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Russia's post-1991 nation-building project has been torn between competing interpretations of national identity. Whereas the other former Soviet republics opted for nation-building centered on the titular nation, Russia's approach to national identity was framed by the fact that the RSFSR had been defined not as a designated national homeland but as a multi-ethnic federation. This, coupled with Russia's definition as the legal successor of the Soviet Union, suggesting continuity and a history of uninterrupted statehood, has enabled a range of rivaling understandings of how to define the "nation." Focusing on top-down official nation-building, this article examines how, against a backdrop of shifting political contexts, structural constraints, and popular attitudes, the Kremlin has gradually revised its understanding of what constitutes the "Russian nation." Four models for post-Soviet Russian nation-building are identified – the ethnic, the multi-national, the civic, and the imperial. Over time, the correlation of forces among these has shifted. The article concludes that, despite some claims of an ethno-nationalist turn after 2014, the Kremlin still employs nationalism instrumentally: National identity has undoubtedly become more russkii- centered, but, at the same time, the Kremlin keeps the definition of "Russianness" intentionally vague, blurring the boundaries between "nation" and "civilization." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the cover as well as the list of editorial board members and the table of contents for the issue.

This study examines the practice of ethnic communities in Bosnia and Herzegovina flying a state, entity, religious, or foreign flag at wedding ceremonies in public spaces. The wedding custom is analyzed through the lens of Hannah Arendt's discussion of the way nationalism in the modern era links family and state. After a tragic war, flag power in this context appears to exacerbate nationalism and ethnic tensions in a polyethnic society trapped in a dysfunctional state structure created by the Dayton Accords. The empirical study finds that flag power does not, in fact, privilege ethnic solidarity over national solidarity to the degree that social and political theory would have us imagine. The national identity of being Bosnian is more likely to be exemplified. A clustered, stratified, random sample of 2,500 subjects over the age of eighteen was drawn from the country's population, including the two entities, Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska and Brčko District. Survey questions involving face-to-face structured questions asked participants whether flags were flown at their weddings, which flags were flown, and attitudes toward the wedding custom. Variations by age, religiosity, education, ethnicity, type of flag flown, and political party affiliation are reported and interpreted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains how the Turkish nation's composition has changed under Justice and Development Party rule. Turkish nationalism and Turkish national identity have dramatically changed since 2010, when the Kurdish Opening process was started by former prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The Syrian refugee crisis and the influx of Syrian refugees into Turkey created another change in Turkish national identity. Increasing religiosity in Turkey and the use of Islam by the Justice and Development Party created a flexible nation, where all Sunni Muslims can be considered members even though they are not ethnically Turkish. The author uses primary sources, such as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's speeches since 2010, to show how his discourse became more embracing of non-Turkish Muslim groups and created a dynastic understanding of nationalism based on religion rather than the idea of an ethnically homogenous, secular Turkish nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of media nationalism has had a curious history. Some of the "classic" studies of nationalism have placed the media at the heart of their work but say very little about media theory or research. More recently, studies of populism and nationalist parties have talked quite a lot about the impact of digital technologies but have very little to say about nationalism. This piece first provides a brief overview of some of these classic studies before noting how insights from the study of media, and in particular audiences, began to filter through to nationalism research in the 1990s and early 2000s. It then addresses both the discursive and digital turns that influenced wider debates around the relationship between media and nationalism over the past decade or so, before outlining the limitations of such work and possible avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1925 Estonian cultural autonomy law is a rare example of the idea of nonterritorial national minority rights officially adopted in the interwar period. Scholarly interest in this legislation, however, has so far overwhelmingly concentrated on the case of the Baltic Germans. This article is intended to make a contribution toward a broader understanding of the 1925 law and the "cultural autonomy" discourse in Estonia altogether by examining the Estonian Swedish minority's political leadership's understanding of cultural autonomy: how it changed and developed up to 1925, and what the subsequent Swedish attitudes toward the 1925 Estonian cultural autonomy law were. I demonstrate that although the Swedish leaders had been closely involved in the long process leading up to the law's passing in 1925, it ended up seen as being of little substantive relevance from the Swedish perspective. Furthermore, by being strongly associated with