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Nationalism remains a major influence on international relations in an increasingly globalised world. Many of the wars that erupted after the Cold War have their origins in ethnic tensions, border conflicts, or national aspirations. Given this, the geo-politicisation of nationalism deserves more attention in the literature. The current study aims to further the area by considering the role of territorial disputes in spawning various forms of nationalism and geopolitics. It develops an analytical framework based on the existing border dispute between Nepal and India in the 'Kalapani' region. Post-2019, the Kalapani dispute not only has represented bilateral border disputes between two entities but also reflects the overall geopolitics of the region. Similarly, it also represents the rise of 'nationalism' as a political anchor point in domestic politics in both India and Nepal. The paper based its assessment on the primary and secondary data analysis. Drawing on the data, this paper argues that border disputes between India and Nepal have two facets that signal the rising nationalism in both sides and the changing geopolitics of South Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that cultural and political strategies that appeal to citizenship and national identity can be used to regulate flows across borders. In this process, citizen bodies may be enrolled as key agents. Drawing on the National Friday Wear programme – a Ghanaian government initiative intended to encourage white-collar workers to dress their bodies in domestically produced textiles on Fridays to reduce the consumption, and thereby also the inflow, of foreign textiles – the paper illustrates that citizen bodies are both spaces upon which borders are inscribed and geopolitical actors that perform borders on behalf of the nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 27 September 2020, Azerbaijan went to war with Armenia on a scale not seen since the ceasefire of 1994. The conflict ended in another ceasefire on 10 November 2020, however, in addition to the theatre of war, the conflict has been prosecuted and continues to be fought post-ceasefire, through claims to cultural heritage which are employed in international organisations to substantiate the legitimacy of territorial claims. In this paper, we specifically focus on carpets and their display in museums to unpack the relationship between carpet as an instance of instrumentalised cultural heritage and the two countries' territorial conflict and claims. Focusing on two major carpet museums in Armenian-occupied Nagorno-Karabakh (Shusha) and Azerbaijan (Baku), respectively, we will explain how ostensibly innocuous claims of cultural ownership and authenticity underline territorial claims with violent outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ukraine is a big and diverse country. However, a regionally decentralized territorial setup has never been considered due to the extremely delicate geopolitical situation, to fears of state-capturing and, not least, to a principled approach which sees autonomy as a slope inevitably leading to secession. While the experience with autonomy in independent Ukraine has been indeed negative, this paper argues that the question should at least be considered, as to whether the lack of autonomy and not its supposed presence could be one of the reasons for the present difficult situation. Such a reading, that would have been unthinkable until present, is now being made possible or at least less unrealistic by the limited but overall positive administrative decentralization reforms that took place recently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper joins the debate on Japan's territorial dispute with South Korea over the Dokdo/Takeshima islets. Informed by the ontological security framework of analysis, this paper seeks to explain the decision to adopt the ‘Takeshima Day’ ordinance by the Shimane Prefectural Assembly and the subsequent ascendance of ‘Takeshima’ to the fore of Japan's identity construction vis-à-vis the Korean ‘other’. In this paper, I distinguish between two processes: one that led to the adoption of the ordinance and another that resulted in the entrenchment of ‘Takeshima’ in Japan's identity construction vis-à-vis the Korean ‘other’. The paper argues that the former process should be understood within the context of Shimane Prefecture's distinct identity construction vis-à-vis Tokyo, while the latter can be attributed to recent changes in Japan–Korea relations unrelated to the territorial dispute per se. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the territorial dispute over the Preah Vihear temple on the Thai--Cambodian border. It sheds new light on discussions of the geo-body and nationalism by engaging with cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard's notions of the simulacrum and hyperreality in association with maps. The dispute over the temple of Preah Vihear has centred on one particular map, known as the Annex 1 map, which locates the temple in Cambodian territory. The map has not remained an inanimate object, but has instead become a 'living thing' and attained something of a 'soul'. As a result, any sense of mismapping which results in the loss of territory is no other than the equivalent of a loss of the biological body, as a result of which real conflict ensues. This paper reveals the historical process of how the Annex 1 map has become a simulacrum in Baudrillard's sense of the term, to the extent that it creates an instance of hyperreality to which people are emotionally attached. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the Tibet question through the looking glass of Taiwan, by considering four dimensions of comparative dynamics between the two cases of Taiwan and the Tibetan government-in-exile (TGIE) in relation to China: territorial, economic, ethnic and cultural. Of the four, the paper argues, Taiwan has high convergence with China in the economic, ethnic and cultural dimensions, and managed divergence in the territorial dimension. The TGIE, on the other hand, has high divergence with China in all four dimensions: territorial dispute, economic incongruence, ethnic estrangement, and cultural gulf. Further, the TGIE is ideologically and sentimentally charged by this divergence and thrives by exploiting it. It therefore should have few incentives to see the lessons of Taiwan applied in resolving the Tibet question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rivalry concept explored in the conflict literature during the past decade offers considerable potential for theory building in international relations. This paper explores one possible avenue to this end by applying insights from historical institutionalism to a case of spatial rivalry in order to explain many of the findings from the quantitative literature. As I demonstrate in this paper, the focus on issues is a good start at explaining rivalry, yet it masks important underlying domestic processes that initiate, maintain, and terminate rivalries. I explain how the "issue" of territory came to be fused with national identity in the case of Argentina- Chile resulting in a history of conflict and classification as an enduring rivalry. I draw on this case to argue that territorial nationalism may explain why seemingly disparate territorial conflicts separated by time and space can be considered linked to form a spatial rivalry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]