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Geopolitical competition and conflict play a central role in canonical accounts of the emergence of nation-states and national identities. Yet work in this tradition has paid little attention to variation in everyday, popular understandings of nationhood. We propose a macro-historical argument to explain cross-national variation in the types of popular nationalism expressed at the individual level. Our analysis builds on recent advances on the measurement of popular nationalism and a recently introduced geopolitical threat scale (Hiers, Soehl, and Wimmer 2017). With the use of latent class analysis and a series of regression models, we show that a turbulent geopolitical past decreases the prevalence of liberal nationalism (pride in institutions, inclusive boundaries) while increasing the prevalence of restrictive nationalism (less pride in institutions, exclusive boundaries) across 43 countries around the world. Additional analyses suggest the long-term development of institutions is a key mediating variable: states with a less traumatic geopolitical history tend to have more established liberal democratic institutions, which in turn foster liberal forms of popular nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media enable broad and diverse publics to mobilize around a shared collective identity. In this article, the authors use social movement literature and studies of peace and conflict to foreground the role of platform-mediated communication in creating a national identity in a fragile state. We argue that, by affording activists with a possibility of public, yet anonymous interactions, social media may play a crucial role in conferring state legitimacy during a violent conflict. Investigating the case of Mariupol, Ukraine, where a small group of citizens employed social media to support and legitimize the Ukrainian state among the city population, the authors illuminate the use of new media affordances to construct a national identity among digitally networked publics, mobilizing support for a threatened state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recognition, or the lack of it, is a central concern in International Relations. However, how states cope with international misrecognition has so far not been thoroughly explored in International Relations scholarship. To address this, the article presents a theoretical framework for understanding international misrecognition by drawing on discursive and psychoanalytical theories of collective identity formation and humour studies. The article conceptualises international misrecognition as a gap between the dominant narrative of a national Self and the way in which this national Self is reflected in the 'mirror' of the international Other. We argue that humour offers an important way of coping with misrecognition by ridiculing and thereby downplaying international criticism. The significance for international relations is illustrated through an analysis of the public diplomacy campaign 'Presenting Israel', which, through parodying video clips, mobilised ordinary Israeli citizens to engage in peer-to-peer public diplomacy when travelling abroad. Public diplomacy campaigns are commonly seen by scholars and practitioners as attempts to improve the nation's image and smoothen or normalise international Self–Other relations. However, after analysing the discursive and visual components of the campaign — which parodied how European media portrayed Israel as primitive, violent and exotic — this article observes that in the context of international misrecognition, such coping attempts can actually contribute to further international estrangement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different studies have shown that national groups construct a positive social identity through the appropriation of heroic narratives about the national past. Within this framework, this research studied the narratives of Argentine university students (n = 27), without specific training in history about a historical process in which their national state carried out morally questionable actions. Specifically, we analysed their narratives on the ‘Conquest of the Desert’, a military campaign carried out in the late nineteenth century which entailed the genocide of the indigenous peoples who inhabited most of what is today Argentina. Through semi-structured interviews, it was revealed that although the grammar of the participants’ narratives is generally poor, it is possible to identify in them two clashing groups as agents of that historical process. Furthermore, the participants did not use the pronouns we/us to refer to any of these groups, so they did not identify with them. We conclude that the poverty of the participants’ narratives may reveal a collective attempt to forget this morally condemnable historical process, which would also have been expressed in the shift of responsibility from the Argentine state to other social groups in most of the narratives analysed. Likewise, failure to identify with the victims, even in cases in which it was considered to be the national state, shows the implementation of cognitive strategies to preserve a positive identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the intricacies implicated in the narration of young people’s national identities by shedding light on intersecting allegiances and on the role that perceived ‘others’ play in their accounts of nationhood. Based upon a qualitative study of youth narratives of identity in the context of Greek society, the article unpacks how participants make sense and narrate their nationhood via utilizing discursive resources, whilst dialogically conversing with the gaze of ‘other’. The narrative–discursive analysis of the in-depth interview material illustrates the interweavement of ethnicity with religion, along with the use of historical imagery and cultural signals of alleged similarity and difference. What becomes evident is the salience