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Among various features of Ukrainian society that the world has started paying more attention to since the beginning of Russia's full-blown invasion in February 2022, many commentators have pointed to a surprisingly strong and encompassing national identity. However, scholars of Ukrainian language and identity matters had for years demonstrated an increased civic attachment of Ukrainian citizens, including Russian speakers, and its greater salience compared with ethnic, linguistic, and regional identifications. This article seeks to highlight the main accomplishments and challenges of research on Ukrainian ethnic and national identity. It focuses on a gradual shift from the essentialist understanding of ethnicity as embodied in bounded groups to the interest in individuals' contextually determined identifications by categories with a changing meaning. Another prominent part of the analysis is the relationship between Ukrainian ethnic and national identity and the amalgamation of these two apparently distinct phenomena into what I propose to call ethnonational identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of the state has been underplayed in scholarship on global health. Taking a historical view, this paper argues that state institutions, practices and ideologies have in fact been crucial to the realisation of contemporary global health governance and to its predecessor regimes. Drawing on state theory, work on governmentality, and Third World approaches to international law, it traces the origins of the 'health state' in late colonial developmentalism, which held out the prospect of conditional independence for the subjects of European empires. Progress in health was also a key goal for nationalist governments in the Global South, one which they sought to realise autonomously as part of a New International Economic Order. The defeat of that challenge to the dominance of the Global North in the 1980s led to the rise of 'global governance' in health. Far from rendering the state redundant, the latter was realised through the co-option and disciplining of institutions at national level. To that extent, the current order has an unmistakably imperial character, one which undercuts its declared cosmopolitan aspirations, as evidenced in the approach to vaccine distribution and travel bans during the Covid-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looking at Blau-Weiss as the first Zionist youth movement in Germany between 1912 and 1927, the article examines the role of dress in expressing new feelings of national belonging as "Jewish" in modern Germany. Drawing on publications of the movement, memoirs, and photographs, the article shows how Blau-Weiss members tried to become visible as Jews while at the same time trying to copy the dress codes of the nationalist German youth movement Wandervogel. It further shows how, after the First World War, Blau-Weiss tried to forge their own way of Zionist dressing. The article argues that it was not the actual clothes worn or the perception of others that was most crucial to the creation of a national Jewish identity, but rather the inner function that reflections and debates on dress had for Blau-Weiss members in forging and redefining their feelings of belonging and identification as Zionist Jews in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do European far-right parties reconcile their long-standing nationalism with their allegiance to European "civilization"? Although they are certainly not contradictory, simultaneously adopting national and supranational identities requires considerable discursive maneuvering to articulate clearly. In this article, I argue that the European Far Right negotiates the boundaries between its national and supranational identities through two discursive mechanisms, abstraction and embedding, which present civilizationism as nonthreatening to and partially constituted by nationalism. Specifically, abstraction links European civilization to general features of a shared heritage, whereas embedding connects civilization to elements of the nationalist repertoire. I demonstrate the Far Right's monopolization of civilizational discourse and use of these twin mechanisms through quantitative and qualitative analyses of more than 1,000 party manifestos and more than 650,000 tweets. These findings contribute to the growing scholarly literature that treats civilizations as supranational "imagined communities" and has implications for the study of nationalism, civilizationism, and the Far Right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 30 years, Silvana Patriarca, a professor of Contemporary History at Fordham University, New York, has deeply and consistently investigated the construction of the Italian national narrative: its 'long term' genealogy, its characteristics, its tensions. Her first book, Numbers and Nationhood (Patriarca 1996), focused on the co-production of statistical knowledge and the national image of Italy during the Restoration and the Risorgimento, rereading the interplay of science, culture, and politics in the formation of bourgeois 'public opinion' in the liberal period. In Italian Vices (Patriarca 2010), she dissected the rhetoric and tropes of the national character, its ostensible fragility, and the different political uses of the recurring discourse on Italian vices and virtues, from the Risorgimento to the Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussing