politics on Social Media” by ECREA in 2019.
Mirca Madianou
Mirca Madianou is Professor in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her current research focuses on the social consequences of communication technologies, infrastructures and artificial intelligence (AI) in a global south context especially in relation to migration and humanitarian emergencies. She is currently Principal Investigator on a British Academy grant on digital identity programmes in refugee camps in Thailand. Her latest book, ‘Technocolonialism: when technology for good is harmful’ was published in November 2024. Earlier books include: Mediating the Nation: news, audiences and the politics of identity, and Migration and New Media: transnational families and polymedia. At Goldsmiths, Mirca is academic co-director of the newly established Migrant Futures Institute and co-convenor of the Digital Culture Unit.
Sandra Obradović
Sandra Obradović is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the Open University and a researcher at the Electoral Psychology Observatory (EPO, LSE). She completed her PhD in Social Psychology at the London School of Economics in the UK. She serves on the editorial board for the European Journal of Social Psychology. She specializes in researching how group identities and group boundaries are constructed, mobilised and resisted, and the consequences this has for political behaviour, including in contexts of post-conflict societies, populism, polarization and elections.
Birgül Yılmaz
Birgül Yılmaz is Senior Lecturer in Intercultural Communication at the University of Exeter, where she is one of the University Senators. She is a critical sociolinguist, applied linguist, and ethnographer conducting ethnographic and discourse analytic research projects that focus on language, forced migration, and everyday social inequalities in humanitarian settings. She has held research and teaching positions internationally, with roles in Greece, the UK, the USA, and Hong Kong. She was awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, during which she conducted an 18-month ethnography with refugees living in two neighbourhoods in Athens.

ASEN Conference 2025: Nationalism and Borders
2025-04-23 - 2025-04-25 | Central European University, Nador utca 15, Budapest, 1051, Hungary
Full information is at asen.ac.uk/conference.

N&N Debate 2025: Aram Hur's Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia
2025-06-04 18:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Paris) | Sumeet Valrani Theatre, London School of Economics, Centre Building, Houghton Street, London, London, WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom
Join the panel for a debate on Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia (Cornell UP, 2022), by Aram Hur. The event takes place in the Sumeet Valrani Lecture Theatre at the LSE, or join us online on Facebook or YouTube, from 1800 on Wednesday 4th June 2025.
Our speakers, Atsuko Ichijo and Yookyeong Im join the author, Aram Hur, for a debate on her book which investigates the impulse behind a sense of civic duty in democracies. Why, she asks, do some citizens feel a responsibility to vote, pay taxes, or take up arms in defense of one’s country? Through comparing democratic societies in East Asia and elsewhere, Hur shows that the sense of obligation to be a good citizen—upon which the resilience of a democracy depends—emerges from a force long thought detrimental to democracy itself: national attachments.
Narratives of Civic Duty won the 2023 Robert A. Dahl Award from APSA, and was shortlisted for the 2023 Luebbert Award from APSA for best book in comparative politics.
About the speakers
Atsuko Ichijo is Associate Professor in Sociology in the Department of Criminology, Politics and Sociology, Kingston University, London. Her research interests are in the field of Nationalism Studies. Her recent publication includes:Nationalism and Subjectivity: East Asian Experiences (2025, forthcoming, Oxford University Press); ‘Defending the Scottishness of Scotch Whisky’ (2024), in Catherin Ng, Titilayo Adebola and Abbe Brown (eds) Place-Branding Experiences: Perspectives from Intellectual Property Owners, Users and Lawyers, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 57-74; ‘What does it mean to be a Christian nationalist in Meiji Japan?: Religion, nationalism and the state’, (2023),International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 309-327; ‘“Overcoming modernity”, overcoming what?: “Modernity” in wartime Japan and its implication’, (2022), International Journal of Social Imaginaries, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 107-128. She is a member of the editorial team of Nations and Nationalism.
Yookyeong Im is an anthropologist specializing in law, language, gender and sexuality, and social movements in the context of contemporary Korea. Her work examines the ways in which the law engages with social discrimination and political aspirations. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies, among others. She is currently working on a book manuscript based on her doctoral thesis, which explores how legal advocacy has emerged as one of the most potent means in South Korean queer activism since the late 2000s. With ethnographic and historical approaches to the increasing judicialization of social movements, she revisits the question of law’s potential in emancipatory politics and reveals the dilemmatic function of law in shaping queer political imaginations. Before joining the University of Sheffield, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Korean studies, Indiana University Bloomington.
Aram Hur is the Kim Koo Chair in Korean Studies and Assistant Professor of Political Science at The Fletcher School, Tufts University. She is a scholar of nationalism and democracy in East Asia. Her first book, Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia, is winner of the 2023 Robert A. Dahl Award for “scholarship of the highest quality on the subject of democracy” from the American Political Science Association. Her research appears in leading disciplinary journals including the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Journal of East Asian Studies. I frequently serve as an expert panelist on Korea & democracy issues and contribute evidence-based commentary to current affairs, including in Foreign Policy and the Washington Post. She holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University, M.P.P. from the Harvard Kennedy School, and B.A. with honors from Stanford University.
Elliott Green is Professor in Development Studies in the Department of International Development at the LSE. Elliott has three main research areas: 1) ethnic politics and national identity in Africa, 2) patronage, clientelism and African development, and 3) the political demography of modern Africa. He has conducted fieldwork in Uganda, Tanzania and Botswana, and is currently working on a book manuscript on ethnic and national identity in modern Africa. His major publications include Industrialization and Assimilation: Explaining Ethnic Change in the Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2022) as well as articles in such academic journals as the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Ethnic and Racial Studies, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Modern African Studies, Studies in Comparative International Development and World Development, among others. He currently sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Development Studies, Nations and Nationalism and Regional and Federal Studies, and is a member of the Executive Committee of the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. Outside academia he has briefed the British High Commissioner to Uganda twice (in 2008 and 2010) and regularly writes blog entries for a variety of websites. He holds degrees from the LSE (PhD, MSc) and Princeton University (AB).

