How do autocracies use nationalism to normalize and contain unsettled times? The full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 marked a decisive point in Russia’s politics from which there could be no return to an antebellum normality. Rather than attempt to mobilize the Russian public to war, state-run television sought to normalize the war as a banal reality for domestic audiences. Drawing on a content analysis of 1,575 reports from the state-run First Channel [Pervyi Kanal] from 2022 to 2024, this article argues that the Ukrainian regions occupied by Russia — the so-called “new regions” — are crucial to this strategy through their incorporation into banal nationalist depictions of Russia. In turn, televised depictions of residents in the “new regions” confer emotional weight and moral examples for ordinary Russians through their everyday practices: their fortitude in voting for Putin despite ongoing attacks; through their shared excitement in acquiring routine aspects of daily life from passports to pensions; and through their embodiment of Russia’s future. In the process, media depictions normalize imperial nationalist justifications for Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territory in terms of the distinctiveness of the Russian people, Russia’s civilizing mission, and presentation of its war as defensive.

Anthony D. Smith, in one of his earlier, less debated, works – Nationalism in the 20th Century (1979) – examines phases of nationalism in the modern era, suggesting that nationalism has taken various forms before and during the 20th century. He argues that nationalism’s adaptability is at the core of its persistence, adapting to changing situations such as fascism and communism. As a result of this adaptability, nationalism still flourishes today. This article applies Smith’s theory to explore the interplay between cultural and material factors in the evolution of nationalism in Ireland. It identifies five ideological phases – revolutionary nationalist, protectionist, liberalising, neoliberal, and ecological – to which nationalism has adapted, and within which nationalism has influenced various aspects of Irish society. These phases are situated within a broader ideological and material context, analysing obliquely the Irish language (a core element of Irish nationalism), and related to changing processes of individualization.

Russian nation-building policy has often been described as ambiguous, blending a rhetorical commitment to the state’s multinational character together with more exclusionary rhetoric and policies. Drawing from original survey questions on national identity commissioned in December 2022, I find that Russian citizens continue to endorse a multinational vision of the Russian state during wartime. Respondents are simultaneously likely to exclude minorities from being fully considered as “true Rossians” [istinnye rossiiane], while socioeconomic and political factors are meaningfully associated with these patterns. In line with previous scholarship, these findings underscore the blurriness of the russkii/rossiiskii distinction in practice: just as russkii should not always be interpreted as an exclusively ethnic term, rossiiskii should not be seen as a non-ethnic category, either. The findings in the Russian case carry implications for understanding how nation-builders in multiethnic contexts may seek to cater to ethnic majorities while simultaneously signaling commitments to ethnic diversity.

The article explores the interplay between imperialism and ethnonationalism, revealing how these seemingly conflicting ideologies coalesced in Russian political thought. The period of 1989–1994 saw a struggle between civic nationalism, which sought to redefine Russia within its existing borders, and imperialist-nationalist currents that viewed Soviet disintegration as a geopolitical catastrophe. Within this ideological conflict, the “time bomb” metaphor emerged as a potent rhetorical device, encapsulating anxieties about territorial fragmentation and national decline. The study identifies Russian émigré intellectual Gleb Rahr as a key figure in introducing the metaphor, later popularized by figures such as Dmitry Rogozin and Vladimir Putin.

We outline a framework for comparative analyses of minority education and present four illustrative Central and Eastern European (CEE) cases: Bulgaria, Estonia, the Republic of North Macedonia and Romania. The fourfold typology we develop relies on literature on minority rights and diversity management and proposes a holistic approach, differing from narrower legal analysis. We investigate education as part of larger macro-approaches of minority policies and focus on the interrelation between educational equity and identity reproduction. In our case studies, we employ a diachronic perspective, focusing on historical dynamics and pathways of educational policies, aiming to identify both gradual change and more radical shifts in institutional processes. The concept of de facto discrimination plays an important role as well: next to the historical analysis of legislative and policy changes, we use various statistics to measure educational equity. We rely on the 2022 PISA results, a tool popular in the comparative research of educational systems but underutilized in the fields of minority rights and minority policies. In our comparative inquiry, we argue that the educational systems of CEEs diverge in terms of minority identity reproduction, but few of them can be labelled as integrative, as intercultural elements are rather weak, while education usually fails to provide equity for minority students.

