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There is an emerging debate about the role and importance of women in right-wing nationalist movements. Drawing on research that highlights the need to study such women as active and complex political agents, this article examines a phenomenon that has previously received little attention—the activism of female Japanese nationalists. We approach the question of how such activism is practiced by analyzing a group interview with female nationalists, a nationalist manga centering on women's experiences, and autobiographic books on such activism by and for Japanese women. The article contributes by arguing that female nationalist agency in Japan is a complex phenomenon, which is enacted through everyday micro-practices. It outlines how female nationalist activism draws upon and enhances, as well as challenges and transcends, a traditional Japanese "housewife identity." As such, the female Japanese nationalist is imagined as having access to certain truths. She takes on the role of "truth-teller," who is playing a strategic role in "waking people up" to the nationalist cause by voicing anger but also making space for a more "joyful," "cute," and inconspicuous everyday activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the major challenges before the “mainstream Indian nationalists” at the dawn of India’s independence was the political integration of the “Northeast” with India envisaged as a nation-state. Some parts of the colonial frontier, such as the Naga Hills, had already witnessed a parallel nationalist discourse with the imagination of sovereignty before India’s independence. With independence, the Indian nation-state project was made difficult by the geopolitical significance of the region, shaped by the experience of the partition, which separated India and Pakistan (East and West), creating a milieu of not-so-favorable international politics. The postcolonial history of the troubled periphery has been marked by an imposed notion of homogeneity and a binary of the nation-state (or the Indian mainstream) and the Northeast. Political theorists have long refuted the notion of national homogeneity. Nevertheless, the dichotomy between the plains and the valley constructed by the colonial logic was and is reinforced by the nation-state ideology, turning the periphery into a cauldron of conflict. This article engages critically with the history of conflict witnessed in the region since independence, against the backdrop of colonial interventions and the integrationist logic of the nation-state. This article argues that the political and developmental strategies, adopted by the Indian state to integrate the region, have led to the perpetuation of conflict in different forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between nationalist narrative and middle-class performativity and how this relationship is challenged by processes of globalization. What types of narrative does the nation-state use to frame the middle class, and how do such representations affect middle-class development? It focuses on the South Korean middle-class post–Korean War, after which the state’s claim to legitimacy rested upon creating a large middle stratum to serve as the synecdoche for the nation. This normative middle-class project was increasingly articulated in neoliberal terms. It then identifies three narrative frames the state used to shape the new urban middle class: loss, progress, and return. I then examine the South Korean middle class as a movement that coalesced or fractured through time in relation to the three narrative framings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the population of the Danish welfare state as an affluent middle class that demarcates itself in relation to a foreign proletariat within a global, neoliberal division of labor. Drawing on Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytical conceptualizations of nationalism, it traces relations between Danish nationalism and the xenophobic blaming of foreigners for structural threats to continued Danish affluence and the welfare state. The article then shifts to a discussion of the dialectical relationship between the nation-state and capitalism in securing the Danish middle-class status in a global, neoliberal world order, and suggests that the threat to the Danish welfare lies not in multicultural pressures but in the simultaneous desires to open Danish borders for surplus extraction and to close them for foreigners. This article ends with a discussion of new perspectives on cohabitation and equality beyond state borders. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As a branch of Chinese political thought, Chinese exceptionalism has recently been the subject of renewed scholarly analysis. By stressing what is unique about China, claims about Chinese exceptionalism seek to provide a different approach to the challenge of global governance, one not dominated by the liberal traditions of the United States and the West more generally. This article argues that Chinese exceptionalism—as understood by the Chinese themselves—represents a nationalistic discourse that attempts to navigate the political and sociological contours concerning what it now means to be Chinese. By stressing what is “good” and “great” about China, Chinese exceptionalism seeks to provide Chinese policy makers substantial traction and legitimacy in the manner in which they choose to frame China’s interactions with the outside world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Rather than making any general claims supporting or opposing the “greening” of sovereignty, this article examines the variable discourses through which the ethos of ecosovereignty is reconfigured. The questions that drive this inquiry are (1) through what discursive pathways do conceptions of nature, political community, and governance intersect to constitute exclusionary ethoses of ecosovereignty? and (2) how might alternative articulations challenge such exclusions? These questions are pursued by examining the contemporary American “environmental restrictionist” (immigration-reduction environmentalist) movement, and critical responses to the movement. It traces how nature, political community, and governance are conceptualized and related to one another in efforts to bolster alternative configurations of ecosovereignty. By gaining insight into the various discourses through which iterations of ecosovereignty emerge, scholars and practitioners might better respond to the multiplicity of ways that nature becomes enmeshed in exclusionary social forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographies always contain more than they claim to represent, and there is always a politics involved in this excessive representation. This article examines how such indeterminate geographies structure popular, academic, political, and nationalist understandings of the current wave of political violence in southern Thailand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the different ideas of community circulating in the aftermath of the 7 July 2005 bombings in London. Specifically, it compares the idea of a community in unity with a more cosmopolitan, urban idea of community. While these two ideas seem to present sharply different responses, the article questions the extent to which the cosmopolitan model offers an alternative to the nationalist idea of community. Drawing on various discussions about how ideas of community are produced through different understandings of time and origins, the article argues that in this specific case both the national and the cosmopolitan accounts of community worked according to a very similar logic, and therefore risked reproducing similar problems and exclusions. Consequently, the article suggests that the task of exploring alternative conceptions of community must involve greater sensitivity to the politics of time and other approaches to the politics of origins. This challenge is pursued through the motif of the city as a site expressing a different temporality and thus a different idea of community from that expressed in traditions of national belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the United States' foreign policy toward Iran. Secularism in the West; Reasons why the Islamic Revolution is perceived as a threat to the U.S.; Linkage between secularism, democracy and freedom; Threat to U.S. nationalism.

Explores how humiliation has been an integral part of the construction of nationalism in China. Social theory; Domestic and international political consequences of the deployment of shame and humiliation; National insecurities in China.

Looks into the emergence of many existential and conceptual anxieties and fears about identity, security and well-being of Western societies. Role of migration in the interrelated dynamics of identity, borders and orders; Securitization of migration through ambivalent arguments; Adoption of securitarian discourse and immigration legislation among European countries; Implementation of stronger border controls in European countries and the U.S.

Examines interaction among forces of regionalization, globalization and nationalism in world politics. Concept of globalization, regionalism and nationalism; Options regarding the relations of regionalism and globalization; Role of nation-state in relation to forces of regionalism and globalization; Notion on pluralistic security communities.

Studies how Slovenian national identity has been constructed, reconstructed, and radicalized since the beginning of the 1980s. History of Slovenia; Collapse of Yugoslavia in the summer of 1991; Declaration of Slovenia's Independence in June 1991; Mediation of three month ceasefire between Slovenia and the remains of Yugoslavia.