Straight Nation
2025-06-05 17:00 - 19:00 (Europe/Paris) | KCL Bush House South East 1.05, Bush House, Aldwych, London
The next event in our book presentation series is Pavan Mano’s Straight Nation: Heteronormativity and other exigencies of postcolonial nationalism. Join us in person at King’s College, London, or online on Facebook or YouTube. Please note that a free ticket, available above, is required for this event.
About the book
Straight Nation dissects the intricacies of nationalism in postcolonial Singapore and its entanglements with the governance of sexuality. Rejecting the romanticization of the nation as a pure bastion of belonging, the book theorizes nationalism as a force obsessed with continually generating threats, and excavates the alliance it has struck up with heteronormativity to produce a series of minoritized figures that contemporary identity claims can neither handle nor dispel.
Through an elegant exploration of a vast array of texts and cultural artifacts, the book argues that the relationship between sexuality and nation is instrumental in producing multiple queered figures who are displaced from the national imaginary. Dwelling on what is often taken as conventional wisdom, Straight Nation demonstrates how queerness can be xenologized under the sign of the postcolonial nation and turned into a technology of “race”, gender and class in the right contexts.
The book delivers a sharp riposte to narrow identity politics and outlines in detail how the governance of sexual expression functions as a powerful mechanism to shape the lives of many – including, as unlikely as it may seem, heterosexual people. In the face of the far-reaching effects of heteronormativity coupled with nationalism, Straight Nation presents a compelling argument for an expansive, non-identarian political critique capable of dismantling the deeply entrenched force of heteronormativity in postcolonial Singapore, and the detritus of nationalism along with it.
Straight Nation is published by Manchester University Press
About Pavan
Pavan Mano is a Lecturer in Global Cultures in the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities at King’s College London.