Drawing from the experiences of thirty-two refugee women who fled with their children from Ukraine to two German cities, Berlin and Frankfurt Oder, this article explores how being a refugee and a mother affects the anchoring, along with the un-anchoring and embedding of Ukrainian refugees in their new environment. It illustrates that solidarity practices and (inter)actions play a crucial role in mobility considerations, as the interlocutors engaging in solidarity work find meaning in building lives in their new environment. The identities of the interlocutors as refugees and mothers play an important role in shaping the solidarity they articulate as they work to support others in a similar situation in cultivating agency, which, at the same time, gives the interlocutors comfort in their own struggles. This article also makes a valuable contribution to the scholarly literature on transnational family ties through the case of Ukrainian refugee women in Germany, who often have family members remaining in/returning to Ukraine. The interlocutors positioning as mothers and refugees means that they engage in negotiating mobility considerations with these positions in hindsight — providing new avenues of enquiry into the agency of refugee-mothers, reflecting on life aspirations, and considering their specific positionalities and forced migration context.

This article analyzes Vladimir Putin’s 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” as an example of political rhetoric invoking the language/dialect dichotomy. Curiously, Putin argued both that Ukrainian is a “dialect” of a greater Russian language and that Ukrainian is a distinct “language” different from Russian. As a form of political rhetoric, the language/dialect dichotomy draws its power from normative isomorphism, the idea that languages, nations, and states ought to coincide. According to the logic of normative isomorphism, claiming that Russian and Ukrainian are separate “languages” gives the Russian Federation a claim to annex the Russian-speaking south-east of Ukraine, while claiming that Ukrainian is a “dialect” of Russian would justify the Russian Federation’s annexation of Ukraine in its entirety. By endorsing both positions, Putin’s speech provided pre-emptively justifications for different policies, giving him room to maneuver. All that said, neither the language/dialect dichotomy nor normative isomorphism offers a solid basis for political legitimacy.

The article addresses the question of the distinction between voluntary and involuntary immobility under emigration restrictions. Based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with people whose family members intended to emigrate from the Polish People’s Republic and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic but who have not fulfilled their intentions, it examines the role of the would-be migrant’s agency in driving the immobility outcome under the narrow opportunity structure for international mobility. The analysis of reasons for the emigration intentions of formerly aspiring migrants having remained unfulfilled demonstrates that the boundary between voluntary and involuntary immobility – similar to that of voluntary versus forced migration – is often blurred. The studied cases suggest it is more justified to view immobility through the lens of a continuum of (in)voluntariness rather than as a voluntary-involuntary binary. Moreover, the study shows how the blurriness of the boundary between voluntary and involuntary immobility may be understood through changes over time in the reasons for the non-realization of one’s migration intentions.

Since 2020, the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh has intensified, culminating in a 44-day war in 2020 and an Azerbaijani military offensive in September 2023 when Azerbaijan reclaimed control over the Nagorno-Karabakh territory. This has ushered in a new phase of the Karabakh peace process amidst a transformed security landscape in the Caucasus. Against the background of a more general reconceptualization of Armenia’s role in the region, shifting away from its traditional alliance with Russia towards closer ties with the West, the article examines the role of women in Armenia in this peace process and their postwar opportunities for agency. The analysis reveals that women’s substantive inclusion in Armenia’s peace process remains limited due to (1) elite-dominated hard power negotiation structures and militarized discourses, (2) societal and economic factors, and (3) “self-exclusion” of women and the need for empowerment. Despite these challenges, the article identifies opportunities for women to assert agency in Armenia’s new security environment, contributing to a more effective, sustainable, and inclusive peace process.

How do people form durable cognitive and affective bonds to state territories? How do these place attachments become rigid? I argue that territorial attachments rest on what social epistemologists call structural ignorance — background knowledge and cognitive mechanisms that filter out discomforting narratives to preserve a dominant view. As the state structures ignorance and as people reproduce it, certain knowledges — the nation’s artificialness and the past presence/ongoing oppression of non-core groups inhabiting the state’s territory — cannot be known, lest people’s cognitive environment and sense of self be disrupted. As structured ignorance becomes entrenched, territorial attachments rigidify. I shed light on the territorializing practices-structured ignorance-rigid attachments mechanism through the case of Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh. Through discourse analysis and practice tracing, I find that as the Azerbaijani state structured ignorance during the Soviet era about the symbolic significance of Nagorno-Karabakh and the erasure of ethnic Armenians, territorial attachments grew. I then show how the 1988–1994 war over Nagorno-Karabakh and practices leading to the 2020 War entrenched the structure and rigidified attachments. Uncovering the structure of ignorance and the attachments it prescribes reveals new ramifications of nation-building and one of the facets of intractable conflicts.

