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Despite predictions that liberal democracy was ascendent as a paradigm for governance in the contemporary era, the world has witnessed an alarming rise in authoritarian nationalism. A seeming preference for open and transparent models of plural democratic government has been challenged by the global advance of despotic and repressive regimes that are organized around racial, religious, and nationalist themes. Social work, grounded in the practice and pursuit of human rights, stands in stark contrast to authoritarian nationalism and is called to act through public diplomacy and soft power to counter emergent neo-fascism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While prior research foregrounds the economic and political conditions that shape cultural globalization, we focus on the effects of culture. We argue that diffusion itself is a cultural practice, and that two types of cultural schemas – ways of conceptualizing national belonging, on the one hand, and geopolitical ideologies, on the other – shape the people, policies, and infrastructures actors deploy to insert their cultural products into the global art and literary worlds. Based on fieldwork in Argentina, South Korea, and Lebanon, we show how two forms of trans-border nationalism – those that incorporate the diaspora based on ethnic or ancestral similarity, and those that incorporate regional neighbors based on common civic norms – are mobilized to circulate art and literature internationally. Who participates in these diasporic and regional networks, however, depends on diffusers' ideological commitments. We identify two types of aspirational visions for a global (art) world order, which influence which people and institutions cultural makers and managers draw on to diffuse art and literature: a reformative vision, in which the core institutions in traditional centers of power maintain their centrality but become more inclusive of creators from historically underrepresented countries, and a transformative vision, in which the global art and literary world are restructured and power redistributed via new nodes and circuits that circumvent these traditional centers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay advances the concept of ritualized nationalism in order to understand the rise of right wing populism in India. It analyzes Narendra Modi's strategy of assigning tasks and seeking sacrifices from citizens in the name of nation building to understand how it has helped make nationalism a pervasive phenomenon that is unprecedented in India's history. The essay utilizes the theory of rituals to claim that the prescribed formats of Modi's tasks and assignments allow those actions to be distinct and mark the doer as "nationalists" in the digital domain as opposed to those not participating. This has further helped foster and inculcate a nationalistic subject who emerges from the ritual of completing the assigned tasks and publicizing its evidence on social media as an agent who embodies the jingoistic and muscular form of nationalism prevalent in India today. By showing how this process plays out across a series of assigned tasks and sacrifices during Modi's era, the essay hopes to both add to explanations about the rise of right wing nationalism in India while also showing that each global iteration of populist nationalism has a distinct trajectory and motivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent imagological scholarship about the Balkans has revised the Balkanism thesis by examining the sympathetic lens through which British liberals viewed the peninsula's Christian and Slavic nationalities following the 1903 establishment of the Balkan Committee. Revisionist historiography has, however, overlooked how non-Christian and non-Slavic communities were represented in Britain beyond overgeneralized orientalist stereotypes of 'the villainous Turk'. This article aims to correct this imbalance by examining representations of Albania in the travel writing and political commentary of Mary Edith Durham and Aubrey Nigel Henry Molyneux Herbert, Britain's most notable supporters of Albania's national movement in the early twentieth century, who came to sympathize with the country because of their own peripheral position in relation to the British cultural and political mainstream, by virtue of gender and an unfashionably conservative worldview. Focusing on their published travel writing and political commentary between the 1904 publication of Durham's first narrative, Through the Lands of the Serb, and Herbert's untimely death in 1923, this article proposes that they articulated a counter-discourse to liberal writing on south-eastern Europe and that their representations of Albania foregrounded the capacity for self-governance, in contrast to the cultural chaos attributed to the country by liberals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reconsiders liberal nationalism in light of the current autocratic nationalist threat. I argue that liberal nationalism cannot redress the social ailments which acclimatize people to the sorts of no-holds-barred political contestation favoured by autocratic nationalists – excessive polarization. I then argue that liberal nationalists do not recognize the degree to which 'in-group' racial solidarity motivates members of the racial/ethnic majority to preserve their status, and that the liberal nationalist approach to defending minorities' rights therefore risks either emboldening the majority to embrace autocracy or consolidating social hierarchies between the majority and minorities. On these bases, I show that democrats must seek to not only detach race/ethnicity from nationality but also redress those problematic racial/ethnic hierarchies. This suggests the need to develop liberal nationalism into multiculturalist nationalism. Multiculturalist nationalism, however, promises a sort of bounded solidarity that does not include all citizens: it makes use of targeted political antagonism against anti-democrats like White supremacists and Identitarians to help diffuse any social antagonism that might exist among minorities, inclusive members of the majority, and cultural conservatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May 2023, Reset Dialogues on Civilizations organized the international conference 'Nationalism, Nation-Building, and the Decline of Empires' in Dublin. The purpose was to gather a group of historians, political scientists, theorists, philosophers, and experts who could grasp the significant trends, over the long term, in nationalism, nation-building, and imperial issues and could create a forum for dialogue that would compare different, and in many ways related, contexts, defining the challenges of the contemporary politics in the international scene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To some