The founding fathers of the Turkish Republic worked to create “an imagined community” that would define them as Turks, regardless of their ethnic differences or primordial bonds with the “homeland.” Their rules were simple: if someone identifies as a Turk, they will be accepted as one. Within that framework, Afro-Turks, descendants of Africans brought to the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, became part of the new nation through citizenship, linguistic assimilation, and everyday participation in the civic rituals. Their visible difference did not prevent their integration, reflecting a model that operated through legal and cultural criteria rather than formal racial hierarchy. Yet their recent articulation of an “Afro-Turk” identity raises deeper questions about the mechanisms through which Turkishness is produced, negotiated, and transformed, particularly amid the post-2000 identity landscape, where new nationalist discourses and large-scale migration have reshaped how difference is perceived and accommodated. Drawing on in-depth interviews and historical analysis, this article demonstrates that Afro-Turks’ long-standing incorporation reflects the workings of everyday nationalism, symbolic whiteness, and conditional inclusion. Their experience shows that the republican promise of equality is realized most fully when difference is demographically small, politically unthreatening, and culturally unobtrusive, revealing the tacit norms that continue to structure belonging in Türkiye.

The Banat, like all territories lost after the First World War, was part of Hungarian irredentist plans. On the eve of the German occupation of Serbia, Hitler promised both the Bačka and the Banat to Hungary. Romania, the other ally of Nazi Germany, also had interest in the Banat as compensation for its territorial losses and as fulfillment of its First World War goals. To avoid a possible conflict between its two allies, Germany decided to occupy the Banat and appointed an ethnic German administration to the region. This article explores how the Banat Hungarian cultural elite navigated this new situation in the shadow of the Reich German occupation and the ethnic German administration. The failed and indefinitely postponed return of the region to Hungary raised self-doubt in the Banat Hungarian minority elites, causing them to rethink their position in the region and in the Hungarian nation. In the hopes of strengthening their positions, these elites discussed their ideas in the only Hungarian-language daily in the Banat during the period. The texts published in the Torontál repositioned the historical borderland of the Banat as a core part of the Hungarian nation-state and reinforced the border only towards the Balkan peninsula.

This article takes xenophobia in right-wing ecological conservation in contemporary Germany as its research object, first examining its manifestation in the history of right-wing ecotourism. Then, using species and animal protection as examples, it specifically analyzes the ways, argumentative characteristics, and underlying motives of the NPD, the AfD, and the Third Way in combining ecological topics with xenophobia. This article emphasizes the continuity and importance of xenophobia in the history of right-wing ecological conservation in Germany and its new characteristics in contemporary times. My conclusion is that xenophobia has always been an important objective of right-wing ecological conservation, and contemporary German right-wing ecological conservation has both maintained historical traditions and undergone contemporary updates. In right-wing ecological conservation in contemporary Germany, far-right parties and organizations use both traditional biologism and more covert cultural racism to incite xenophobia. However, whether advocating the superiority of “species (race)” or “culture,” the underlying ideology is one of inequality. Similar to the argumentation methods in the history of right-wing ecological conservation, species conservation and animal protection in right-wing ecological conservation in contemporary Germany ultimately equate to homeland protection. Therefore, species conservation and animal protection are merely tools for far-right parties and organizations to build their image, disguise xenophobic ideas, and greenwash their agenda. This article contributes to research on immigration and the far right in contemporary Germany.

In the autumn of 1920, Dáil Éireann leveraged the hunger strike and subsequent death of the Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, to launch a propaganda campaign aimed at advancing the Irish independence cause in the context of the Anglo-Irish War. One of the principal countries targeted by this campaign was Spain. There, Sinn Féin received significant support from the various branches of the Catalan nationalist movement. However, this support was met with unease by Irish republicans, whose primary objective was to win over broader Spanish public opinion and Spanish political elites. This article examines how the Dáil crafted its propaganda strategy in Spain based on the principles of realpolitik, in contrast to a Catalan nationalism that offered its backing from a position of idealism, and situates that response within a broader context and contrasts it with the reception it received from the Irish delegates led by Éamon de Valera.