the term "cultural autonomy," the law also deprived the Estonian Swedish national movement of an important slogan that had long functioned as the overarching goal of Estonian Swedish nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the project Sacred Geography of Kazakhstan, launched in 2017 in Kazakhstan as part of the nationwide program Ruqani Zhangyru (Modernization of Spirituality). The officially stated goal of the project is to cultivate a sense of patriotism in the country's residents related to places and geographic sites that are important for the historical memory of independent Kazakhstan. The authors assume that the real goal of the project is national territorialization, or recoding of the semantics of space, by selecting, codifying, and articulating some symbols and practices, while leveling and "forgetting" others. The analysis, which is based on expert interviews and official documents, shows that this postcolonial process fits into the tendency toward ethnonationalization of Kazakhstan, in which discourse on the civil nation continues to be reproduced at the official level, while real activity is more focused on reinforcing the idea of Kazakhstan as the state of the Kazakh nation. The institutionalization of organizing and recoding the sacred landscape involves a wide variety of groups and actors. These factors may explain the success of the project in comparison to other projects being implemented under the Ruqani Zhangyru program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the current scholarship around racism and nationalism, two of the mostly hotly debated issues in contemporary politics. Both racism and nationalism involve dividing humanity into groups and setting up some groups as innately superior to others. Until recently, racism and nationalism were both widely seen as unpleasant relics of times past, destined to disappear as the principles of equality and human rights become universally embraced. But both concepts have proved their resilience in recent years. Scholars have been devoting new attention to the "racialization" of ethnic and national identities in the former Soviet Union and East Europe, the regions that are the main focus of this journal. The article examines the prevailing approaches to understanding the terms "racism" and "nationalism," which are distinct but overlapping categories of analysis and vehicles of political mobilization. Developments in genomics have complicated the relationship between perceptions of race as a purely social phenomenon. The essay explores the way racism and nationalism play out in two self-proclaimed "exceptional" political systems – the Soviet Union and the United States – which have played a prominent role in global debates about race and nation. It briefly discusses developments in other regions, such as the debate over multiculturalism in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its inception, Pakistan has faced challenges of ethnic-nationalism from her ethnicities. State efforts to mold these diverse identities into one communal Muslim identity have been continually resisted by the different nationalities comprising Pakistan. The demands of ethno-national movements have fluctuated between independence and autonomy, depending upon the relation between the state and the respective ethnic group. Sometimes the demand for autonomy has expanded into a desire for independence, as was the case with Bengali ethnic nationalism. At other times, the desire for independence has shrunk to a demand for autonomy, as manifested by Pashtun nationalism. This shift is explicated through the relationship between the state and ethnic groups. The author analyzes this shift through the prism of Paul Brass's instrumental theory of elite competition. The factors that contributed to the success of Bengali nationalism in achieving statehood and the failure of Baloch nationalism to do so are viewed through Ted Gurr's concept of relative deprivation. The integration of Sindhi and Pashtun ethnic groups into the state structure is explained via Andreas Wimmer's notion of ownership of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The youngest generation of the Azerbaijani diaspora in Turkey was formed almost immediately after the downfall of the Soviet Union, resulting in the increased emigration of Azerbaijanis to foreign countries, in particular to Turkey, where the language barrier is minimal due to linguistic proximity. This article is an attempt to investigate the dynamics of identity production (and, consequently, senses of belonging) of the most recent generations of the Azerbaijani diaspora in Turkey in relationship to their linguistic and cultural repertoires. While language and culture are key factors in identity production, linguistic and cultural practices may be influenced by various social factors. I have therefore tried to examine the identity paradigms of Azerbaijanis living in Turkey in the frameworks of their ethno-national, socio-cultural, and socio-communicative perceptions. The survey I conducted for this purpose mostly covers post-Soviet immigrants to Turkey and, to a lesser extent, earlier generations of Azerbaijanis who settled in Turkey during Soviet times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically examines the prevalent nationalist interpretation of historical images featuring textiles from rural regions. In an effort to disentangle the threads of folk costumes, it proposes a conscious unlearning of the way we read images of rural material culture from the late 19th century. This period has entered historiography as a period of intensifying national movements and political use of rural culture, in particular in Central and Eastern Europe. So-called folk costumes have been viewed as a symbolic representation of the