extent, the current Russian-Ukrainian may be described as a conflict between two visions of nation, respectively, ethnic and civic models. Putin believes that a language defines a nation. In his understanding, since many Ukrainians are Russian speakers, they are Russians. His perception of Ukraine is anachronistic. He has failed to notice Ukraine's radical transformation since it gained independence. The current Ukrainian identity has a strong civic component. Its core is represented by a new urban middle class with a new set of values. Sustainability of this identity largely depends on longevity and results of the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I assess Stalin's ideas and concepts about nationalities, their 'manipulability' and their legacies. I do this by briefly reconstructing their theoretical and political roots in both Tsarist and socialist traditions. Special attention will be paid to the discovery of a positive correlation between economic development and the growth of nationalism among 'backward' peasant peoples, which went against the grain of previous socialist beliefs, and to the appearance of a theory according to which socialism would naturally produce a superior national-popular society. After discussing the evolution of these ideas and concepts, their practical applications, and the reaction they generated up to 1953, I will focus on the Soviet post-Stalinist theories and practices, and their results, also by taking into consideration the development in Soviet times and after 1991, of new, hybrid variants of Russian nationalism, as well as of Eurasian trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vladimir Putin's legitimation of Russia's brutal war of aggression against Ukraine raises questions about traditional understandings of nation and empire. Should we contrast the two in terms of values and practices? In this case, Putin uses both nationalist and Imperialist rhetoric to justify his actions. My essay questions how we understand nation and empire using the example of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. How did this empire develop laws, institutions and administrative practices to manage conflicts and claims around language use and nationalism? How did Austria's governments rule a multi-lingual, multi-confessional society effectively, without resorting to brutal policies of nationalization? When nationalist conflicts arose in different settings, how and why did they originate? I conclude that in European terms, Imperial Austria and even nationalist Hungary apparently managed daily-life issues around diverse language use and religious practice far more humanely and effectively than did the successor nation states after 1918. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1991, new political discourses emerged in the Soviet republics that had to reinvent themselves as independent states, redefining their national identity on several dimensions. This process matured ambiguous attitudes toward the former imperial center and different visions over the scopes, perspectives, and claims of a 'Russian World' in the former Soviet space, where Moscow still asserted an exclusive political and cultural sphere of influence. In this article, we will review the cases of Armenia and Uzbekistan with peculiar national projects and relationships with Moscow, reviewing their inclusion within the USSR, their path to independence, their post-Soviet relations with Moscow, and the changes during the turning points of 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bamboo diplomacy, the latest conceptualization in Vietnamese foreign policy, has recently captured widespread media coverage. This study investigates the discursive legitimation strategies employed by the Vietnamese Communist Party to justify the adoption of the aforementioned policy. In addition, the study focuses on the integration of nationalism in the legitimation process of bamboo diplomacy discourse in the context of digital media. Drawing upon constructivism, banal nationalism, and Van Leeuwen's model of legitimation in discourse and communication, the study utilizes CDA and DHA to analyze 66 articles on six official Vietnamese online news outlets. The findings revealed that nationalism-based legitimacy is a key underpinning of three discursive strategies of the four implemented in the VCP's bamboo diplomacy discourse. Accordingly, three main patterns of nationhood reproduction were identified: (i) the myth of national history, (ii) the authority of national traditions, and (iii) the moralization of bamboo iconography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European radical right parties (RRPs) have recently experienced strong electoral success and have strengthened their positions within the European Parliament. While their Eurosceptic positions are well documented in the literature, the fact that most RRPs refer not only to their nations but to Europe in general in order to ground their nationalist visions remains understudied. We investigate this issue by analyzing the discourses of MEPs from 24 radical right parties in the 8th legislature of the European Parliament (2014–2019). Relying on a vast corpus (36,413 speeches) and using quantitative text analysis, this research sheds light on the various notions of Europe that are used by radical right MEPs. We find evidence of three visions of Europe: as a civilization; as an ethno-religious community; and as a liberal society. The use and preferences for these visions vary according to ideological positions, strategies and national contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Securitization theory has paid extensive attention to transnational issues, actors, and processes. Surprisingly, however, only little attention has been paid to the securitization of diaspora communities, defined as overseas citizens or co-nationals abroad. This article fills this gap by developing an analytical framework to study the securitization of diasporas, focusing on three discursive formations: diasporas as threatening actors, as objects under threat, or as security resources. Building upon the recent literature on state–diaspora engagement and drawing on an analysis of Israeli elite discourse (from 1948 to 2022), this article demonstrates how the securitization of diasporas serves as a discursive mechanism that naturalizes and legitimizes extra-territorial policies towards Jews abroad. Thus, the article complements structural and rational explanations of state–diaspora engagement by examining the intersubjective process that endows diaspora policymaking with meaning. Against the backdrop of extensive securitization scholarship that focuses on attempts to keep "foreigners" out, this article shows how securitization justifies bringing certain people in or governing their national identity abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we