An Outline of a Theory of Civilization by the Japanese thinker Fukuzawa Yukichi, this essay shows how theorists of liberal nationalism might draw on "non-Western" theoretical resources to enrich their normative ideas and better appreciate their own tradition. I argue that Fukuzawa's work represents an alternative strand of liberal nationalism that complements its mainstream counterpart pioneered by David Miller, Yael Tamir, and others. More specifically, I argue that Fukuzawa's contributions help us reconsider three central claims made by his more mainstream peers: (1) cosmopolitanism poses the most important threat to liberal nationalism, (2) the strength of liberal nationalism lies in its perceptiveness about ordinary people's sense of national belonging, and (3) liberal nationalism emerged in mid-nineteenth-century Europe and spread elsewhere in the age of decolonization. In so doing, I show how the current "comparative turn" in political theory can benefit a specific debate—on liberal nationalism—within the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May 1954, the story broke internationally of Marta Olmos, recipient of the first widely known, male-to-female sex reassignment conducted in Mexico. Her doctor, Rafael Sandoval Camacho, claimed that homosexuality could be cured and that, through transitions, queer Mexicans could be made into 'socially useful' citizens. While initially celebrated as a scientific triumph placing Mexico among elite nations, and receiving support from individuals close to the Ruiz Cortines administration, opinions soured as critics – physicians, politicians, cartoonists and clerics – condemned Marta for renouncing manhood through a fraudulent cure that threatened the binary sex/gender order underpinning Mexican nationalism. Sex reassignment, understood through foreigners including Christine Jorgensen and associated with 'anti-social' queer Mexicans, thus exemplified misplaced priorities during a period in which the state sought to 'modernise patriarchy'. While self-affirming for Marta and permitted unofficially through state indifference, sex reassignment became seen as anti-Mexican. Thus, Marta's case illuminated how the state reconciled development with policing its patriarchal order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the epic national narratives of modernization and development in China is the story of Beidahuang ('Great Northern Wilderness') in the country's northeast. The term 'Beidahuang' refers originally to state-sponsored campaigns, starting in the 1950s, that involved the enlistment of tens of thousands of People's Liberation Army soldiers, educated youth, and Communist Party cadres. Their task was to transform the vast northeast 'wasteland' into productive farmland that would feed the nation while securing the nation's borders with Russia. This article examines the significance of Beidahuang as a feature of the environmental discourse in China's northeast borderlands, focusing on the first decade of the twenty-first century when the Chinese state was establishing more systematic measures for addressing environmental concerns. In the context of the northeast borderland, the massive deforestation that resulted from the socialist campaigns to transform 'wasteland' into productive farmland has left a controversial legacy for regional elites grappling with the Party leadership's turn towards environmental conservation as an emerging political priority. This article suggests that the ongoing importance of the 'Great Northern Wilderness' in the Chinese cultural imagination has shaped the ways in which regional elites frame environmental issues in relation to economic development, nationalism, and border relations with Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its destructiveness, disaster clears the way to accomplish a set of goals. That was why the Gold Coast governor and officials welcomed the 1939 earthquake as an opportunity to rebuild Accra. However, mishandling their reconstruction plan proved disadvantageous. The aftermath of the disaster, including an unprecedented rehousing project, exacerbated urban discontent. How everyday urban residents responded to rehousing further exposed the weakness of the colonial state and gave momentum to nationalism. The paper introduces natural disasters and relief programs into the scholarly narratives that have demonstrated that anticolonial nationalism emerged from a chain of grievances from amongst colonial subjects, some of which were unfulfilled social and economic expectations. The experiences of rehousing following the earthquake powerfully informed local perspectives and contributed to the chain of events leading to formal decolonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses a comparison with Ukraine to investigate why protests against Lukashenka in 2020 failed to oust the Belarusian dictator. First, in contrast to his counterparts in Ukraine, Lukashenka successfully built new authoritarian economic and coercive institutions in the 1990s that raised the costs of opposition activity and reduced challengers' access to business support. Second, Belarus has lacked a strong national identity that was critical to opposition success in Ukraine. In Ukraine, relatively powerful anti-Russian nationalism repeatedly motivated a core group of anti-incumbent activists and facilitated the opposition's control over local power structures that supported protest activities at critical moments. In