nation, whereas their broader social and economic role in the history of industrial society has been overshadowed. By bringing together the production, collection, and exhibition of rural material culture, this article reveals processes in industrial society that shaped the modern history of folk costumes. It draws on late-19th-century source material stemming from a network centered in Prague that promoted textiles from rural Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, and Galicia as ethno-commodities. Textiles were integrated into women's industrial education and presented at events promoting national economy and the latest technological innovations. Thus, this article contributes to nationalism studies by discussing capitalism and industrialism and seeks to further scrutinize the history of nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In national historiography, estate (social) divisions are typically disregarded in favor of supposedly shared ethnicity, which is proposed to have united a given nation for centuries. Hence, the Polish national historiography is unable to account for the Galician Jacquerie (1846), when serfs were killing nobles, despite their (retroactively) assumed shared Polish ethnicity. On the other hand, the 1994 mass massacre of the Tutsis by Hutus is recognized as the Rwandan Genocide, though both groups share the same language, culture, and religion—or what is usually understood as ethnicity. What has sundered the Tutsis and the Hutus is the estate-like socioeconomic difference, or a memory thereof. It appears that under certain conditions estate (social, class) difference may become an ethnic boundary. In the case of the aforementioned jacquerie, the estate difference made the serfs and the nobles into two different de facto ethnic groups. Similarly, in Rwanda, estate (social) difference is implicitly posed as ethnicity, thus making the Hutus and the Tutsis into separate ethnic groups. However, the official definition of genocide as adopted by the United Nations explicitly excludes social groups (for instance, estates) from its purview, leading to terminological paradoxes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article focuses on the period between 1848 and 1906—between the politicized "discovery" of Balkan Aromanians as a kinfolk by Romanian nation-state builders and the aftermath of the community's recognition by the Ottoman government. Examining how Romania imagined its own entanglement in the Macedonian Question, the article aims to raise the broader question of how a nation-state imagined the agency of kinfolk beyond its borders and, as part of a geographically distributed national division of labor, ascribed a specific task to one part of its ethnic body. In Romania's case, this had a double thrust. One, Aromanians were imagined as the natural bourgeoisie of the southern Balkans, a people superior in their origins, culture, and mores to other ethnic groups—and a natural vanguard for Romania's economic interests in the region. Two, they were imagined as a vanguard for catalyzing the internal development of a native merchant class in Romania proper, which was understood as a primary agent for economic and social progress but perceived to be problematically absent. Thus, this study hones in on the process of ascribing the status of a "prosthetic bourgeoisie" to the Aromanians, and its insistent discursive recurrence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to shed light on the process of nation-building and the formation of national identity in post-Soviet Azerbaijan. The peculiarity of Azerbaijani nation-building is that the debates on how to build a nation and define national identity were nourished by two discourses: Azerbaijanism (Azerbaycançılıq) and Turkism (Tűrkçűlűk). The article focuses firstly on the discourses on national identity and nation-building in the pre-independence period while elaborating on the roots and premises of the nationalist independence movement. Secondly, it highlights the discourses of nation-building in the post-independence period while discussing the meanings attributed to national identity and nationhood. It shows how these two discourses shaped the existing identity formation in Azerbaijan with a particular emphasis on citizenship identity, marked by multiculturalism, hospitality, tolerance, and patriotism. Yet one can still categorize the country as having an incomplete nation-building process, due the violation of territorial integrity as a result of the Karabakh conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Lezgin irredentist movement is one of the less-studied national movements in the post-Soviet space, despite affecting the strategically important Russian-Azerbaijani borderlands and the bordering process between the two post-Soviet states. This article aims to fill this gap and to examine the impact of the Lezgin national movement on the development of territorial nationalism in early post-Soviet Azerbaijan. Based on the analysis of media publications in three Azerbaijani newspapers between 1992 and 1996, I argue that the movement contributed to consolidating the territorial vision of the Azerbaijani nation as incorporating groups historically settled in this territory. While media coverage stressed friendship between ethnic Azerbaijanis and Lezgins, the responsibility for secessionist claims was placed on external forces, particularly Russia and Armenia. In the long term, this framing led to the securitization of ethnic minority activism as a major threat to Azerbaijani statehood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the author discusses developments in the journal, including the introduction of a new article type, the focus on nationalism studies, and the resignation of Associate Editor Paul Goode.