introduce the concept of soft nationalism through a case-study analysis of short videos by US-born rapper MC Jin (Jin Au-Yeung), who is of Chinese background. Jin's creative output, we argue, with its cross-cultural and grassroots invocations of Chinese identity, ethnicity, tradition, language and belonging, complicates existing theories of nationalism. To address these complications we develop the term 'soft nationalism', to describe forms of nationalism that are neither 'hard', 'hot' and bellicose nor 'banal' or 'everyday'. Like soft power, soft nationalism carries intent but speaks quietly, and is practised everywhere but often found in China, in the context of a recent surge of participatory online nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much research has documented how global technologies and platforms are part of specific cultures and reflect local values. In this study, I examine the case of Hebrew Wikipedia as representative of localization that is neither top-down (producer-driven) nor bottom-up (user-driven); but rather, it is implemented by mid-level, self-selecting bureaucratic administrators in an ongoing process that is driven by their own perceptions of Wikipedia's mission. Through an analysis of Hebrew Wikipedia's deletion discussion pages—in which editors decide what information should be excluded from Wikipedia—I demonstrate how national ideology customarily triumphs over the global, communitarian ethos of the Wikipedia project. Even when decisions are aligned with a more "global" agenda, editors still portray their choices as congruent with the national cause through strategic use of depersonalized discourses about Wikipedia's policies. I thus argue that global, seemingly "neutral" policies can provide a discursive framework that conceals questions about the power of local ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article questions whether past experience with nationalisms rooted in history, language, custom and religion will be much of a guide to pseudo-nationalisms that arise in a globalized age with increasingly 'liquid' societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under what conditions do secessionist parties advance identity, socioeconomic or political frames for constitutional change? By performing a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) of 93 party manifestos from six Western regions, the results identify a key variable that plays an important role in rhetorical strategies: the governmental status of the party. In linguistically distinctive regions, parties tend to put forward identity frames when in opposition. Instead, being in office is a condition for framing their position in socioeconomic terms. The results concerning political frames are highly complex, although patterns around office holding have also been identified. Hence, the present article shows that office-seeking strategies imply a fundamental change in how these parties frame their claims. Minority nationalist parties take the opportunity of being in office to enhance their credibility as governing parties by downplaying identity issues in favour of a more inclusive and policy-oriented appeal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editorial introduces a themed section that focuses on the production of gender discourse and representations in the midst of tightening social and cultural control in China's entertainment industry and digital media landscape. In various ways, the two articles featured case studies that exemplify how the production of gender discourses and representations in this context emerges from the interplay of state control, the market, and the digital realm and unfolds against the rise of platform capitalism and techno-nationalism. Both articles center on the intricate and sometimes contradictory configurations of gender within China's state-market nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rise of a trend to reread biblical texts through the lens of trauma, some scholars have begun to apply Jeffrey Alexander's definition of social trauma to reading biblical texts in the Hebrew Bible, such as Jeremiah and Lamentations. This reading assumes that the Hebrew Bible constructs a social trauma to shape ancient Israelites' national identity. However, this article points out that Alexander's theory does not fit well with the narratives of the Hebrew Bible. The main argument consists of three case studies concerning the book of Jeremiah, Lamentations, and communal psalms of lament; the author argues that none of these writings answers the four questions crucial for the construction of a socially mediated trauma in Alexander's theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instead of thinking of 'public order' as the type of power that police deploy to manage disorder, this article suggests that we understand it as a set of background affects. The problem of analysing these affects is that (aside from moments of unrest) the majority of the populace is anaesthetised to them. Most people take the public feelings of calm predictability for granted. Crucially, however, the everyday management of public order does not anaesthetise everyone. It also produces 'suspect populations', who must remain attentive to its low background hum. This article focuses on the US 'colony within' literature, developed by civil rights and black nationalist traditions from the late 1960s. The article suggests that this internal colony analysis contains a nuanced exploration of the spatialised affects of public order; the clouds of suspicion; the atmospheres of tension; and the police encounters that generate an affective substrate of relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural policies of Felipe González's government were intended to reshape a certain national identity. We will focus on these legitimation strategies through TV series, and particularly those with historical background produced and exhibited by the public broadcasting institution, Television Española. The recovery of some liberal mythology from the 19th century and its adaptation to the 80s will allow us to connect the promoted national identity with the concept of constitutional patriotism defended by important figures of the PSOE since the transition to democracy until nowadays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Methodological nationalism as a critique of container-based and nation-state-focused theory and empirical research is currently strongly anchored within migration studies, where it was initially developed. While this has led to extensive literature and critical engagement with methodological nationalism, and ways to circumvent the national trap in many (sub-)disciplines, it has not much penetrated theories of social stratification. This conceptual paper will address this gap by discussing the social positioning of high-skilled migrants in contemporary