Radicalisation and Crisis Management: Shifts of Radical Right Discourse
2025-11-10 16:30 - 18:00 UTC
As part of ASEN’s book discussion series, we sit down with Vasiliki (Billy) Tsagkroni to discuss their new book, Radicalisation and Crisis Management: Shifts of Radical Right Discourse on 10th November from 1630UTC (check this time in your city). As ever, we’ll be live on Facebook and YouTube and members will be invited to join the Zoom call.
About the book
This book discusses theories of crisis management and the radical right, to shed light on how responses to crisis influence radical right parties in their presence, discourse, and evolution. The book offers a comparative perspective by examining case studies with various traditions of radical right actors, presenting data on how crisis exploitation can assist in exploring, reconsidering, bargaining, and learning about the prospects of change of political parties. It focuses on the debate on radicalization and crisis management. Similar to the already existing economic, political, post-Brexit, and migration crises in Europe, discourses of fear around the latest health crisis are paving the way for further radicalised discourse from the far right. The book looks into how radical right parties in Europe have responded to these crises. It monitors and explores how crisis exploitation impacts political strategies, opportunity-seeking behaviours, and the evolution of the discourse of radical right parties in the contemporary political landscape.
About the author
Vasiliki (Billy) Tsagkroni is Senior Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics at the Institute of Political Science. Their main research includes far-right parties, populism and radicalisation, political discourse, narratives in times of crisis, political marketing and branding and policy making. Their work has been published, among others, in the Journal of Common Market Studies, Party Politics and British Journal of Politics and International Relations and numerous edited books. They hold a PhD from Queen Mary University London (2015), a MA from Panteion University of Athens (2008) and a BA from the same institution (2005).

Book launch: Atsuko Ichiko (2025), Nationalism and subjectivity: East Asian experiences
2026-02-20 18:00 - 20:00 UTC | Birkbeck Central, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HY, United Kingdom
This event is free but registration is required.
The Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research (ICPR) and the Department of Politics of Birkbeck, University of London and the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN) invite you to an event to introduce Dr Atsuko Ichijo’s latest monograph, Nationalism and Subjectivity which proposes a reconceptualisation of nationalism based on East Asian experiences.
Running order

Welcome by Dr David Cole (ASEN)
Introduction by Dr Mai Sato (ICPR)
On Nationalism Studies in Birkbeck by Dr Jason Edwards (Politics)
‘Nationalism and Subjectivity: East Asian Experiences’ by Dr Atsuko Ichijo (ICPR)
Reflection on the book by Dr John Hutchinson (London School of Economics and Political Science)
Q&A

The event is chaired by Dr David Cole (ASEN).
Dr John Hutchinson will comment on Dr Atsuko Ichijo’s presentation to initiate a discussion with the audience on the state of theories of nationalism and the field of Nationalism Studies. The in-person session will be followed by a drinks reception.
Dr Atsuko Ichijo is a Honorary Research Fellow at ICPR. Her research interest is in Nationalism Studies and Nationalism and Subjectivity is her sixth monograph on nationalism. She is a member of the editorial team of Nations and Nationalism and serves on the International Advisory Board of the Association of the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism.

Anthony D. Smith Lecture 2026 | Left, Right, & Centre: national political authority and its symbolisation | Jonathan Hearn
2026-04-21 18:00 UTC | Old Medical School, Teviot Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AG, United States
This lecture examines the ideas through which we both do and analyse national politics in the modern world, treating these as both concepts, and symbols. It looks at three pairs of concepts: Left and Right, Centre and Periphery, and Liberal and Authoritarian. Regarding Left/Right, I argue that this is a symbolic structure that is necessary for democratic politics, but not reflective of deep political principles. We may tend to overweight the analytic value of this distinction. Regarding Centre/Periphery, drawing on Edward Shils, I argue that this distinction is essential for the analysis of the distributions of material and ideological power in all states, across human history. Regarding Liberal/Authoritarian, I argue that this modern distinction hinges precisely on the ‘tightness’ or ‘looseness’ of the governing relationship between centre and periphery. Beneath this analysis of political ideas is a concern with how nations construct political authority, which for me is the core problem of nationalism. I invite the listener (and reader) to consider whether this concern comes within the remit of Anthony Smith’s ethnosymbolic approach.