Belarus, weak national identity and consequent dearth of committed activists in national government institutions in the 1990s hampered efforts to challenge Lukashenka's consolidation of authoritarian power. In addition, weaker national identity undermined the capacity of opposition forces to control local power structures that might have aided opposition protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The many recent crises in Belarus are often seen through the prism of democratization, post-communist transition, and nation- and identity-building. As a rule, it is put into the context of the 1989 democratization in Central and Eastern Europe and compared with similar societal mobilization in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004; 2014), and Kyrgyzstan (2005). This article, however, argues that while these theoretical approaches provide an important explanatory potential, they nevertheless fail to account for informal, hidden, and unstable processes presently unfolding in the Belarusian society, leading to profound change. We argue that, in the vulnerable, unpredictable, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world of today, our knowledge and ability to plan and achieve desirable outcomes are limited in contrast to a largely positivist or interpretivist epistemology of the mainstream theories, which conceive of the world as a closed system. In this article, we offer an alternative explanation of the many crises in Belarus by drawing on the insights of complexity-thinking to suggest that (hidden) transformative change in the country is now irreversible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will examine the response of the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) to the COVID-19 pandemic from an ontological security approach to illustrate how critical junctures may help de facto states in their quest for status and internal legitimacy. Stressing the pandemic's role in the reconstruction of political narratives and self-legitimating practices among Turkish Cypriot elites, it sheds light on the effects of this global crisis on domestic power struggles in Northern Cyprus as well as its quasi-foreign relations with its patron state (Turkey), parent state (Republic of Cyprus), and the European Union. The study shows that both nationalist and federalist elites of the de facto entity instrumentalized the pandemic in their legitimation strategies and engaged in opportunistic behavior amid the outbreak. It also reveals how the pandemic enhanced the ontological security of Northern Cyprus while advancing its nationalist leadership's claims for legitimate authority by enabling state-specific forms of agency and unilateral acts concerning the Cyprus dispute that may jeopardize the resumption of peace talks with Greek Cypriots. Thus, it can be assumed that advanced ontological security of the TRNC is highly volatile given the prospects of further isolation and de-engagement in the post-pandemic era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the anti-Lukashenka protest movement in Belarus by comparing it to the Solidarity movement in Poland. We organize our analysis around the concept of four stages identifiable in the development of social movements: emergence, coalescence, bureaucratization, and decline. We argue that protests in Belarus reached the bureaucratization stage, but their transformation into a more durable movement was slowed down by the brutal repressions unleashed by the Lukashenka regime propped up by Putin's Russia. However, the spectacular changes in people's conceptions of national identity built around symbols different from those associated with the officialdom may sustain emotional mobilization necessary for formation of higher levels of organizations in the oppressive context of today's Belarus. The contours of this process are brought into sharp relief when compared with the long, cumulative trajectory of the 1956-89 anti-authoritarian Polish revolts. This opens the way for cautious prognostication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how the Soviet government perceived higher birth rates in Central Asia as a threat to national identity and the stability of the USSR. The issue of demographic change was complex, and concerns about differential fertility between republics were not informed solely by prejudice. Rather, prejudice and racism mingled with practical concerns about labor surpluses and shortages. The Central Asian Republics had low labor mobility because people were unwilling to leave their cultural community, had a low level of Russian, and tended to not to be trained in the kind of heavy industries that required workers elsewhere in the Soviet Union. I argue that rather than aiming to change these factors, the government misdiagnosed economic problems as demographic ones. They placed primary emphasis on changing patterns of reproduction to remedy the situation by changing the population itself, portraying Slavs and Central Asians as distinct groups who had a predetermined role and place in life. In doing so, Moscow elites failed to address the structural and operational issues of Soviet socialism and inflamed tensions with local leaders who saw demographic campaigns as an attack on their culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the ethnic entanglements of the land reform debate in the first Polish Diet (1919–1922). Against the backdrop of global comparative studies, interwar Poland, haunted by land