stratified societies. This exemplary discussion will bring together a critical perspective of methodological nationalism on class and milieu theory. It will also confront the critique of methodological nationalism with the question of the origin of social power and dominance, which are the foundation of stratification theories. This article will specifically draw on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of social space and its derivative. Emphasis will also be given to Michael Vester's development of social milieu to highlight blind spots according to the critique of methodological nationalism. This paper shows that these theories have not grasped high-skilled migration thoroughly. It also outlines that migrant theories and their critique of methodological nationalism inadequately address the source of symbolic hierarchy and the formation of social stratification. Thus, both theoretical strands would benefit from a deeper conversation with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, the relationship between innovation and technology has formed an important element of Euro-American identity. However, such a view ignores older or alternative media forms and practices, contributing to a conception of modernity as future-oriented, obscuring the importance of transitional moments during which the value and meaning of new media develop and new senses of community identity can be defined. As we live through a transitional moment with new forms of technological media emerging in shortening cycles of time and with American identity in conflict and flux, re-assessing the relationship between innovation, technological media, and modernity is urgent. The mid-19th century likewise was a time of social, technological, and cultural change. Following a media archeological method, I focus on a messaging system from the 19th century, the Pony Express, which was in operation for only 18 months, but became a media phenomenon whose imaginative influence lasted into the 21st century. The Pony Express's success as a messenger demonstrates how an anachronistic communications system solved a problem of American modernization – the need for networked connection across long distances – and shows how such a system provided imaginative and iconographic frameworks for maintaining a sense of American identity at a time of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In twentieth-century Sweden, conventional inland nationalism was challenged by strong currents of maritime national identities. The reason was a national frenzy regarding maritime popular music – primarily, songs about Swedish sailors and their adventures in exotic faraway lands. Throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, and continuing into the 1950s, numerous Swedish composers, singers and musicians produced hundreds of sailor songs. Their commercial success was staggering, to the delight of Sweden's developing music industry, but the identitarian consequences were even more astonishing. Maritime national identities flourished as Swedishness itself changed drastically via this huge exposure to sailor songs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What accounts for the nation's persistence as a central object of identification in anticolonial movements during the 1960s? How can we understand the appeal of nationalism when it simultaneously could signify one path to and a pitfall of decolonisation, as Frantz Fanon warned? This article addresses some of these questions concerning anticolonialism, its political possibilities, decolonial fantasies and desires in Iran. I discuss how Jalal Al-e Ahmad articulated a diagnosis of cultural imperialism, gharbzadegi, that expressed tensions between the translocality to which his framework aspired and the rigid confines of the nation-state model. This imbroglio, I claim, reverberated through the pathologisation of the national group, with the wounds of colonial violence unsettling and reforming different national attachments in Iran. To support this argument, I read the specific conditions, dynamics and sociohistorical processes in which Al-e Ahmad was immersed alongside the transnational structures to which they were related. Juxtaposing this pathological discourse with his travelogues, we can grasp a specific articulation of the translocal-national dyad that informed Al-e Ahmad's life and found expression in his limited theorisation of gharbzadegi. Analysing this particular context, I argue that this entanglement exposes the limits and pitfalls of anticolonialism in Iran. Souffrir pour/contre la nation : gharbzadegi et les tensions de l'anticolonialisme en Iran [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how immigrants are understood by Swedish alternative media and the role that Islamophobia plays, if at all, in these representations. What is remarkable is that although all articles were sampled explicitly to discuss Ukraine, the analysis showed that Muslim immigrants figured with unexpected frequency throughout. The value of these two immigrant groups were antagonistically contrasted through arguments of alleged differences in culture and geographical origin, perceived legitimacy as asylum seekers, and in terms gratitude and supposed level of threat to Swedish society. With this, the unity that is formed around Islamophobia trumps any nationalist views of the Swedish nation state as particularly superior or white and the social and economic consequences which are usually believed to be at risk due to immigration. By extension, the war in Ukraine is articulated as a matter of whiteness and works to exploit war for strengthening the transnational far right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shinzo Abe, Japan's former and longest-serving prime minister was assassinated on 8 July 2022. As the world expressed sorrow of the human tragedy, nationalists in China were celebrating the disappearance of a hardline Chinese hawk with great enthusiasm. When a Chinese journalist sobbed for Abe's death during a live report of the assassination, the surging anti-Japan sentiment exploded and soon developed into a hashtag-based nationalist protest attacking Abe and the journalist. Drawing from cyber nationalism and hashtag activism literature, the author coined a concept 'hashtag nationalism' to analyze this protest, the interactions between state-led nationalism and popular nationalism, and the role of digital media in the public-state relation. This article also generalized three affordances of hashtag – interconnectivity, intertextuality, and interdiscursivity – to approach the role of social media in digital activism from a relational perspective. Finally, the analysis revealed the discursive and networked nature of hashtag nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The end of the First World War was a crucial time for nationalist leaders and minority communities