In response to the Hamidian massacres of 1894–1897, Armenian immigrants held commemorative events in the US that concurred with their activism for the Armenian Question. Although largely overlooked in scholarship, these commemorative practices offer insights into the early history of this community and the memory of the late Ottoman state violence. We explore how American Armenians commemorated the Hamidian massacres, addressing this gap in scholarship. Specifically, we delve into the socio-political and cultural sphere, analyzing the agencies and narratives involved in these commemorative practices. Through a close examination of various commemorative forms, we find that the incentives of American Armenians went beyond simply honoring the victims. We argue that the motives of mourning loss and striving to prevent violence from recurring were intricately intertwined in the commemoration. Despite the unsuccessful outcome, the search for prevention remained an important driving force behind commemorating Ottoman violence in the following years. By integrating its memory into their public life, communal leadership aimed not only to foster social cohesion among Armenian immigrants but also to garner public empathy and sympathy within the host society, ultimately translating it into political support for the Armenian Question, which was believed could prevent future atrocities.

The international recognition of the Armenian genocide is the most prominent issue shaping Turkish-Armenian relations today. Nevertheless, the academic literature lacks empirical analyses of people’s perceptions of the genocide in Turkey. To address the gap, the article provides an exploratory investigation into people’s online comments regarding the genocide on the most popular Turkish forum website, Eksisozluk. Guided by Cohen’s (2001) theoretical approach, the study explores online entries on the topic spanning from 2002 to 2018 (N = 2127). The findings reveal eleven attitudes that individuals adopt in the debate. The article examines the diversity in responses by utilizing Cohen’s typology, which helps to define and categorize individuals’ rationales for denial. Further, it shows that Cohen’s approach could contribute to explaining non-denying responses to the recollection of past suffering. The study concludes that people do not uniformly follow the official line concerning the Armenian genocide in Turkey.

This article contributes to the ongoing debate on reactionary internationalism by linking it with scholarly discussions on civilisation and civilisationism, which have mostly been running in parallel trajectories. By doing so, it attempts to address the question of how the radical right, rooted in numerous particularisms, such as cultural, national, and religious, has managed to foster a global movement with an internationalist ideology that poses a significant challenge to the liberal international order. Through an analysis of the relevant literature and a case study of the Serbian radical right, this article tries to elucidate this question and bridge the gap between the two debates by demonstrating that civilisationism forms the core of reactionary internationalism, unifying the radical right from the West to the East. This article examines the Serbian case and its history of civilisational and geopolitical reactions as a possible paradigm for the contemporary radical right in general. Furthermore, it explores the role of Russian revisionism and war in Ukraine in shaping this civilisational discourse, specifically considering the narratives built around the Serbian foreign fighters’ network in Ukraine. An additional contribution of this article is that it provides a non-Western perspective on civilisation, religion, and nationalism.

Ethno-religious nationalism has been an integral part of the Georgian identity since the country regained independence. Since the early 2000s, Georgia has had a constitutionally enshrined pro-European foreign policy, which has been reflected in a strong identification with Europe, its culture, and values. Survey data show that Georgians prefer European and Christian ethnic outgroups to Asian and Muslim ones. These factors could have explained the rise of the far right in Georgia, had Georgia experienced a wave of refugees comparable to EU states in mid-2010s. However, only few people fled from the Syrian civil war to Georgia. Nevertheless, in and around 2016, various far-right groups with a strong anti-liberal ideology appeared in the Georgian public sphere. In 2017, a far-right rally was organized, demanding that the rights of Turkish, Iranian, and Arab business owners and citizens be restricted in Georgia. This was accompanied by violent incidents involving physical abuse and property damage of non-white foreigners. The sudden rise of the far-right political organizations in Georgia gives rise to various questions: Do the far-right ideas have grassroots origins, or was the activation of the far right a top-down process? Which domestic and external factors could have contributed to these developments?