of ethno-cultural and religious identifications, operating as potent resources for self-making but also as vehicles for categorization and the potential exclusion of ‘others’. The article concludes by underlining the importance of empirically substantiating and theorizing the configurations of young people’s collective identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dominant groups (e.g., White U.S. citizens) are more associated with "American" identity and they feel greater ownership over American national identity compared to ethnic minority groups. We extended this perception to gender and tested whether American national identity is constructed in masculine, versus feminine, terms. We examined whether U.S. men feel greater symbolic ownership over the nation and represent what it means to be a prototypical American, more than U.S. women. In Study 1, men and women considered male-associated traits more American than female-associated traits and listed more men as examples of "true" Americans than women. In Study 2, men reported higher levels of nationalism than women. Women's nationalism was moderated by their conception of male-associated traits as American--women who viewed American identity as more masculine were less nationalistic. Men showed a stronger correlation between gender identity and American identity compared to women. However, correlations between gender identity and nationalism did not differ by participant gender. Results suggest men and masculinity are considered more American than are women and femininity. We provide support for the subgroup asymmetry hypothesis through the novel lens of gender. We discuss means of attenuating the gendered construction of national identity in terms of media, policy, and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that news coverage plays an important role for national identity building in the way that it evaluates the own nation better than foreign nations (in-group/out-group bias). This notion is being transferred to the media as an element of national cultural identity. This article identifies analogies between national identity building through the mass media and the third-person perception, which states that people assume others to be more vulnerable to negative media influences. It is hypothesized that patterns of an international third-person perception occur in news coverage, i.e. the news media should present media influences in the own country to be weaker than in other countries. A first standardized content analysis (N = 2204) of newspaper coverage from the US and Germany on elections in own and other countries supports this hypothesis. Consequences are discussed and directions for future research are pointed out. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of this article is to explore young people’s constructions of national identity in Cyprus. The article is based on focus group discussions with 20 Greek-speaking and 20 Turkish-speaking young people between 13 and 15 years of age, drawn from two schools in the divided capital city of Nicosia. The article explores both the ways in which Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot young people understand their own identity and the degrees of their allegiance to an overarching identity as ‘Cypriot’, rather than Turkish/Greek Cypriot. The article reflects on the contradictions young people face in divided societies where there are competing discourses around national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article uses a survey experiment embedded in the 2008 CCES national sample to assess how the public responds to immigrant-rights protests and to determine whether symbolic representations of national identity can serve to “prime” attitudes about immigrants and immigration policy. Based on social identity theory, the common in-group identity model, we expect responses to protesters waving American flags as a display of loyalty should be less hostile than responses to protesters waving Mexican flags. Our experiment demonstrates evidence in favor of this proposition but shows no impact of how protesters were framed on immigration policy preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reconsiders the manifestation of nationalism in the Republic of Moldova during the late Soviet period and early 1990s. Whereas dominant approaches have focused on the ethnic dimensions of the national movement, I argue that rural-urban identities also played a significant role in shaping political events and outcomes of the recent past by drawing on ethnographic research among participants in the "folkloric movement" within the arts and performance world. This movement coincided with the broader national movement of the 1980s and demonstrates the centrality of "villages" in the construction of an anti-soviet "national" identity among ethnic Moldovans. In conclusion, the politics of nationalism must be understood in a wider framework that also accounts for the importance of non-ethnic forms of collective identity, such as villages, and that investigates how individual origins and social memory shape civic and political participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article recounts the history of the numerous attempts to create or promote a European identity through television and explores the reasons for their failure. From the 1950s, engineers of the European soul, with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) playing a central part, resorted to a variety of technologies and genres: simultaneous live broadcasts in Eurovision, news exchange, later satellite television, highbrow drama and popular entertainment notably with the Eurovision song contest. Even when they reached an audience, these attempts failed with respect to their main aim, as they were based on a false, deterministic view of television as a medium and on a dated, communicative view of the nation where media have the power to shape collective identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]