across the European continent and beyond. The impact of the post-war spread of self-determination on the redrawing of Eastern European borders and on the claims of colonial independence movements has been extensively researched. By contrast, the international historiography has paid little attention to minority nationalist movements in Western Europe. This article focuses on three regions (Catalonia, Flanders and South Tyrol) that experienced considerable sub-state national mobilization in the interwar period. We aim to understand whether the leaders of Western European minorities and stateless nations shared the same enthusiasm as their anti-colonial and Eastern European counterparts for the new international order that self-determination seemed to foreshadow in the months following the end of the First World War. Because the American President Woodrow Wilson stood out as the most prominent purveyor of the new international legitimacy of self-determination, the article further examines how Western European nationalist movements exploited Wilson's image and advocacy to achieve their own goals. Nationalist forces in Catalonia, Flanders and South Tyrol initially mobilized self-determination and referred to Wilson as a symbol of national liberation, but this instrumentalization of self-determination was not sustained. Large-scale mobilization occurred only in Catalonia, and, even there, it disappeared suddenly in spring 1919. Furthermore, sub-state nationalist movements in Western Europe tended to mobilize self-determination to gain regional autonomy, rather than full independence, thus pursuing internal, not external, self-determination. The willingness of these movements to privilege autonomy over full independence made them more receptive to compromise. Radical forces would become stronger only in the 1930s and largely for reasons not directly connected to the post-war mobilization around self-determination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blood on the ice. Cheers when the injured athlete stands and limps off the field. Comebacks, backflips, and back injuries. Celebrity athletes are punished and rewarded for their abilities, including their ability to perform while injured or work through pain. Injuries, illness, disablement, and even death are not uncommon in celebrity culture broadly and the field of competitive sports more specifically. While critical disability studies often attends to disabled celebrities, less research and critical attention has been paid to the disablement of celebrity and the expectation and performance of injury or illness understood through the lens of ablenationalism. Focusing on international figure skating and the 2022 Winter Olympics, this paper offers a supercripping of athletic celebrity by interrogating how gender, race, age, and nationality impact a global audience's view of vulnerability, risk, and harm. Analyzing media coverage of the event alongside popular discourse uncovers the impact of nationalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy on sports narratives and celebrity cultures of debilitation and disablement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been an intense public debate regarding the worldwide re-emergence of far-right politics and the ways in which it has engaged with the international. Surprisingly, thus far there have been no reflections on the broader implications of conceptualising the far-right in its international, transnational, and global dimensions. This article argues that we are witnessing an international turn in far-right studies that posits the international as constitutive of far-right politics, opening new forms of understanding it both from a historical and theoretical point of view. It develops a conceptual assessment of the international turn in three steps: first, it identifies that what binds this interdisciplinary literature together and breaks away from mainstream approaches is a shared critique of methodological nationalism; second, it classifies innovations in two different conceptual levels: the 'globalisation front', which sees transformations in the nature of far-right politics due the intensification of globalisation, and the 'historiographical front', which claims that the far-right has always been an international phenomenon. The article then analyses the main limitations of the international turn and offers a way to overcome it by articulating an intersocietal approach to the study of the far-right that draws from Global Historical Sociology. Le tournant international dans les études sur l'extrême droite : Une évaluation critique [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, a small but growing number of Australian local councils have emerged as major actors in the movement to change the date of Australia Day by electing to replace or cancel local events held on 26 January. This article draws on Lyn Spillman's analysis of the 1988 Australia Bicentenary to make sense of these developments and their implications for cultures of national commemoration in Australia. For Spillman, the Bicentenary marked a shift towards a thinner conception of national identity which was intended to increase buy-in for Australia Day but risked fostering fragmentation. Arguing that local council actions to 'Change the Date' can be understood within these fragmentary dynamics, the article shows how the federal politicisation of Australia Day has seen these councils present local vernacular commemorations as preferable to official ones and promote an alternative moral vision of the place of Indigenous peoples in the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this contribution, I present emergent analysis of a preoccupation with managing COVID-19 through border control, among non-Governmental public health actors and commentators. Through a reading of statements, tweets, and interviews from the 'Independent Sage' group – individually and collectively – I show how the language of border control, and of maintaining immunity within the national boundaries of the UK, has been a notable theme in the group's analysis. To theorize this emphasis, I draw comparison with the phenomenon of 'green nationalism', in which the urgency of climate action has been turned to overtly nationalistic ends; I sketch the outlines of what I call 'viral nationalism,' a political ecology that understands the pandemic as an event occurring differentially between nation states, and thus sees pandemic management as, inter alia, a work of involuntary detention at securitized borders. I conclude with some general remarks on the relationship between public health, immunity, and national feeling in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, developed from a panel speech on 'Radical internationalism and shifts in the global order' at the IRR50 New Circuits of Anti-racism Conference at King's College, London, October 