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This article reviews three recent books on nationalism, each focusing on a different aspect of this multifaceted phenomenon. Mylonas and Radnitz's volume explores the relationships between nationalism and the politics of treason, Hadžidedic's book zooms in on the historical interdependence of capitalism and nationalism, while Maxwell's historical monograph explores nationalist habitus as a form of lived experience. These three insightful contributions show the diversity and plasticity of nationalist ideology and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jelena Subotić's Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism has already received such broad recognition and numerous awards that its invaluable contribution to memory studies likely does not need repeating. It is not only a study of Holocaust remembrance in particular, but contributes broadly to our understanding of memory appropriation by the state, through a careful and vivid analysis of its transformation over time in several Eastern and Central European countries. Subotić provides a study of how memory can serve as a strategic tool for reinforcing state interests. The central argument of the book is that the states in question – Croatia, Lithuania, and Serbia – engage in memory appropriation in order to qualify their ontological insecurities (14). The strategies include "memory inversion," appropriating the Holocaust to emphasize crimes against them (primarily in Serbia), "memory divergence," placing blame for the genocide on German Nazis (Croatia), or "memory conflation," wherein Holocaust memory is combined and equated with Communist crimes (Lithuania, 15). These appropriation strategies, which overlap and are combined in the various states, allow states to paint themselves as the ultimate victims, absolving them of responsibility for their role in Holocaust crimes. The danger, of course, is that this not only set ups the false equivalence between victims of Communism and of the Holocaust, allowing for the relativization of Nazi collaboration as anti-Communist resistance, but also because it banalizes and trivializes the specific suffering of the Jewish population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stefano Bianchini's comprehensive work Liquid Nationalism focuses on the frequent redrawing of state borders, especially in Eastern Europe, the fluidity of the contours of nations, and the vagaries and idiosyncratic nature of political changes in the European continent from the 19th to the 21st centuries. The title of this work takes its inspiration from Zygmunt Bauman's famous work, Liquid Modernity (2000). Bauman's work, which was published in 2000 in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and also Yugoslavia that resulted in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, first posits the obvious – that fluids cannot hold their shape as solids do because the structural arrangements of solids, unlike liquids, bind their atoms together. Bauman characterizes solidity as having hardened contours and belonging to a pre-modernity with its unchanging or slowly changing social, political, and economic mores. Modernity, on the other hand, is likened to liquids in that, like time, there is a fluidity and a fast-moving quality associated with it brought about by the European Enlightenment and the development of democracy and capitalism. As he states, "When describing solids, one may ignore time altogether; in describing fluids, to leave time out of account would be a grievous mistake. Descriptions of fluids are all snapshots, and they need a date at the bottom of the picture" (2). The lightness of touch, the quickness of response to changing times that liquid modernity promised, he points out, has resulted in postmodernity or late capitalism as "deregulation, liberalization, 'flexibilization', increased fluidity, unbridling the financial, real estate and labor markets, easing the tax burden, etc." (5). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liquid Nationalism and State Partitions in Europe is Stefano Bianchini's magnum opus , reflecting a lifetime of working on the issues of ethno-nationalism in Europe, from Southeast Europe through Central Europe and the former Soviet space to all of western Europe. It is more than a book; it is an entire seminar, ranging not only geographically but also historically, from the Enlightenment to the second decade of the 21st century. Simply a list of the gems I learned would usurp all the space I have been given for this essay and much more. I choose to focus on one small part, what I take to be the primary motivation behind this book, namely his anguish over the lessons for western Europe "not learned from the dismemberment of Yugoslavia" (the title of Chapter 10), a case he knows so well. That chapter then begins with a quotation from another specialist on Yugoslavia, Jacques Rupnik, in Le Monde in 2014, "the greatest obstacle to the Europeanization of the Balkans is the Balkanization of Europe" (185). Nor are Bianchini and Rupnik alone in this concern. Already in 2012, Ivan Krastev convened two parallel seminars at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna on what he called, "The Logics of Disintegration" – of the Soviet case (Part I) and the Habsburg and Yugoslav cases (Part II) and their lessons for the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jelena Subotić's book is an important contribution to memory studies scholarship because it shows how the mechanism of memory appropriation connects state-led remembrance practices with the processes of national identity formation. Through the comparative analysis of Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania, Subotić argues that Holocaust remembrance in these states is less about remembering the Holocaust – or acknowledging the states' own responsibilities for the forced displacement and mass killing of the Jewish population on their territories – and more about the political use of the memory of the Holocaust in the context of the postcommunist transition and national identity insecurities. Yellow Star, Red Star , and particularly its chapters on Serbia and Croatia, nicely complement the existing literature – such as the work of Keith Brown, Siniša Malešević, Vjekoslav Perica, Dejan Jović, Emil Kerenji, Vjeran Pavlaković, Jelena Đureinović, Tamara Banjeglav, and Ana Ljubojević, among others – analyzing linkages between nationalism and state-sponsored memorialization practices in the post-Yugoslav states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a long career of research into the history of nationalism and ethnic politics in Europe, Stefano Bianchini has written an erudite book on how the nationality factor affects European politics – state formation and state partition in particular. He presents a wide-ranging survey over la longue durée, and also argues a case: that state partitioning should be avoided whenever possible, as it creates many more problems than it solves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do ethnic minorities who have been cut out of power choose, in some contexts, to take up arms and, in other contexts, to take to the streets? This question might seem an obvious one to ask, and yet