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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]

This paper explores the limits and possibilities for postethnic mobilization in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It employs and critically assesses Tarrow's classic concept of political opportunity structure for the explaining the variations in the occurrence of postethnic mobilization in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a deeply divided society. While the main cleavages in the country run along ethnic lines, a number of groups and NGOs attempt to mobilize alternative identities across ethnic boundaries. These groups are mostly based in the Federation entity of Bosnia-Herzegovina and not in the Republika Srpska. My analysis shows that the concept of political opportunity structure only partly explains this difference. I thus suggest an alternative perspective, which takes into account the cultural environment in which the mobilization happens. The first part of the paper expands on the definition of postethnic activism, explaining what it is and how I proceeded in researching postethnic groups in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The second part uses the framework of political opportunity structure for assessing the influence of environmental factors on the emergence and development of postethnic activism. The third part of the paper evaluates the relevance of the political opportunity structure framework, considers the merits of an approach which takes into account the cultural context, and suggests some further avenues for research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]