2022, takes issue with simplistic and partial positions surrounding Russia's war with Ukraine. It points to the fact that we now have to reckon with a clash of imperialisms (of the US and Russia), the weaponising of local nationalisms and a reworking of Eurocentrism born of the Cold War. The author warns that revanchist ethnonationalisms in central and eastern Europe and the Baltic States − based in a distorted rereading of history, especially of the countries' roles in the Holocaust − are being ignored in the interests of a larger geopolitics with consequences also for the future direction of the EU (see Figure 1). In this, anti-Communism, which has defined so much of the history of the Global South in terms of violent opposition to anti-colonial liberation struggles, is being updated and revitalised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the life and death of juvenile drug dealers in the state of Bahia, Brazil, where the drug business has become omnipresent and a growing number of youths from the urban periphery are taking up a career with one of the country's many drug gangs. The price most of them pay for their economic success as traffickers is high: they are repeatedly imprisoned under harsh conditions, suffer severe physical violence and, at times, die at young age. Drawing on the narratives of juveniles from Bahia and the writings of Bataille and Baudrillard, the youths' approach to life is discussed as a knowingly illusory attempt to regain their sovereignty within the boundaries of consumer capitalism. It is argued that their death is not a blow of fate, but rather the premeditated consequence of their acquisition of consumer-citizenship 'on credit' and, ultimately, their refusal to constitute Brazil's modern precariat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article adopts a poststructural approach to examine the relationship between the news media and international relations. It compares 15 years of international aid coverage from two donor nations, the United States and Britain, and two recipient nations, India and Pakistan, to understand the types of identities news media construct for a nation in relation to other nations. Despite their differences, the news discourse in all four nations has a neoliberal orientation. Moreover, neoliberalism underpins a hierarchical structure of relations that privileges some nations as superior and makes other nations willing participants in their own subordination. While scholars of press–state relations regard newsmaking as epiphenomenal to foreign policymaking, this article argues that newsmaking and policymaking are mutually constitutive social phenomena: both draw from and, in turn, reproduce a shared conception of national identity vis-à-vis other nations. In doing so, the article illustrates the productive power of news media in international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the structure, content, and function of widely circulating prophetic narratives in contemporary Greece and Cyprus. Prophetologists play a key role in recycling and disseminating prophecies through traditional and modern means of communication in an attempt to explain conditions of crisis and to promote conservative moral values and nationalistic aspirations as salvific remedies in the public sphere. Their highly politicized prophetic discourse blurs the differentiation between religion and politics that characterizes secular modernity. But at the same time, the use of modern media and secular strategies for sacred purposes have unintended secularizing effects on the religious field. Finally, the article explores the reasons why prophecy belief finds fertile soil for proliferation in these countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates Western European right-wing populists' ambiguous relationship with religion and secularism using the example of the French Rassemblement National (RN). Drawing on social cleavage theory, survey data and elite interviews with RN leaders, French mainstream politicians and Church authorities, it finds that the RN employs Catholicism and laïcité as cultural identity markers against Islam to mobilise voters around a new identity cleavage between liberal-cosmopolitans and populist-communitarians. However, instead of a rapprochement with Christian policy positions, ethics and institutions, this article finds that the RN is becoming increasingly secularist in its policies, personnel and electorate. This finding is of significant relevance for the broader populism and religion literature not only because it suggests the centrality of right-wing identity politics for populist parties, but also because it challenges traditional assumptions about the relationship between right-wing populism and religion by providing evidence that in Western Europe the former is increasingly dominated by its 'post-religious' wing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A prominent figure in the social sciences in Brazil and Latin America, Renato Ortiz is invited in this interview to reflect on his intellectual and academic trajectory, whose (re) beginning goes back to France in the 1970s. Professor at the Campinas State University since 1988, he addresses here the main concepts and references that make up his vast work, situated at the intersections between sociology and anthropology. The conversation begins by addressing the issue of his university education and insertion in the Brazilian academic field and develops through the following topics: religion and popular culture, national identity and modernity, mundialization and globalization, the market of symbolic goods and the luxury universe. Finally, he focuses on the dilemma of intellectual work in the social sciences amidst the adversities of the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Administrative burdens can hinder people's social, political and economic participation. However, most empirical studies usually tackle the issue of how they affect access to citizenship merely indirectly. This article examines administrative exclusion from Argentina's National Identity Document and its effects on a key social policy: the Universal Child Allowance. Findings indicate that: (1) administrative exclusion from official identity documents 'feeds back' into the construction of a vulnerable target group that is systematically excluded from social benefits and public services; and (2) limitations in the administrative capacity for identity registration and documentation 'trickle down' to complications in the implementation of social policies as target groups remain 'off the radar'. Findings also demonstrate the importance of understanding administrative burdens as a systemic issue. Burdens manifest themselves at the level of citizen–state interactions but their causes and consequences are tied up with intractable institutional characteristics, administrative capacities