hunger, rural poverty, and high concentration of land ownership, is an odd case. Despite conditions conducive to far-reaching land reforms, that is, a high level of inter-elite conflict and semiautocratic order, the Polish reform was very moderate, if not disappointing. Unpacking the series of moves in the debate and the sequence of hairbreadth voting on its shape, I ask why, despite broad acceptance of the reform across the political spectrum, it could not attract enough support to be swiftly executed. The ethnic composition of the country triggered controversies concerning German farmers and peasants of the ethnically diversified eastern borderlands. Major political parties shared tacit Polish nationalism, but the history of political alignments made the nationalist politicians susceptible to the lobbying of the landed elite and estranged them from peasant parties. The land holdings of nobles were considered a bulwark of the nation, which effectively blocked the alternative idea of integrating the ethnic minorities via land ownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While ontological security (OS) studies have gone through a recent evolution, shifting toward psychoanalytic and existential accounts of anxiety, this article argues there remains a deficient engagement with the affective environments within which actors operate. Specifically, focusing on shared emotions/affect allows for a thicker account of the mechanisms of OS – including the constitutive forces underpinning society/societal trust, the role/power of signifiers and narratives, and the basis upon which actors promote social change. Accordingly, it suggests Durkheim's social theory, his broader concept of 'religion' as an affective community constituted by faith in a moral order entwined with the sacred, offers a viable pathway to develop these insights and develop a new basis for the mechanisms of OS. The drive for OS thus becomes reconfigured as an effort to act faithfully toward a dynamic moral order, while ontological insecurity emerges from the unbearable lightness of being experienced within moral disorder. Following Durkheim's preliminary argument on nationalism representing the continuation of religion, we can then revise how/why nations are integral to OS and International Relations. Specifically, we can view foreign policy as informed by debates around how to act faithfully toward the moral order – a process interrelated with revitalization and renewal of the sacred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies Afro-Mexicans’ Afro-baroque culture and sovereignty in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through an analysis of the description of two performances with Black kings found in the 1610 “Account of the Great Festival Held in Mexico City for the Dedication of La Profesa Church and the Beatification of Our Holy Father Ignatius.” The purpose of the analysis is threefold. First, to distinguish festive Black kings from the alleged Black rebel kings of colonial Mexico. Second, to expose the Afro-baroque culture that Afrodescendants developed in colonial Mexico, highlighting their cultural, social, and political agency in the formation of that culture. Finally, in light of that triple agency, a theory of Black sovereignty is put forth, where that triple agency reflects the autonomy and freedom Afro-Mexicans enjoyed in shaping their creole culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black women who seek and win elected office are changing the political landscape in the Americas. In Latin America, this shift became widely recognized when Epsy Campbell Barr became the first Black woman vice president in Costa Rica in 2018. Her election builds on the work of three generations of women whose engagement in formal politics is rooted in their intertwined identities as Black, women, and of West Indian descent. By recovering a racialized, gendered, and ethnicized lineage of community activism, relationships, and networking—which I call “Little’s links” to honor the legacy of the writer and activist Eulalia Bernard Little—I argue that in Costa Rica, Caribbean identity and Black motherhood politics have influenced Black women’s engagement in national politics. This account of these other (and mothers’) political routes to state power for Afro-Caribbean women in Costa Rica complements current explanations of Black women’s participation in national politics elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a critical review of new policies in China, the United States, and the European Union that characterize genomic data as a national strategic resource. Specifically, we review policies that regulate human genomic data for economic, national security, or other strategic purposes rather than ethical or individual rights purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes the adoption of a multi-modal system for allocating vaccine doses during large transnational outbreaks of infectious diseases. The chosen allocative criteria (public health need; country-income level; qualification through funding; and, subsidiarily, a modified lottery system) are adapted from a current embodiment of allocative multi-modality outside the context of public health: the New York City Marathon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civil religion has been described as the "common elements of religious orientation that the great majority of Americans share". In an age of partisan division, there have been calls