it has rarely been posed in quite these terms – in large part because ethnic politics research has concentrated far more on violent resistance than its nonviolent alternative. We have reams of pages on the roots of ethnic insurgency, violent secessionism, and ethnic civil war but far less on why and how marginalized ethnic groups might mobilize using unarmed strategies of civil resistance. Manuel Vogt's impressive new book makes this point well – and offers a succinct and parsimonious explanation to answer the question of why an ethnic group might choose one path over another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been more than five decades since Ted Robert Gurr asked the question, "Why Men Rebel" (1970), in the most popular scholarly work of political rebellion and protest. The subsequent research often focused on grievances as the main motivation behind collective mobilization (Collier and Hoeffler 1998; Fearon and Laitin 2003). Yet the questions of how and why grievances lead to group mobilization and violent or nonviolent conflict onset still attract much scholarly attention. Not all groups with grievances engage in violent and/or nonviolent mobilization. Some do. This is the puzzle Manuel Vogt addresses in this theoretically novel and empirically rich book. He focuses on the type of state birth, i.e. colonial settler or decolonized states, as the backbone of several causal paths from grievances to ethnic conflict onset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why African Americans do not rebel? Why is there no armed insurrection of African Americans across the USA, especially in cities and states where they make up almost half of the population? In many parts of the world, ethnic, racial, and religious groups that are much smaller in size, much less disadvantaged socioeconomically and politically, and with relatively fewer historical grievances than African Americans, launched armed insurrections that lasted for decades. The quiescence of African Americans is a momentous puzzle if one subscribes to grievance-based theories of violent ethnic insurgencies (e.g., Gurr 1970). There are more than 40 million African Americans in the USA, which makes them a more populous ethnic group or a potential nation than any Eastern European nation in the European Union. Yet, approximately 40 million African Americans, despite their high level of collective consciousness and multifaceted grievances, did not produce as much armed insurgency as less than three million Basques in Spain have, to expand a comparison Manuel Vogt (4) briefly alludes to. What accounts for this dramatic difference? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grounded Nationalisms , as its name suggests, provides a rich historical and sociological account concerning the paradoxical persistence of nationalism. What motivates Malešević to write this book is precisely such a paradox, presenting nationalism as an ideologically bereft, anomalous, and exceptional political and social force, and evidence that suggests the contrary. As Malešević argues, "rather than being a historical abnormality and a temporary irritation," nationalism has continued as "the dominant form of modern subjectivity" because it is a cross-cutting "social practice embedded in the everyday life of modern societies" (2019, 3–4). In other words, Malešević's rich historical and sociological perspective provides the evidentiary and analytical flesh to see nationalism as "a super-thick ideology, a meta-ideological doctrine, which penetrates daily interactions of human beings and as such also shapes how modern individuals see and act in their social world" (4). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grounded Nationalisms: A Sociological Analysis has become an instant classic in nationalism studies. In just over 300 pages, Siniša Malešević, one of the world's leading nationalism scholars, has constructed a rich treatise on some of the central questions of our day: How should we think about nationalism? What is the future of nationalism? And what accounts for the ubiquity of national identities and national identification long after the so-called Age of Nationalism ended? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Siniša Malešević's Grounded Nationalisms asks: "Why has nationalism proved to be such a potent, protean, and durable force in the modern age? Why has the nation-state established itself as the central organizing mode of social and political life in the last two hundred years? Why is nationalism still the dominant form of collective subjectivity?" (8) The author draws from several disciplines to tackle these questions, including sociology, political science, history, psychology, demography, and anthropology. In a nutshell, he finds the answer rests in the historical origins and organizational, ideological, and micro-interactional dynamics of nationalist ideologies that evolve and adapt over time. This book is an instant classic of historical sociology arguing that nationalism is the dominant form of modern subjectivity and unlikely to be replaced or shaken by globalization or neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book The Red Mirror: Putin's Leadership and Russia's Insecure Identity by Gulnaz Sharafutdinova is a valuable contribution to the literature on post-Soviet Russian politics, as well as to identity studies. Scholars of international relations largely succeeded in demonstrating the relevance of national identities for foreign affairs. However, there are not so many works exploring their effects for domestic political regimes. Sharafutdinova explains Putin's lasting popular support by his contribution to the "sense of national identity and collective purpose that Russian citizens relate and value" (19–20). She relies on the social identity theory that posits a sense of belonging, pride, and self-esteem, provided to individuals by their respective groups, as an important driver of social behavior. According to Sharafutdinova, Putin's leadership rested upon a crafty exploitation of group emotions associated with "two central pillars of the Soviet collective identity, including a sense of exceptionalism ... and a sense of a foreign threat to the state and its people" (18). Such manipulations were facilitated by using the state-controlled media to broadcast the proper messages, on the one hand, and "the contextual variables" that made the Russian population sensitive to them, on the other (35). Among such variables, the author particularly emphasizes "the Russian citizen's collective experience of the Soviet collapse and the ensuing transition" (35). Of course, this is not the first work exploring the political outcomes of the national identity construction in Russia (e.g., Morozov 2009) or pointing to the contrast between the hardships of the early years of Russia's [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews several books including "Sorrowful Shores: Violence, Ethnicity and the End of the Ottoman Empire 1912-1923," by Ryan Gingeras, "Fezzes in the River: Identity Politics and European Diplomacy in the Middle East on the Eve of World War," Sarah Shields, and "How Happy to Call Oneself a Turk: Provincial Newspapers and the Negotiation of a Muslim National Identity," by Gavin Brockett.