and social inequalities. Points for practitioners: Efforts by developing countries to develop effective social protection systems are often thwarted by limitations in the state's capacity to identify and reach marginalized citizens. This suggests the need for a systemic perspective of the state's entire capacity instead of merely focusing on the design of social protection programmes. Specifically, we demonstrate that complete, accessible and up-to-date civil registries, identity documents and other forms of registration are a precondition for transforming formal rights into a tangible reality for citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International Relations (IR) has long been criticized for taking a particular (Western) experience as basis for formulating theories with claim to universal validity. In response, recent discussions have therefore centered on making IR 'truly global', that is, more inclusive and less parochial in its language and substance. But the concept of the global underpinning this discussion is both illusive and strongly contested. It requires problematization. But how? In this Forum, scholars discuss this question with a forward-looking agenda. Building on recent critical engagements with the question of the global as a concept in general and Global IR specifically, the authors ask how the global should be problematized in order to achieve a (more) progressive agenda for IR. They draw on different regional and disciplinary perspectives to both further the agenda of a less exclusive and racist discipline without falling into the trap of shallow inclusivity, and to discuss ways of problematizing the global without falling back into nativism or nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a powerful assertion of geopolitical power and conflict. But Russia's nationalist and expansionary drive takes place within the context of transnational economic ties. Such ties help define the nature of the war, and both the Russian and western response. The contradictory pressures of nationalist desires conflicting with transnational integration is an underappreciated complexity of the war that this article will explore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The deconstruction of the 'War of Independence' (1808–1814) as a Spanish nationalist myth was a necessary step in advancing our knowledge of the history of the Age of Revolutions in Spain and of Spanish nation-building itself. However, it set aside those who had in fact experienced those events through a genuine Spanish nationalized lens. Using a corpus of autobiographical sources written between the 1780s and the 1830s, this paper argues that political concepts of Spanish nationhood were already available before the liberal revolution unleashed by the French invasion, that anti-liberals used the language of nationhood in their ego-documents too, and that ideas of independence and constitution pervaded social cleavages and ideological divides. Arguably, then, the War of Independence had both mythical and real dimensions in terms of the history of national identities. Therefore, the great issue in nineteenth-century Spanish nation-building would have not been a congenital 'lack' or 'weakness' of nationhood but an intense cultural war for its definition along political lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of the Global Right usually trace its intellectual underpinnings to the revolutionary conservative New Right and its ideas claiming to defend an 'ethno-pluralist' European identity from the multiculturalist threat of a 'Great Replacement' through immigration. A second lineage, which we refer to as 'national-conservative', is less explored and is more concerned with threats to moral order and the loss of moral bearing due to liberalism's relativism. These two intellectual lineages, and corresponding political alignments, engender different political projects of the Global Right, which is not that coherent as it seems. Taking a long-term historical-ideational perspective that underlines the power of ideologies as templates, we argue that a closer look at the different intellectual traditions of the Global Right can help explain the contrasting political preferences for socio-economic action, institution-building and transnational cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While nationalism as a mental model that can be represented in text and talk, it has not been sufficiently examined in discourse studies. This study examines the discourse of nationalism in spoken texts of an elite cohort of Chinese speakers at the World Economic Forum. Through methodological integration of nationalism (as a conceptual/theoretical tool) with the socio-cognitive approach anchored in critical discourse analysis, this study examines the structures of 'national-We' and 'foreign-Others' pervading discourse and linguistic levels with reference to China-specific origins of nationalistic ideology. By scrutinising appraisals, referential nouns/pronouns and value-laden metaphors as linguistic realisations, this study reveals three nationalistic discourses: an economic-leadership discourse for Self, a deterrent/delegitimisation discourse regarding Others' threatening actions/views, and a common-community Self discourse that aims to solidify more countries with China in a common community with shared interests and future. The study suggests there is value in integrating sociology-oriented conceptual/theoretical tools with the socio-cognitive approach in disclosing latent ideological configurations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Brazil as a case study, we examine ways in which radical right activists and leaders actively participate in world politics through religious nationalist narratives which operate on both national and transnational levels. We propose the existence of a particular subcategory of populist radical right (PRR) politics, which we call religious-populist radical right. Our argument is divided into three parts. First, we argue that religion provides ideational and material capabilities that have allowed the PRR to capture state institutions through elections. Second, we claim that once in power, the PRR's governing strategy is conducted through transnational culture wars with religious overtones. Third, we argue that the PRR establishes novel patterns of international alliances to advance their vision of a new world order based on independent ethno-religious communities. By exploring the entanglements between the PRR and religious nationalism, we conclude that religion provides the radical right with the ideas, means, and social power to transform both state forms and world orders. Création de l'État devant Dieu : l'intersection du populisme radical de droite et du nationalisme chrétien dans le Brésil de Bolsonaro [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National