Situated at the intersection of language rights, nation-building processes, and security issues, this article analyzes language policies in Ukraine in the three decades since its independence (1991–2021). It traces the legal evolution and decisions of the Ukrainian Constitutional Court, identifying the specific ideological approaches towards language issues that emerge in such a development. We distinguish four periods in the evolution of Ukrainian laws, highlighting how these stages reflect specific ontological and societal (in)securities and related securitization processes, and their intersection with the process of nation-building and the role assigned to the Ukrainian language in such a process. In this way, the article discusses how, in light of the Soviet legacy and Russian kin-state activism and geopolitical agenda, Ukraine has moved to adopt a more assertive nationalizing approach to language issues that aim at promoting Ukrainian as the state language. Russia’s aggressive actions accelerated the ongoing nation-building process, interplaying with the relevance assigned to the Ukrainian language for the Ukrainian nation-state as well as the country’s ontological and societal (in)securities. In this way, our contribution complements our understanding of language policies, bringing to light the connections of their evolution and variations with how security concerns affect nation-building processes.

This article examines the divergent historical views espoused by Russian and Ukrainian societies and their representatives on topics such as the 1932-1933 famine, Stalinism, and the post-World War II Soviet Union. We draw on an original online survey, conducted simultaneously in January 2021 in Ukraine and Russia, to provide an in-depth analysis of views on history in Ukraine and Russia before the 2022 invasion. In Russia, we illustrate how little contestation there is of official narratives. This may signal the existence of an integrated mnemonic community after a decade of state-curated historical narratives, but it might also imply that Russian society is disengaged from history. In pre-2022 Ukraine, meanwhile, we identify persistent fragmentation in the ways in which society perceives history, largely centered along the country’s linguistic divide. However, a central finding is that Russian-speakers in Ukraine differ in their historical views from Russian citizens on key dimensions such as the memory of Stalin and the Holodomor. These results speak to the evolving and politicized nature of societal memory and provide an important baseline for interpreting potential mnemonic shifts that accompanied the full-scale war launched against Ukraine by Russia in February 2022.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, pandemic-driven nationalism surged in China, exemplified by widespread mockery and disparagement of India’s handling of the crisis in Chinese cyberspace. Adopting a linguistically grounded approach, this study scrutinizes how India is discursively constructed as an inferior Other amid COVID-19. It conducts a linguistically informed discourse analysis of a highly viewed text on Zhihu (China’s largest online Q&A platform). Drawing mainly on Halliday’s transitivity theory, this study unpacks the linguistic features in the chosen text, which, within a discourse of modern medicine, depicts the Indian people as trapped between hopelessly passive and absurdly overactive in the face of the pandemic. The text also casts the Indian government as an impotent foil to the Chinese government, a representation situated within a discourse of strong-state pandemic governance. By interrogating the non-official social media text through a linguistic lens, this study contributes to understanding China’s representational politics of Othering the non-West within the intertextual nexus between official and non-official spheres. It also contributes to making sense of the multidimensionality and ambivalence underlying Chinese national identity-making as well as “Orientalism within the ‘Orient’” in the Chinese context.

This article examines how issues related to World War I were remembered and represented during the Single Party Era of the Turkish Republic (1923–1945), focusing on the political elite’s narrative strategies. The study situates the persistence of a positive perception of Unionism in contemporary Turkey within the historical remembrance shaped by the early Republic’s identity politics. Drawing on newspaper analyses from the 1930s and 1940s, the article reveals how narratives surrounding prominent Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) figures — such as Talat, Enver, and Cemal — evolved. Initially, the Kemalist regime distanced itself from the CUP by framing World War I (also referred to “the War” in this article) as the product of a few Unionist leaders’ recklessness while celebrating the War of Independence as the foundation of a new, victorious Turkish identity. However, by the 1930s, publications began to reinterpret and partially rehabilitate the CUP leaders’ reputations, emphasizing their dedication to state interests and leadership qualities.

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?

The global political order that emerged from 1919 inscribed Jews into two distinct legal roles under the League of Nations system: a model national minority in the new nation-states of Eastern Europe, and a virtual national majority in British Mandatory Palestine. Despite extensive scholarship on each of these stories, we know precious little about how they interacted in the interwar Jewish political imagination. In this article I track several key East European Zionist intellectuals through the period between World War I and the aftermath of World War II as they attempted to imagine a new geometry of transnational nationhood via international law. This account of their pursuit of national self-determination beyond sovereignty reveals the promise and limits of interwar Jewish worldmaking and provides an index of the changing meaning of nationhood itself in the interwar period.

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.

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.

In the late nineteenth century, the orally transmitted Armenian legend about the folk hero David of Sassoun seemed doomed to oblivion when Ottoman Armenian clergyman Karekin Srvandzdiants published a tiny booklet containing the story that he had learned by chance. Srvandzdiants noted that he would be happy if the story could reach twenty people. Decades later, this hitherto little-known folk legend would be read, and its main heroes celebrated by tens of millions of citizens of the Soviet Union. Scores of variants of the epic were collected from all over the newly established Soviet Armenia; some of the most revered Soviet poets and linguists produced a collated text of the epic and translated it into dozens of languages. More importantly, David of Sassoun and other heroes of the epic cycle came to symbolize the newly forged Soviet Armenian national character in a vast totalitarian empire whose guiding ideology was inimical to various aspects of Armenian traditions. In this article, I examine the underlying messages of the epic, discuss how Soviet policies helped the epic captivate a large audience in a short period, and analyze the political calculations and ideological justifications behind the promotion of the epic.