The last phases and immediate aftermath of World War One represented both the peak of the nationality question and the definitive breakthrough of the minority one. The “morphing” of one into the other (as Holly Case has defined it) is often mentioned in the historiography but rarely analyzed in detail. This article focuses on the key period 1916–1923 and tracks this transition examining the work of different organizations and actors that contributed to it. The article shows that the switch from nationalities to minorities was not absolute. Although the grammar of minorities and majorities was dominant in the interwar years, the vocabulary of nationalities did not disappear and many actors used these terms as synonyms to refer to the same underlying “problem”: the persistence of national difference in an increasingly homogenizing world. Above all, the move from nationalities to minorities foreclosed any possibility of obtaining independent statehood in the new Europe of nation-states. Finally, the article dissects the process whereby the imposition of minority treaties only to Central and Eastern European countries entrenched a stereotypical distinction between a civilized homogenous West and a repressive heterogeneous East that established an understanding of the two areas as undifferentiated monolithic entities.

This article reexamines the Ottoman Turkish term millet, which is supposedly central to understanding Ottoman governance over non-Muslim subjects. While scholars have largely assumed that the use of millet for non-Muslim collectives reflected top-down imperial control, this article challenges that premise by extensively examining how the term was employed in Ottoman documents from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The findings reveal that the extant understanding of millet as a rigidly defined, state-recognized confessional community lacks empirical support throughout the empire’s history. Instead, the term millet, as used in Ottoman documents, vaguely denoted a group of people who supposedly shared a common origin and culture, though not necessarily defined by a common religion or confession. Furthermore, millet’s use for non-Muslim collectives gradually increased from around 1805, not due to state imposition, but influenced by non-Muslim actors who responded to millet’s acquired distinction as a term denoting modern nationhood. Thus, this article contributes to revising the prevalent state-centric view of Ottoman history by demonstrating the participation of non-Muslims in the development of Ottoman discourse.

To explain why Vladimir Putin launched Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this article foregrounds a crucial but understudied dimension: national memory. It argues that both discontinuity in national memory and dislocation between national memory and territory threaten states’ ontological security. The Soviet collapse marked a profound break in Russia’s national memory. To restore the ontological security thus shattered, Russia’s ruling elite adopted a narrative of radical continuity of Russian statehood, linking Kievan Rus, the Grand Duchy of Moscow, the Romanov Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation into an unbroken thousand-year tradition. Yet by placing its origins in independent Ukraine, this narrative was inherently precarious. While mending the discontinuity in national memory, it produced a dislocation between memory and territory, rendering Russia ontologically vulnerable. By asserting their own claim to Kyiv as the birthplace of Ukrainian nation- and statehood, Ukraine’s ruling elite exposed this dislocation and laid bare both the precarity of the radical continuity narrative and Russia’s resulting ontological vulnerability. The Kremlin’s response was to seek political – and, when that failed, military – control over Ukraine to redress this dislocation and eliminate the sources of ontological vulnerability that flowed from the radical continuity narrative.

This article develops the concept of meritocratic nationalism to unpack the online backlash surrounding the rise to fame of a Tibetan cyberstar, Tenzing Tsondu (Ding Zhen), on Chinese social media. Meritocratic nationalism not only embeds ideals of individual achievement, education attainment, and productivity within narratives of national identity and regime legitimacy, but also sustains structural inequalities through racialized and gendered assumptions about who is capable of merit and whose success is ‘deserved’. First, critics frame state media’s endorsement of the internet celebrity as a betrayal to the meritocratic ideal the state is supposed to safeguard. However, this does not lead to a critique of meritocratic legitimacy itself but rather its reaffirmation. Secondly, the reproduction of a Han-centric and masculine-coded ideal of merit is integral to the construction of majority male victimhood, which denies and normalizes structural violence. Thirdly, we note the multifaceted representation of the international in the backlash, where users deploy the figure of ‘white American men’ as fellow victims of ‘political correctness’ to animate a racialized imagination of shared majoritarian grievance. The article contributes to nationalism studies and broader debates on meritocracy, racism, and the grievance politics of ethnic majority men.

Festive culture is often analysed as a manifestation of spontaneity, creativity, popular culture, and humour, as well as an opportunity to express territorial identity. However, these rituals and their artistic expressions can also manifest hateful and contemptuous discourses toward national and cultural minorities, as observed in some European carnival celebrations. In the case of Valencia, from the Francoist dictatorship onwards, the festive culture was controlled by a political and social elite right and extreme right group, which instrumentalised the celebration as a political tool. Thus, these phenomena can be observed with the proliferation of hate speech against social and political minorities as Catalan and Valencian nationalists, depicting them as animals, traitors and enemies of Valencian and Spanish identity and exposing them in public space to shame them. This phenomenon was radicalised at the end of 2015 with the mobilisation of the Spanish right and far right to counter the left and nationalist government of the city, despite the Fallas’ adherence to UNESCO principles to promote understanding and dialogue between cultures and nationalities.