As Poland began to expand towards the east in the 1340s, a large-scale settlement initiative commenced on the former Polish-Ruthenian borderland in the Carpathians. This initiative, along with integration of German and Polish colonists, resulted over time in the emergence of a Polish cultural group known as Forest Germans (in Polish Głuchoniemcy). In 1871-1989 Polish-German conflict led to the relevant ethnonym and choronym being removed from both Polish academic and popular discourse. As a result, no systematic geographical research into the location and borders of their settlement region was carried out. All we have are its dispersed, imprecise geographical descriptions from the period between the second half of the 17th century and the first half of the 20th century. Despite the erasure of this term from discourses and obstruction of the process of self-determination by the local population as Forest Germans at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries primarily for political reasons, the existence of a community which can potentially be identified today as Forest Germans at the former Polish-Ruthenian border is a fact. This article outlines the problems, challenges as well as the very process of delimiting Forest Germany, along with a general outline of its boundaries.

“Oriental confectioners” were a separate administrative category of craftsmen in early socialist Slovenia. The group of mainly Albanian-speaking seasonal craftsmen came from the rural Polog basin in North Macedonia during the interwar period and continued migrating to Slovenia in the profoundly changed postwar context. The emerging socialist authorities cast private craft businesses as potentially antisocialist. Employing a textual analysis of craft-related archival documents from the period (1945–1955), the article explores the treatment of Albanian migrants by the nascent bureaucracy in the People’s Republic of Slovenia. The key argument posited is two-fold. Firstly, the economic exclusion of Albanian migrant craftsmen extended beyond socialist distrust towards private enterprise. Exclusion was deeply intertwined with Slovenia’s orientalist, balkanist, and possibly racist perceptions, which culturally diminished craftsmen’s origins and products, and placed Albanian migrants in a conflicting position with socialist modernization. Secondly, and in contrast to the first point, the state’s treatment was not uniformly discriminatory. Albanian migrants were often able to negotiate their inclusion into the urban economy by appealing to socialist morality, to which socialist authorities at the republican level were particularly receptive.

Recent scholarship on the democratization and Europeanization of the Western Balkans as well as the field of media studies have not amply dealt with the concept of political clientelism in the media in this region, which has been a major feature of the post-Milošević democratic transition in Serbia. This article examines the gradual political instrumentalization of the media landscape in Serbia under the ruling party since 2012. It will argue that despite the adoption of the new media laws first in 2014 and their amendments in 2023, government influence of the media outlets vis-à-vis more subtle mechanisms of control, has served to undermine media freedom rather than fostering democratic changes through genuine domestic reforms. This type of more subtle mechanism of indirect control is visible through the captured regulatory authority, state subsidies in the media vis-à-vis project co-financing, advertising contracts where the government serves as an intermediary, and the recent amendments to the new media laws adopted in October 2023 that practically “legalized” government interference in the Serbian media.

The article looks at two electoral cases from the European Court of Human Rights that raise long-disputed doctrinal issues. Bakirdzi and E.C. v. Hungary deals with the preferential representation of national minorities in parliament, while Zsófia Vámos v. Hungary concerns the rights of Hungarians living beyond the borders to vote in general elections. The author argues that the Court would need to critically examine the social and political system when deciding on electoral rules in order not to miss the forest for the trees, i.e., the way authoritarian regimes manipulate elections. If this is not done, even if decisions condemn Hungary, they may have a legitimising function for the regime. Using a feminist approach that introduces critical perspectives by rewriting problematic court decisions, the article will show how these cases should have been decided and argued in light of the real facts and political context. The article highlights the future potential external constraints of an authoritarian regime and empowers the supporters of constitutional democracy in Hungary.

The article investigates perceived and objective inequalities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, focusing on Republika Srpska amid rising societal tensions, bolstering the secession narrative, and political mobilization. Aimed at identifying objective inequalities that might fuel grievances causing societal upheaval, the findings reveal no significant disparities between Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Despite the absence of objective economic, social, or political inequalities, a perception of disparity persists among Bosnian Serbs, driven by the nationalist rhetoric of local leaders. Hence, the research underscores the gap between perceived inequalities and objective disparities, challenging conventional beliefs about the causal chain from objective horizontal inequalities to social mobilization by demonstrating how unfounded grievances can still drive tensions and secessionist agendas.