governments have played a key role in constructing the Covid-19 pandemic through their communications. Drawing on thematic, discursive and visual analyses of Covid-19 campaigns from 12 national contexts, we show how the pandemic has presented governments with unique conditions for articulating and reinforcing nationalism and neoliberalism. The campaigns frame the pandemic as a force that brings the nation together and conjure up notions of national 'solidarity lite' while relentlessly authorizing the crisis-ready responsible citizen. In so doing, they reproduce neoliberal rationality by shifting the locus of responsibility from the state and social structures to the individual and re-inscribing gendered and classed notions of responsibility, care and citizenship. Mobilizing national neoliberal narratives enables governments to render the pandemic legible as a crisis while obscuring both the structural injustices that exacerbate the crisis and the structural changes required to address it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines religious and patriotic languages in digitized letters written by ordinary Finnish people in the Second World War. We combine qualitative and quantitative methods to analyse how religious and patriotic languages were used throughout the war years. Our findings show that the frequency of religious and patriotic vocabulary fluctuated widely during the war. Religious words were most notably connected to the intensity of the warfare, peaking during the periods of heated combat and dropping in the period of stationary warfare. Patriotic words were likewise common during the early periods of combat, but their use waned in the later war years. The analysis of words occurring in close proximity to the religious and patriotic words suggests that this was due to the different functions of the two languages. Religious parlance was essentially a vehicle of private emotional coping, while patriotic style gave a collective meaning to the sacrifices of the war. Religion and patriotism diverged during the war because the collective meaning of the war vanished but the need for emotional comfort persisted until its end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 12 October 1947, Argentine President, Juan Domingo Perón, used the events of the Hispanidad Day to extoll the Spanish heritage in Latin America. Within a few years, however, Perón well understood the futility of using Hispanidad as the basis of a new national consciousness for the Argentine immigrant society. Instead, he opted for a corporative mode of political representation under the aegis of the 'organized community'. This model was designed to be of an inclusive nature and to offer space not only to different social groups, but also to the variety of ethnic and immigrant groups of Argentine society. This new concept of corporative citizenship facilitated a heightened recognition of collective rights, which manifested in the gradual integration of Argentines of Jewish, Arab, or Japanese origins in the political system, as well as that of indigenous peoples' movements. By the early 1950s, Peronism had adopted a more inclusive perspective and began to demonstrate respect for all religions. Peronism aspired to confront the transgressions of the privileged few by protecting the rights of minorities and marginalized groups. Thus, it also challenged the traditional melting pot with its emphasis on White, European, and Christian Argentines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Warsaw positivists, one of Poland's most influential intellectual collectives, emerged in the 1860s with an ambitious plan to strengthen the Polish nation. The self-proclaimed progressives, enamored with trends popular in Europe's contemporary liberal circles, declared that Poles were a backward nation stuck in the feudal era. Consequently, they proposed comprehensive national reforms inspired by Western Europe, or the region that the Warsaw positivists designated to be the beacon of progress and civilization. However, as Western European empires intensified their colonial efforts in Africa in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, the Warsaw positivists felt compelled to reassess Western Europe through the lens of its ongoing imperial politics. This article examines the Warsaw positivist critique of Western European imperialism in Africa and argues that while the Warsaw positivists denounced Western European imperial methods, they stopped short of condemning imperialism per se. That allowed them to decry Western Europe for exploiting Africa and simultaneously justify Western European plans to subjugate the continent. Most importantly, the positivist critique of Western European actions in Africa opened space to redefine the place of Poles on the axis of progress and civilization. While never employing the category of whiteness explicitly, the Warsaw positivists included Poles in the increasingly racialized categories of civilization, progress, and Europeanness, even if, or perhaps particularly because, as a nation, Poles were politically vulnerable under the control of Russia, Germany and the Habsburg Empire, functioned on Europe's margins, and in so many ways lagged behind Western Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses responses to the typhus epidemic in German-occupied Poland during the First World War. The German conquest of the Kingdom of Poland in 1915 not only instated a new political regime, but also brought about social misery on an unprecedented scale. Especially in larger cities, the poor segments of the population were made homeless or cramped into tiny apartments and suffered from hunger and disease. From 1915 outbreaks of typhus occurred in major cities, often found amongst the Jewish population. The German occupiers forcefully responded by fumigating houses, quarantining suspected cases, and forcing thousands of families into delousing facilities. These measures particularly targeted Jews as German medical officials identified them as the carriers and spreaders of the disease – some of them characterized typhus itself as a 'Jewish disease'. In an effort to prevent the spread of the disease to Germany and to protect the German Volkskörper, Polish Jews – for the fact that they were Jews – were from 1918 onwards barred from crossing the border and thousands of Jewish migrant workers in German industry were arrested and deported. The article examines both the political and the medical context in which these policies were employed and analyses Jewish responses to both the spreading of the disease and the German anti-Jewish policies. It shows the close connection between health policy and antisemitic and nationalist ideological narratives and projects, and identifies this racialization of disease as a key moment in the development of German antisemitism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]