It has already been three years since millions of Ukrainians found refuge in other countries. In our longitudinal research, we examine in what way the main news websites in Poland and Czechia portray Ukrainian refugees and through that how they contribute to their social construction as a group deserving or undeserving of societal and public policy support. Data were collected from platform X, focusing on the accounts of the five most popular news websites in each country. In 2022, we expanded CARIN to CARIN+A, highlighting assistance as a booster (Zogata-Kusz, Öbrink Hobzová, and Cekiera, 2023). Now, examining the period between February 24, 2023, and July 31, 2024, we formulate a hypothesis of dimension content modification, i.e. the meaning of deservingness dimensions change over time for the same target group. Both countries exhibited similar themes and narratives. This was most visible in the attitude and reciprocity, although identity was also important. While at the beginning of the invasion the question of deservingness tied to who they are, later how they behave became crucial. Additionally, we observed normalisation of the situation, without compassion fatigue. Longitudinal media analysis is rare but crucial for countering xenophobia and nationalism.

This article deals with the domestic politics of Estonia and Latvia after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. It studies the cases of the Estonian Conservative People’s Party (EKRE) and Latvia’s National Alliance (NA). This piece concentrates on the cases of EKRE and NA with an interest in these parties’ formation processes, outlooks on identity politics, their stances vis-à-vis the EU and developments in international politics, and their relations with other political actors in Estonia and Latvia.

EKRE and NA anchor their ideological prerogatives in the longer trajectories of ethno-nationalism in Estonia and Latvia. However, whereas NA transformed into a party of the national conservative right, open to cooperation with centrist and centre-right partners, EKRE has remained a party of the radical right with a staunchly anti-systemic rhetoric and agenda. This particularity is largely to account for NA’s convergence with Latvia’s major parties on the increased securitisation of relations with Russia and EKRE’s divergence towards a rhetoric that urges a prioritisation of the national interest and a “pro-peace” stance vis-à-vis the war in Ukraine.

During World War I, national pride in France fostered solidarity and increased patriotism. However, after the war, the principles of self-determination and nationality reignited debates among young regionalists about federal reorganization in France and Europe. Federalism was seen as a way to promote peace in Europe and to protect national minorities within the state. This movement crystallized in 1927 when representatives from Alsace, Corsica, and Brittany established the Central Committee of National Minorities in France (CCMNF). The CCMNF advocated for self-determination and international federalism, suggesting that a federation of peoples could replace the modern state system. This structure would let each nationality decide its political status and cultural development. While the CCMNF marked a milestone in uniting minorities around federalist ideas, its efforts were slowed by the 1929 economic crisis and a resurgence of political tensions. This article examines the rise of regionalist federalism in 1920s France and its connection to the broader post-war discussions on self-determination. By placing this movement within the larger national debates on reorganizing the French state, it highlights federalism’s potential as a transformative framework for addressing political and cultural diversity.

Golden Dawn (GD), Greece’s most prominent far-right political organization, strategically utilized antisemitism as its core ideological principle rather than a marginal prejudice or rhetorical device. This article argues that antisemitism served primarily as an epistemological conspiratorial framework central to GD’s ideological worldview, providing a coherent interpretive lens through which all political, economic, and social phenomena were explained as elements of a singular Jewish-orchestrated plot. Drawing on qualitative discourse analysis of over 10,300 GD publications spanning 1993 to 2020, the study illustrates how this epistemological master frame enabled the party to unify diverse domestic and international issues, from foreign policy tensions and immigration debates to economic crises, under a consistent antisemitic narrative. Additionally, by explicitly employing Holocaust denial, endorsing Nazi symbolism, and openly propagating antisemitic conspiracies, GD deliberately violated post-Holocaust European norms. This normative transgression was integral to the party’s identity, positioning it in overt defiance of mainstream moral and political boundaries. The article thus demonstrates how GD’s antisemitism functioned not merely as a rhetorical provocation but as the foundation of a comprehensive ideological system that consciously challenged established European taboos. These findings also suggest broader implications for understanding the role and adaptability of conspiratorial antisemitism and normative transgression in other extremist ideologies beyond the Greek context.