Homelands are an integral component of nationalism. This recognition notwithstanding, the lines nationalism draws on the globe have received much less systematic attention than the lines drawn between in-groups and out-groups. This article argues that homelands, precisely because they are so central to nationalism, should be more consistently integrated into scholarship on international conflict, among other outcomes. We begin by detailing what homelands are, why they matter, and some suggested mechanisms for how they impact outcomes of interest. The next section considers the choices scholars make about identifying homelands, including the particular measurement strategy and the level of analysis used. Here, we highlight recent advances that enable the measurement and analysis of homelands in ways consistent with both constructivist insights about the possibility of variation in the homeland's extent (both over time and within populations) and with positivist analysis. We conclude by sketching out future directions for research on homelands and nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's response to reviews of his book "The Red Mirror: Putin's Leadership & Russia's Insecure Identity," published within the issue. Topics include issues of nationalism and identity politics, nuances in the conceptualization of politics, uniqueness of Putinism, concept of political myth, issue of collective identity politics and state of exception in post-Crimea Russia.

This article investigates the determinants of individual support for independence in Montenegro. We outline five theoretically distinct groups of factors covered by the literature and evaluate their impact on individual preference for independence. Using observational data obtained from a nationally representative survey conducted in Montenegro in 2003–2004, we find support for several hypotheses, showing that identity, income, and partisanship significantly impact individual opinion about independence. We also investigate and discuss the relative effect size of different factors associated with preference for independence. Additionally, we test variables with hitherto unexplored implications for opinions on independence, including the impact of support for EU membership, as well as support for democratic principles. Our logistic regression analyses reveal that attitudes towards EU integration and minority rights are strongly associated with support for independence. By systematically analyzing existing and new hypotheses with data from an understudied case, our findings contribute to the nascent literature on individual preferences for independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The short-lived Ukrainian armed volunteer movement and its interaction with electoral politics, in some regards did, and in other regards, did not fit patterns observed in research into irregular armed groups (IAGs). The brief life span of most Ukrainian IAGs as more or less independent actors, and their swift integration into Ukraine's regular forces during the years 2014–2015, were both unusual. They were also one of the reasons for the relatively low political impact of the IAGs as such - a repercussion that is in contrast to the partly impressive individual political careers of some IAG commanders in 2014–2019. There were various forms of interpenetration of parties with IAGs in post-Euromaidan Ukraine. Certain parties, political activists, and MPs took part in the creation and development of IAGs in 2014. Some – to that point, mostly minor - politicians became soldiers or commanders of IAGs. Subsequently, a number of IAG members transited into the party-political realm, either joining older parties or creating new political organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does religion motivate and intensify nationalism, or does religion moderate and even suppress nationalism? Six kinds of relationships between nationalism and religion are critically reviewed: nationalism as a modern religion in competition with traditional religions; religious origins of the "Chosen People" as the mythomoteur of nationalism; religious exclusion as nation-building; religious influences on national policies; influence of religious observance on national identification; and religiously based "civilizations" transcending nationalisms. Western Christian experience with nationalism is not generalizable due to the institutional autonomy and supranational organization of the Catholic Church. Western European nationalisms were premised on religious sectarian homogeneity, and the homogenous "confessional state" served as the template of European nation-states. Furthermore, I argue that the late medieval eradication of Muslims and Jews across Western Europe prefigured sectarian and ethnonational purges of the following centuries. Finally, I argue that different configurations of religion and nationalism depend on two critical conditions: the degree to which the dominant religious tradition is doctrinally supraethnic and institutionally transnational, and the religious identity of the main adversary in the constitutive conflict that culminated in national statehood. The crises of Marxism and liberalism provide the context for the resurgence of religion and nationalism at present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study represents an application of the concept of national indifference in the Post-Ottoman Balkans. It addresses the question of why two minority communities in Northwest Bulgaria in the first half of 20th century – the Protestant Voyvodovo community and the Catholic community of Bărdarski Geran, both marked by a strong principle of religious endogamy, intermarried. The author maintains that the main reason why these two communities intermarried was – despite all the differences between them – their national indifference, a parameter that both communities shared. These marriages did not cross the ethno-national boundary (the communities were nationally indifferent and thus ethno-national borders did not divide them). Contrary to standard understandings of the concept of national indifference, the author emphasizes that national indifference can be said to have two sides. On the one hand, nationally indifferent groups represent those in which the "we-they" opposition does not follow national lines, while on the other hand these groups identify and organize themselves on the basis of principles other than national ones. In the example of the inhabitants of Voyvodovo and Bărdarski Geran, this principle was religion. The appreciation of the "positive" side of national indifference enables us to grasp "the native's point of view," how people themselves perceived and understood their reality, their identities, and loyalties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how everyday religious practices inform the processes of social identification, complicate presumed ethno-religious categories, and