This article analyzes four war-themed exhibitions in Ukraine’s two leading national museums and studies their role in documenting, interpreting, and exhibiting the Russo-Ukrainian war. This research intends to prove that since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, museums have been conceptualizing the war through narratives of suffering and sacrifice, grounding tangible historical authenticity through the display of items such as war trophies and personal belongings. The narrative of suffering tends to be based on the opposition of “we” and “they,” where “we” focuses on civilian torment and resurrection as the main metaphor of physical and spiritual survival, and “they” are predominantly depicted as the military enemy, creating strong anti-Russian and anti-Soviet tendencies. The martyrdom narrative of sacrifice focuses on Ukraine’s (fallen) defenders, whose image is created by deep personalization, nationalization, and heroization. This article argues that musealization of the Russo-Ukrainian war exemplifies and represents “warring memory,” which is predetermined and justified by active engagement in an ongoing war while performing the functions of testimony, resilience, and mourning.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Georgia became a key destination for Russian migrants, who significantly influenced the local housing market. This article explores the impact of the influx of Russian migrants into Tbilisi, which caused a surge in rental prices and aroused feelings of social insecurity among Georgian citizens. Using qualitative methods, including social media analysis and semi-structured interviews, the study investigates the emergence of “informal sanctions” imposed by Georgian Airbnb and Booking.com hosts as a means of expressing political dissatisfaction with their own government and protecting national interests. This article identifies four patterns of informal sanctions, such as rejecting, discomforting, avoiding, and exploiting Russian tenants, which reflect a form of patriotism from below. We argue that these spontaneous, everyday practices of resistance lead to the politicization of mundane host-tenant relations and the collective stereotyping of a migrant group in a time of insecurity. The theoretical proposition here is that everyday nationalism is closely related to informality, which opens the possibility of examining grassroots responses to perceived threats and tactics of resistance, with implications for broader social dynamics in times of ongoing geopolitical conflict and wartime migration in Eastern Europe.

Does the presence of two or more transborder minorities alter the logic of nation-building and affect minority securitization? This article goes beyond the triadic nexus framework commonly applied to minorities caught between their home- and kin-states, proposing a complex lens for analyzing states with multiple ethnic minorities. Titular political elites dealing with multiple minorities assign them to contradictory frames to manage the challenging reality of ethnic demography and regional security. By framing one minority as a “model minority” — trustworthy and law-abiding — and another as a “fifth column” — threatening and disruptive – they accomplish two aims: (1) maintain the dominant status of the titular nation by discrediting minority claims for institutional changes, and (2) legitimize the differential treatment of minorities. Ethnic minorities’ responses to these frames vary from relative acquiescence to violent conflict. I explore why the initially excluded Poles have been recently accommodated in Lithuania, why the marginalized Uzbeks became targets of repression in the Kyrgyz Republic, and why the relatively accommodated Russian speakers, former colonizers, became framed as a security threat in Lithuania but not in the Kyrgyz Republic after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Understanding how strategic framing advances nation-building offers generalizable insights on (de)securitization of ethnicity.

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.

The rise of antagonism between the German and Czech nationalist activists in the mid-19th century has been neither clearly explained nor convincingly dated. Although this is a topic closely linked to the history of nationalism, the state of research has paradoxically been misguided by the nationalist approach adopted by historians analyzing it. The reason is that nationalism was not the cause but just one response to a greater phenomenon. The aim of the article is therefore to clarify the German-Czech relationship in the broader context of European history and the history of international relations using the perspective of geopolitics and security. As it claims, it was not cultural, linguistic, or constitutional issues but the fear of external threats that caused the mutual distrust of political activists that led to hostility and conflicting policies. Under the impact of international events and within the context of their relations to other international actors this process originated in 1839 by the latest. During subsequent years it developed rapidly and became obvious during the 1848 revolutions. The article thus reveals that this year did not represent the beginning but merely another chapter in a process that had begun nearly a decade earlier.

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 is concerned with contemporary changes in the spatialization of the Russian-Finnish borderland as an example of re-bordering politics. The main material is a long-term ethnographic study in the territory of former Finnish Karelia, ceded by Finland to the Soviet Union following World War II. By extending the historical context of bilateral relations between the USSR (later Russia) and Finland, the article questions the implications of changing international relations regimes for situational forms of borderwork. The article contributes to the debate on contemporary border practices and the contradictory effects of foreign diplomacy by combining institutional and situational approaches to border territoriality and by focusing on border memory and heritage as resources of local identity and instruments of soft power. Examining the successive shifts of de- and re-bordering regimes in the Russian-Finnish borderlands from the late Soviet period to the present, the article demonstrates the unforeseen impact of foreign relations on local life and memory.

This article explores the relationship between ethnic diversity and intermarriage in Vojvodina, Serbia, a highly diverse region with a history of shifting political landscapes. Unlike many studies focusing on migration, this research examines autochthonous settings from a quantitative perspective, offering insights into how diversity and intermarriage intersect locally. Findings indicate that greater ethnic diversity is generally associated with higher interethnic marriage rates within sub-regions. However, these rates have not always paralleled changes in diversity, especially during disruptions like the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. The study reveals that declining diversity tends to reduce intermarriage by creating more homogeneous marriage markets, while intermarriages may also―albeit intermittently, under specific political circumstances, and indirectly―influence diversity trends. Results highlight small social distances and permeable ethnic boundaries among Vojvodina’s ethnic groups, though significant ethnic asymmetries remain. This study contributes to understanding the dynamics of diversity and interethnic relations, specifically through marriage, within national minority contexts.