This article examines the identities of three sub-ethnic and ethnographic groups in Georgia – Adjarians, Megrelians, and Tushetians – and their relationship to the Georgian nation in political and ethnic terms. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2023, the study explores how these groups navigate their distinct cultural markers, such as religion, language, and traditions, while engaging with the broader national identity. Using the theoretical framework of nationalization, the analysis explores four key themes: the salience of ethno-cultural differences, the transformation of sub-ethnic identities, the politicization of ethno-cultural markers, and the groups’ historical narratives emphasizing their contributions to Georgian-ness. The findings highlight the link between local identities and national integration. The findings contribute to broader theoretical debates on nationalization by demonstrating that the integration of sub-ethnic groups is not a unidirectional process of homogenization, but a dynamic negotiation of diversity and unity.

This article focuses on unilateral sovereignty referendums pursued by territorial autonomies. Due to their unilateral character, such referendums are unlikely to gain external recognition and, as a result, fail to effect or prevent any de jure change in sovereignty. However, they are still pursued despite these constraints, suggesting that they serve purposes other than formal changes in sovereignty. To explain this phenomenon, the article proposes a framework of seven potential motivations. The framework is examined through the case of Gagauzia’s 2014 referendums, which addressed two key issues: Moldova’s foreign alignment and Gagauzia’s deferred independence. The analysis follows three referendum stages — proposal, initiation, and implementation — focusing on the dual leadership of the executive and legislative branches. Drawing primarily on newspapers affiliated with these branches, the study finds empirical support for three key motivations: advancing the individual and collective political interests of autonomy leadership, strengthening Gagauzia’s ties with its patron (Russia), and empowering the territorial autonomy vis-à-vis the parent state (Moldova). This article contributes a framework of motivations for unilateral sovereignty referendums tailored specifically to territorial autonomies, going beyond existing explanations developed for all polities. It also provides a detailed account of one of the most significant political events in Gagauzia’s history.

This article discusses the modalities of visual necropolitics in the context of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Drawing on the concepts of necropolitics (Mbembe 2003), visual necropolitics (Deprez 2023), and insights into everyday forms of violence and subjugation, this article argues that the necropolitics of Russia’s war on Ukraine manifests itself in the form of physical but also social death. Relying on the method of visual semiotic analysis, it identifies two key modalities of visual necropolitics: manipulation of representations and a forceful imposition of a new identity. In doing so, it contributes to the literatures on necropolitics of war and the lived experiences of peoples and communities living under occupation.

This article explores the strategic (mis)use of historical memory by populist political actors, focusing on George Simion, leader of the Romanian radical-right party Alliance for the Unity of Romanians. Through a detailed case study of the Valea Uzului Cemetery controversy, the research examines how populist movements construct and disseminate exclusionary historical narratives to mobilize affective publics, reinforce nationalistic ideologies, and generate political support. Drawing on qualitative analysis of Facebook comments and posts, the study investigates how memory is weaponized to polarize public opinion and elevate a simplified, antagonistic vision of history. The Valea Uzului case exemplifies how war cemeteries and commemorative practices can be transformed into symbolic battlegrounds for political gain. The digital environment serves as a key vector for radicalization, emotional amplification, and narrative reinforcement. Ultimately, this research highlights the critical role of memory in populist politics and the power of social media in shaping historical perception. It calls for further comparative investigation into how such mnemonic strategies impact democratic processes, interethnic relations, and the broader politics of remembrance in contemporary Europe.

In a longue durée study of the European context from 1918 to the present day, this article critically assesses alternative modalities of self-determination proposed by two non-state, transnational actors – the Congress of European Nationalities (1925–1942) and the Federal Union of European Nationalities (established 1949). Situating the activism of these organizations within an international system that has prioritized state determination over the self-determination of peoples, the study charts their attempts to renegotiate dominant statist paradigms of minority protection and human rights, using ideals and frameworks of European integration as a guide. The analysis shows that although the rise of the European Union after 1945 created an environment far more propitious than the one that existed between the two World Wars, transnational activism has faced consistent limitations on its effectiveness, arising not just from the external machinations of states but also from internal divisions within the organizations concerned. In this respect, the study also sheds light on an enduring tension between collective and individual concepts of self-determination within contemporary Europe, demonstrated most recently by the Federal Union of European Nationalities’ failed European Citizens’ Initiative on a “Minority Safepack” during 2013–2021.