mediate local cultural differences in face of political and cultural hegemonic practices. In the context of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a de facto state recognized only by Turkey, Turkish Cypriots and Turks are considered to share an ethnicity and religion. This "overlap" has been employed to justify Turkey's military intervention and its political, economic, and cultural domination over the island. Yet the cultural diversities and "perceived" differences between and among these groups are exacerbated by power dynamics, nationalist agendas, and mutual biases. The article explains subtle discussions around "genuine" Turkish and Muslim identities, as well as the enforced coexistence and constructed brotherhood of Cypriots and Turks on the island. The competing accounts of the "correct" interpretation of Islam at a Muslim tekke reflect intragroup power asymmetries and the conflict between institutionalized Sunni-Orthodox and "heterodox" local Islam. The article focuses on two overlooked issues in the scholarship on Northern Cyprus—the relations between Turkish Cypriots and settlers from Turkey, and the role of religion in the political processes—as well as on literature on shared sacred sites and an analysis of competitive intracommunal interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article identifies place-name etymologies as a powerful tool in constructing national spaces. Since place names derive from one language or another, often visibly so, competing nationalisms have used them to support territorial claims. This strategy may appear trivial, but it dates back no further than the Romantic period. The article traces the story of how, by the end of the nineteenth century, suggested place-name origins had become building blocks of two opposed visions of Romanian ethnogenesis. In a context of competing nation-building, these scholarly reconstructions were thinly disguised statements about whose ancestors had lived first in Transylvania—defined here in a broad sense as the eastern, Romanian- and Hungarian-speaking parts of the contemporary Kingdom of Hungary—and therefore who was entitled to political sovereignty. Place-name derivations had been little more than rhetorical ornaments until nationalist scholars seized on them following the 1848 revolutions. It was later still, in response to the questioning of Romance-speaking continuity in Dacia, that a positivist generation adjusted them to the principles of comparative linguistics and onomastics, the latter devised by German scholars for the study of national antiquities. With some refinements, the two views are still held today as the legitimate versions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The competing ideologies of nation and monarchy had a troubled beginning in the 19th century, insomuch as they derived partly from two opposing sources of legitimacy. However, from the 1830s on, their supporters achieved the establishment of an interspecific and mutually advantageous relationship. The nation gradually managed to prevail over the monarchy, justifying its presence in national terms. However, the monarchy possessed something longed for by liberal nationalists: historical legitimacy. Thus, the crown served Romantic nationalism in its search for national foundations and to generate national emotions of a collective sense of belonging. This article analyses this process by focusing on the Spanish case and using a vast range of cultural sources. I reason that the monarchy's history was intensively used in Isabel II's reign (1833–1868), both by the monarch herself as well as nationalist elites, to legitimate and justify their presence in the liberal world. The article is divided into three sections. The first part locates the problem into a general process that touched all the crowned heads of Europe. The second section studies the appeal of exemplary medieval monarchs in the liberal hunt for national roots. The final one focuses on the particular case of Isabel the Catholic because of the remarkable prominence it acquired. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the lead article of this symposium, Florian Bieber predicted that the Covid-19 pandemic would have limited long-term effects on the global rise in the level of nationalism because most governments were likely to revert to their prior nationalist trajectories following the pandemic. Nonetheless, I argue that we can learn something about the role of nationalism in the management of public health crises by looking at the variable state responses to the arrival of the virus within their borders. In the modern international system, state governments are tasked with safeguarding the health and well-being of their national populations. During national emergencies, sovereigntist movements form around competing images of the nation that deserves protection. This article uses political artwork to show how different images of the idealized sovereign community were employed to justify divergent pandemic policies of US President Donald Trump and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Over the course of the pandemic, both leaders came under fire for failing to protect their constituents, providing space for alternative leaders and models of national protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Situated at the interplay between ethnic politics, migration, border, and security studies, this contribution analyzes processes of securitization of borders in South Tyrol, an Italian province bordering Austria and Switzerland with a German- and Ladin-speaking population and a past of ethnic tensions. South Tyrol is considered a model for fostering peaceful interethnic relations thanks to a complex power-sharing system. However, the arrival of migrants from foreign countries and the more recent influx of asylum seekers have revitalized debates around the borders between South Tyrol/Italy and Austria and among South Tyrolean linguistic groups. The current COVID-19 pandemic has brought further complexity to the issue. I use the concept of securitization—the process through which an issue is considered as an existential threat requiring exceptional measures—in order to understand why and how borders become exclusionary and restrictive, shaping dynamics of othering. With this framework, the article explores how South Tyrolean borders have been subjected to (de)securitizing and resecuritizing moves in discourses and practices. In this way, I shed new light on debates on the articulation of borders and interethnic relations that are occurring due to recent international migration, consolidation of nationalist agendas, and the current pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the authors discuss articles in the issue on topics including the exclusionary forms of nationalism, role of fear in the increasing populism, and the ideal typical sovereign imageries of liberal nationalist and ethnopopulist.