for a revitalized civil religion, but the idea that civil religion can be unifying has been debated. In this paper, we investigate whether civil religion can be unifying, or is it fractured by partisanship? To address this, we use two strategies. First, we created a civil religion battery and deployed it on two different cross-sectional surveys. The results indicate that there are two dimensions to civil religion. These dimensions are distinct from Christian nationalism and structured along partisan lines. Second, we developed two survey experiments to understand the dimensions of civil religion and improve on the causal mechanisms that link civil religion to political behavior. Results indicate that, rather than promoting unity, civil religion is interpreted through partisan lenses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the annexation of Austrian (East) Galicia emerged as a distinct political—and ultimately military—mission in St. Petersburg before the First World War. The Russian nationalist project to recover the "lost lands of Rus΄ became an extension of the domestic agenda formulated by Peter Stolypin to promote Russian political and cultural hegemony in the western provinces of the empire. The campaign to liberate Subjugated Rus΄ and defeat "Ukrainian separatism" in Galicia led St. Petersburg to become ever more deeply engaged in the complex borderland politics of the Habsburg empire in the years before the war. By 1914, the idea of Subjugated Rus΄ and "four million persecuted Russians" came to inform the whole of St. Petersburg's understanding of its relations with Vienna and created an expectation that war with Austria-Hungary was inevitable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses how population genetics has impacted on nationalist discourses across the Taiwan Straits and affected the relationship between Taiwan and China since the 1990s. In Taiwan this cutting-edge science has helped to construct a native-based and Taiwan-centred national identity through promoting indigenous peoples' rights, rejecting a blood-based, cross-Straits nationalism, and founding a pan-Pacific indigenous peoples' community through genetic links and cultural affinity. In China, after subverting the nationalist myth of Peking Man (a Homo erectus group believed to be the common ancestor of the Chinese) by analysing genetic data, the same group of Chinese genetic scientists have constructed another nationalist myth of a genetically homogenous nationhood. Such a discourse not only valorizes Chinese nationalism through claiming a DNA-based Chineseness across ethnic distinctions but also asserts genetic links between China and Taiwan, therefore providing a 'scientific' basis for China's nationalism in the new century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits Rabindranath Tagore's critique of nationalism as well as his interventions on the theme of samaj. The claim is that contained within Tagore's reflections on nationalism and samaj is a vision of political community that is stipulated as an alternative to the one espoused by the nation-state mode of politics. Tagore's formulations of the possibilities within samaj suggest his commitment to normative orders grounded in a notion of relationship as a basis for social cooperation. Tagore contrasts and prioritizes the relationship-based orientation of samaj with what he calls the 'mechanical' emphasis of forms of community associated with the nation-state. Tagore articulated his views during the high noon of anti-colonial nationalism in India, and he offers a striking secular and modern political alternative to nationalist visions of community, which I classify as upholding a vision of societal politics. In underscoring the modern and political bases of Tagore's critique of nationalism and his endorsement of social and political forms related to samaj, I suggest that it would be a mistake to classify Tagore's perspective on nationalism and samaj as reflecting anti-political, or local-traditionalist, or aesthetic responses to the problems attached to national models of community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative studies of nationalism rarely incorporate China as a case in their observations. Despite the rise of nationalism in salience throughout Chinese society, studies of nationalism in China are frequently tagged as insularly focused and unsuitable for comparison. However, a survey of the literature in Chinese nationalism studies reveals that similar blind spots and limitations challenge studies of China with more general comparative research on nationalism. Given this parallelism in development, I argue that looking to observations of China provides scholars of nationalism with vital opportunities to expand and refine theory to include insights from a non-western, non-democratic case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to characterize the culturalist theory of the nation by Florian Znaniecki. Opposing the sociological theory dominated by Western, particularly Anglo-Saxon, thinkers, Znaniecki rejected the view of the nation as a state society. He believed that the nation is a type of community constituted by a specific culture that is created by its intellectual leaders. To derive his findings, he used the knowledge gained from the experiences of the nations of Central and Eastern Europe. He believed that their specific history required the development of a sociological theory that was adequate for such research, not