For three European states in particular, the Covid-19 pandemic has served to catalyze pre-existing territorial disputes. While the United Kingdom, Spain, and Belgium have all had very different responses to the pandemic, in all three cases the actions of central and regional government have put existing structures of regional autonomy under strain. In Spain, the pandemic response has become intertwined with the Catalan independence debate (especially in disputes between pro-independence parties), and elsewhere in the country it has cemented co-operative relationships between moderate nationalists and the statewide left. In Belgium, the pandemic has accentuated territorial disputes and further complicated government formation. And in the UK diverging responses to the pandemic have helped boost nationalist movements in the devolved nations; particularly the cause of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and their ambitions to create an independent Scottish state. While the year has been highly significant for secessionist movements in all three states, only in the UK does a decisive shift towards state-breakup seem to have occurred. The article argues that whether or not a secessionist movement benefits from the pandemic is highly contingent on contextual factors, including the performance of state-level governments in responding to the pandemic and the relative autonomy of regional governments during the response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article outlines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on nationalism around the world. Starting from the premise that nationalism is a global and ubiquitous idea in the contemporary world, it explores whether exclusionary tendencies have been reinforced by the pandemic. The pandemic and government responses will not necessarily trigger the increase in exclusionary nationalism that both far-right politicians and observers have noted. However, there are 4 aspects, examined in the article, that might be shaped by the pandemic. These include the recent trajectory of nationalism and its social relevance prior to the pandemic,the rise of authoritarianism as governments suspend or reduce democratic freedoms and civil liberties, the rise of biases against some groups associated with the pandemic, the rise of borders and deglobalization, and the politics of fear. Thus, while the rise of exclusionary nationalism might not be the inevitable consequence of the pandemic, it risks reinforcing preexisting nationalist dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outbreaks of major pandemics have historically been associated with the proliferation of conspiracy theories. This article explores what role conspiratorial narratives have played in the development of different "imagined communities" in the premodern, modern, and contemporary worlds. I argue that premodern conspiratorial narratives were mostly focused on eschatological and theological images, aiming to blame and delegitimise the religious Other. In these imaginary plots, spread of disease was interpreted as an attack on one's religious beliefs. The prevalence of religious conspiracies helped reinforce religiously based, yet temporary, "imagined communities." With the rise of nation-states and the decline of empires and patrimonial kingdoms, the periodic outbursts of epidemics gradually attained more nationalist interpretations. Hence in the modern era, pandemics often triggered the growth of nationalist conspiracies. In these narratives the threatening Other was usually nationalised, and even traditional religious groups became reinterpreted as a threat to one's national security. In recent times, new technologies and modes of communication have created space for the emergence of global conspiracy theories. The onset of Covid-19 has been associated with the dramatic expansion of such conspiracies. Some scholars have interpreted this as a reliable sign that nation-states and nationalisms have lost their dominance. However, this article shows that many global conspiracies in fact reinforce nationalist ideas and practices and, in this process, foster the perpetuation of national imagined communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pandemics and other crisis situations result in unsettled times, or ontologically insecure moments when social and political institutions are in flux. During such crises, the ordinary and unnoticed routines that structure everyday life are thrust into the spotlight as people struggle to maintain or recreate a sense of normalcy. Drawing on a range of cases including China, Russia, the UK, and USA, we examine three categories of everyday practice during the COVID-19 pandemic that respond to disruptions in daily routines and seek a return to national normality: performing national solidarities and exclusions by wearing face masks; consuming the nation in the form of panic buying and conspiracy theories; and enforcing foreign policies through social media and embodiment. This analysis thus breaks with existing works on everyday nationalism and banal nationalism that typically focus on pervasively unnoticed forms of nationalism during settled times, and it challenges approaches to contentious politics that predict protest mobilization for change rather than restoration of the status quo ante. In highlighting the ways that unsettled times disrupt domestic and international structures, this work also presents a first attempt to link everyday nationalism with growing work on international practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In comparative works on nationalism, Latin America is usually portrayed as a world region that is devoid of nationalist and separatist movements, while in Europe nationalist movements seeking greater self-determination or separate statehood can be easily observed. This article takes a different perspective. Applying the concept of territorial autonomy movements, it pursues a cross-regional comparison of Santa Cruz in Bolivia, Guayas in Ecuador, and Catalonia in Spain to show that movements strikingly similar with regards to their core claims, diagnostic frames, and tactics do in fact exist across the Iberian world. The chapter then draws on social movement theory to account for the recent intensification of territorial autonomy mobilizations in these cases. We argue that in all three substate units (1) threats of political exclusion emanating from contestations over established power-sharing arrangements triggered territorial grievances; (2) the formation of dense associational networks and new alliances with subnational party and state representatives enhanced the organizational resources of territorial challengers; and (3) broader protest cycles, and their concern with direct democracy and/or multicultural group rights, provided territorial challengers with new framing strategies to justify their demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of nationalism knew about the role of memory and forgetting in nation building long before the contemporary boom of memory studies. Still, they can learn a lot from this relatively new research field. This article offers an overview of the literature on the politics of memory, focusing on different patterns of dealing with a dark past of genocides, civil wars, and political repressions, on the one hand, and on the observations derived from the recent so-called "memory wars" in Europe, on the other. Both issues elucidate a persistent role of nationalism in the contemporary world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The centuries-old Turkmen community of Stavropol' Krai in southern Russia, while currently numbering only about 15,000 people, is an integral part of the famously diverse ethnolinguistic landscape of the North Caucasus. To the extent that Euro-Atlantic scholars have noted the existence of this community at all, their comments have been rather cursory and dismissive, and it has been claimed that the North Caucasus Turkmen (virtually alone among the dozens of similarly small ethnic groups of the region) have never published anything in their own language. Intensive investigations in the bibliographic record (and in secondary sources in Russian, Turkish, and Turkmen) show that this is not actually the case, and that the North Caucasus Turkmen do have a modest record of Turkmen-language publishing stretching back a century or more. What are the implications of these published works for our understanding of Turkmen identity, the Turkmen diaspora, and the complicated multiethnic and multilingual environment of the North Caucasus? What does it mean when groups like the North Caucasus Turkmen are made all but invisible in Euro-Atlantic scholarship and Euro-Atlantic library collections? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses a popular survey on national identity in Poland. However, the analysis of the survey is a pretext to remind one of the limitations of crude quantitative methods and to look at the Polish national identity itself. The article shows that the survey questions are far from unambiguous, and respondents might attribute different meanings to them. The survey does not "measure" national identity existing in the world, rather it serves to maintain the hegemonic concept of Polishness. It diminishes the significance of Catholicism and the perceived biological dimension of Polishness. It ignores public sentiment linking Whiteness and Polishness, contributing to maintaining the dominant image of Polishness as free of racism. Under the guise of objective research, the survey is one of the elements sustaining the image of a relatively open and inclusive Polishness. Referring to my own qualitative research and recent literature on the topic, I argue that Polish identity must be seen in terms of selective racism without racism—that is, it is an identity based on racial premises but which at the same time neglects its racial character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vast body of inquiry into nationalism has traditionally seen Europe as a main center for the emergence of nationalism, but scholars of "national indifference" have countered with the idea that nationalism may not matter much at all as a motive for most people. The concept of national indifference calls into question the power of nationalism as a motive for action and the mass appeal of nationalism. Studies of national indifference have constructed an alternative non-national narrative, but face particular challenges accounting for major themes and episodes of discrimination and violence. At its core, national indifference paradoxically both rejects and accepts binary notions of identity and incorporates binary assumptions about motives. It is tempting to resolve the contest between parallel accounts of pervasive, powerful nationalism and national indifference by choosing a victor, but this contrast between models shows the fluidity and dynamism of nationalism. The debate between the now classic accounts of nationalism and the alternative of national indifference points to the importance of often overlooked variables: frames and sense of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]