dominated by the findings of Western sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast with the distorted and romanticized images reproduced by far-right narratives, we argue in this study that the constructive ideals of "nation" held by Italy's Giuseppe Mazzini and Turkey's Ziya Gökalp, from two later examples of European nationalism, could fit into what might be called a "proto-modernism" within nationalism theories. It is proposed that both Mazzini and Gökalp went through ideological transformations that made them firm opponents of German Romanticism and ardent believers of the Enlightenment, as shown in their non-exclusionary approaches to nationalism. They both rejected essentialist (religious, ethnic, racial, etc.) rationales for the backwardness of their respective countries and maintained the necessity of constructing nations that would initially provide civic equality among citizens and then aim at normative equality among nations at the civilizational level. In that sense, our analysis finds four fundamental similarities between Mazzini and Gökalp with regard to their national ideals: loyalty to the principles of the Enlightenment, national self-determination, civic-legal equality among citizens, and normative equality among all nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attempts to create a national opera in Spain repeatedly failed throughout the 19th century. Some authors have attributed this phenomenon to a deficit in the nationalization process. Others, to the contrary, have proved that there was a strong sense of Spanish national musicality from the middle of the 19th century onward. This article tries to explain this paradox underlining some essential elements that are not always attended by specialists: the importance of transnational, social, and economic dynamics that interfered in the process of the cultural construction of modern national identities. The projects of the Spanish nationalist intellectuals of the 19th century in relation to the definition of a national music were marked by the Romantic construction of Spanish musical exoticism, the new industry of entertainment, the existential situation of Spanish musicians, the formation of new artistic and musical fields, and the appearance of new forms of social distinction in the aftermath of the Spanish Liberal Revolution of the 1830s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of History in Africa: A Journal of Method is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In a 2018 referendum, the Irish public voted to lift the Irish state's near-total constitutional ban on abortion, bucking a recent global trend towards restrictions on reproductive rights. While abortion rights have long been a major concern of Irish feminists, appeals to national identity have often been viewed with suspicion by the women's rights movement in Ireland due to the historic role of national identity construction in perpetuating gender-based inequalities. This article explores the way(s) in which discourses of Irish identity and gender were mediated by the use of Irish in the linguistic landscape (LL) at the time of the vote. Proposing a modified version of Du Bois' (2007) stance triangle, I argue that signs use Irish as both a means of stancetaking and as an object of stance in itself, thus effectively taking a stance on both the referendum and on Irish national identity, indexed by the language. (Stancetaking, Irish (language), national identity, gender, abortion, Eighth Amendment) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The study of social imaginaries occupies a marginal place in the historiography dedicated to Cameroonian nationalism. This article deals with them as both modalities of invention and transformation of the Nation-State since the late nineteenth century. The study argues that at the heart of the multiple caesuras in the history of Cameroon, social imaginaries appeared as a resource from which actors have drawn to produce utopias that have taken on a performative dimension in various contexts. This article makes three main contributions: first, it shows that the idea of Cameroon as an indivisible territorial entity has its origins in the German colonial period. It reveals that beyond its structural causes, the Anglophone question in Cameroon objectifies the idea of a conflict of imaginaries between Francophones and Anglophones. The analysis of the diasporic question finally highlights the influence of the media in the production of social imaginaries in the Anglophone crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the evolution of issue coverage by the press during election campaigns in Quebec from 1994 to 2018. Two observations emerge from this study. First, we witness the diversification of the media agenda, explained in particular by a decline of the national question in the media in favor of issues such as the environment and immigration. The reframing of the national question, now much more focused on the identity dimension than on the question of the political status of Quebec, is striking. These changes seem to indicate the rise of a liberal-authoritarian political axis in the province, and the emergence of a multiparty system opens the door to a lasting political realignment. These observations tend to confirm the view that the agenda during a campaign results from the interaction between the media, the parties, and the voters and that it thus offers an appropriate reflection of the evolution of political dynamics in a given society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political salience of religious issues and identities has been rising in Thailand, and this is increasingly reflected in electoral politics. Thai political parties seek to position themselves in relation to struggles over the location of the ideological centre of gravity, which has pitted defenders of the religio-political status quo—a monarchy-centred civil-religious nationalism—against Buddhist nationalists, on the one hand, and proponents of greater secularization, on the other. In the 2019 general election, political entrepreneurs 'particized' these religio-political differences, which has far-reaching implications for majority-minority relations, to an extent that appears unprecedented in recent Thai political history. This argument is developed through an analysis of the platforms, policies, and rhetoric put forward by political parties contesting the election, which concluded an almost five-year period of direct military rule. This analysis suggests we need to pay greater attention to the role of political parties and electoral competition in maintaining and contesting the secular settlement in Thailand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of research connects Christian nationalism—a preference for a religiously conservative political regime—to social and political beliefs. This paper raises questions about the validity of a popular scale used to measure those attitudes. I begin by exploring the factor structure of the six-item Christian nationalism index. I then show how semi-supervised machine learning can be used to illustrate classification problems within that scale. Finally, I demonstrate that this index performs poorly at the interval level, a combination of measurement error and the sorting out of religious and political preferences. These attitudes have become so bound up in conventional politics that they often exhibit a threshold rather than a linear relationship to political preferences. I conclude with an appeal for care in matching theory to empirics: Christian nationalism is a prominent political theology, but research must grapple with the limitations of prevailing measurement tools when operationalizing it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1980s, the Soviet Union and China resurveyed their border in order to restart their long-stalemated border negotiations. These negotiations resulted in only a partial border settlement: the agreement was signed in 1991. By the end of 1989, nationalities openly expressing their wish to secede from the Soviet Union caused the Soviet government to slow down the negotiation process, and Moscow insisted on setting aside the most contentious sections. China's nationalities issue had the opposite effect on Zhongnanhai: Chinese leaders wished to settle the entire Sino-Soviet border as quickly as possible. However, once the collapse of the Soviet Union became imminent, the Chinese saw advantages of delaying the negotiations on the disputed sections of the border. They calculated that would allow for China to negotiate with weaker, newly independent countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a detailed analysis of the debates at the All-Russian Democratic Conference and in the Provisional Council of the Russian Republic (the Pre-Parliament), which followed the proclamation of the republic on September 1, 1917, and predated the Bolshevik-led insurgency on October 25. The two assemblies were supposed to help resolve the multilayered political, economic, and military crises of the First World War and the Revolution by consolidating a Russian postimperial political community and establishing a solid government. The debates demonstrated that grievances and antagonism, which were articulated in terms of class and nationality, made the idea of a broad nationalist coalition unpopular, since it would halt agrarian and other reforms and continue the negligence of non-Russian groups. Furthermore, those who still called for all-Russian national or civic unity split on the issue of community-building. The top-down, homogenizing and bottom-up, composite approaches proved irreconcilable and precluded a compromise between non-socialist and moderate socialist groups. The two assemblies hence failed to ensure a peaceful continuation of the postimperial transformation and did not lead to a broad coalition against right and left radicalism. The divisions, which were articulated in the two assemblies, translated into the main rifts of the Russian Civil War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The demand for family mediation to adapt and change has risen sharply in the contemporary English and Welsh family justice system. This paper focuses on a crucial, yet overlooked, barrier to reform: the tensions felt within the family mediator profession. It first provides an important overview of the introduction of family mediation in the late twentieth century, highlighting the distinction between the traditional therapeutic mediator and the subsequent lawyer mediator. Recent anecdotal evidence suggests that friction exists amongst the two mediator sub-groups, similar to earlier tensions felt between lawyers and mediators. The remainder of this paper is based on an empirical study, comprising 17 interviews with family mediators, which confirms these tensions, as well as a lack of national identity across the profession. However, the data also reveal mediators' desire for collaboration and community within the profession. The paper is hopeful that regulatory reform can help mediators to 'mediate themselves' going forward, and questions whether this transition is supported by a new hybrid mediator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strained South Korea–Japan ties are frequently attributed to the use and abuse of history by national leaders. This article considers a more bottom-up explanation by examining how Korean civil society is taking three different pathways to exert influence on bilateral relations. First, non-governmental organizations are expanding domestic and international awareness of grievances regarding Japan's 1910–1945 colonization of the Korean Peninsula. Second, activists are pushing court cases in attempts to change legal interpretations and government policies. Third, certain civic groups demand maximalist positions on history and stigmatize cooperation with Tokyo. While influential over Korean public opinion, these efforts win few hearts and minds in Japan and complicate productive diplomacy. With particular attention to the 2015 Korea–Japan agreement for "comfort women" survivors and the 2018 South Korean Supreme Court decisions on wartime labor, this article unpacks the relationship between activist Korean civil society and historical reconciliation with Japan, offering implications for foreign policy and state-society relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her introduction to the themed cluster "Nationalism, (Anti-)Communism and Violence in the European Cold War," the author contextualizes the issue's research contributions on Greece, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. She introduces the methodological rationale and highlights what binds the three case studies together: They explore how nationalism was woven into Cold War societies. The authors employ, as analytical prisms, both physical and symbolic violence in order to visualize empirically the workings of nationalism in the service of both communism and anti-communism. Hitherto, few scholars have focused on the interconnections between nationalism, (anti-)communism, and violence in Cold War east central and southeastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By introducing Bourdieu's notion of symbolic violence, the author explores the state uses of the cinematic industry—notably through the making of grandiose national epics—in the endeavor to model and, ultimately, to assimilate Muslim minorities during the so-called "Revival Process" (1984–1989) in socialist Bulgaria. Drawing attention to often-neglected aspects of film production, such as the selection of symbolically charged "national landscapes," shooting locations, and the use of Muslim film extras, she examines the production of a state-sponsored historical master narrative, its widespread dissemination at home and abroad, and the attempt at channeling film reception by national minorities and the majority population. The visual recreation of the alleged Ottoman "forced islamization" of Christians and the blurring of the distinction between fiction and fact, as well as past and present were intended to boost the national pride of the majority, achieve support for anti-minority measures, and win the obedience of minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the conception and subsequent reception of Jaromír Weinberger's 1927 opera Schwanda the Bagpiper in the context of various expressions of nationalism, anti-Semitism and Jewish identity politics throughout the interwar period. It takes into consideration the many historical, political and musical junctures before and during the opera's trajectory. While remaining rooted in nineteenth-century Czech nationalism, Weinberger sought to blend a plurality of cultural expressions, thus responding to the transitory state of nationalism during the interwar period. This is evident in the dialectics of the work – including its music, its libretto by Miloš Kareš and the first production. In this way, Schwanda and its divergent reception represents young Czechoslovakia's liminalities in relation to nationalism and the complexities of the new multi-ethnic state, especially with regard to its minorities. The article thus offers insights into the phenomenon of nationalism, which at the time of the opera's conception was inescapably co-constructed with anti-Semitism, and demonstrates Schwanda 's importance as part of larger histories of European music and opera. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconstructs the heated – local and national – debate around the consistent and pervasive foreign presence in the border territory of Lake Garda on the eve of the Great War. Here, the growing nationalistic tensions that preceded the conflict intertwined with the emerging hospitality industry. Tourism, seen as a social phenomenon, can thus offer a privileged perspective on the transformations of the general context of the time. Introduced by Austro-Germanic inhabitants of the lake at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the hospitality industry on Lake Garda flourished up to the eve of the Great War. There were, however, also opponents to this model of development. The dispute escalated to the point that, in the perception of the locals, the 'outsiders' turned into 'enemies' and Lake Garda increasingly became a disputed area: a symbol of the tensions of the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]