The intersection of nationalism and inequality is undoubtedly gaining interest in current debates in nationalism studies. The effects of economic inequalities on nationalist politics are the most researched area; however, there are other ways to explore the relationship between nationalism and inequality. Focusing on economic and political aspects of inequality this state-of-the-field article offers an overview of existing research on the relationship between inequality and nationalism in various areas of nationalism studies, ranging from nationalist politics to exploring the symbolic construction of nationhood. Following the inequality scholars, we highlight the growing importance of capital accumulation and emphasize the spatial aspect of it. We argue that while being largely overlooked, the role of territory—and territorial politics more broadly—becomes crucial for the understanding of the intersection of nationalism and inequality today. Overall, we show that it is necessary for nationalism studies scholars to engage in contemporary literature on inequality and acknowledge the wider implications of growing inequality to various manifestations of nationalism.

This article seeks to discover how this contemporary Finno-Ugric identity has been politically instrumentalized and negotiated in Estonia. First, we look at how the Estonian state engages with the concept of Finno-Ugric world and inscribes it into Estonia’s foreign policy goals. Then, we delve into the role of Finno-Ugric traditionalism in Estonian populist and far-right discourses. Third, we discuss how local identity constitutes and cements community building initiatives and projects in the Seto region known for its local specificity and cultural peculiarity.

Since emerging in the early 1990s, Estonian hip-hop has developed in line with other cultural and artistic projects in the country, reflecting attempts to foster a homogeneous society, yet ultimately cultivating one where diversity and multiculturalism prevail. As a genre where minority groups are frequently presented as “authentic,” hip-hop and its visual and performative manifestations provide a valuable platform to examine expressions of identity. To this end, several Estonian hip-hop musicians have explored aspects of being “post-Soviet” in contradistinction to official hegemonic discourses, which outright reject the Soviet past and emphasize titular ethnicity as a cornerstone of national identity.

This article uses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Multi-Modal Discourse Analysis (MMDA) to examine the lyrics and accompanying video of popular hip-hop song “für Oksana” by “Nublu featuring Gameboy Tetris.” Doing so highlights how the song’s basic narrative acts as a metaphor for experiences of integration processes between ethnic Estonians and Russophones since Estonian independence. I argue that through a combination of linguistic and cultural codeswitching, “für Oksana” constitutes an expression, performance, and negotiation of Russophone Estonian identity from both insider and outsider perspectives, emphasizing the need to understand Russophone Estonians as more than simply “Russians who live in Estonia.”

Jews of Turkey have been applying for citizenship restitution from Spain and Portugal through processes formalized in 2015. Using 29 interviews, I analyze applicant motivations and find that cultural connections play a minor role in applicant decisions. The citizenship application process did not lead to self-questioning of identity for these applicants, unlike Sephardic Jews in other contexts. The more important motivators were Jewish fears about the future of Turkey, the practical benefits of easy travel on a European Union passport, and the desire for global mobility, allowing individuals to chase prosperity wherever it may go. While Jewish fears are mostly in the background, the other two motivations were more pressing. I place these motivations in the context of changing conceptions of citizenship in Europe and the global inequality of citizenship, crystallized in a hierarchy of passports. I find that after acquiring Iberian citizenship, Jews from Turkey relate to their new citizenship solely in practical ways.

This article contributes to discussions on culture wars, memory politics, and the politics of dead bodies. It uses the example of the annual celebration of the liberation of the city of Pilsen by the American army in 1945 to demonstrate the use of the concept of “political necromancy.” The Pilsen celebrations are one of the events during which participating politicians use fallen (or suffering) soldiers as an argument to support current political goals. Metaphorically, the politician as a necromancer brings the fallen back to life and sends them as an army of the dead to fight in culture wars and memory wars. The article focuses on introducing the different strategies used in this process (depersonalizing the fallen or creating a ghost hero) and shows how dead bodies and the appropriate use of memory politics are used to bolster foreign policy ties to the US and to lash out against Russia and communism.

The article deals with Czech and German nationalist discourses and practices in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as they relate to tourism in the Krkonoše/Riesengebirge, the highest Central European mountain range between the Alps and Scandinavia. It will discuss the discourses developed in relation to mountain tourism and nationalism (metaphors of battlefields, wedges, walls, gates, and bastions), different symbolical cores of mountains, and practices of tourist and nationalist organizations (tourist trails and markings, excursions, the ownership of mountains huts, languages used, memorials, and the construction of roads). It will examine how these discourses and practices changed from the first Czech-German ethnic conflicts in the 1800s until the end of interwar Czechoslovakia. Finally, it will discuss the Czech culture of defeat in the shadow of the Munich Agreement, which meant the occupation of the Giant Mountains by Nazi Germany.

This article looks at different strategies in which authoritarianism operated in relation to the redesign of Skopje during the rule of the conservative party VMRO-DPMNE and its leader Nikola Gruevski. It argues that the promoters of the urban project called “Skopje 2014” relied on a set of nondemocratic mechanisms and involvement and coordination of various individuals and institutions on all levels to implement and legitimize the project and expand its political dominance. These ranged from state-driven mechanisms and urban design strategies to contributions of non-state groups, thus demonstrating a systematic effort behind the makeover of Skopje. Examining the project through the concept of authoritarianism, the article goes beyond (methodological) nationalism to understand the complexity of the revamp of North Macedonia’s capital. It also demonstrates how the party used its ideological principles to leave its enduring mark on Skopje’s urban environment. Additionally, the article points out the need to study urban space politics in the context of hybrid and competitive authoritarian regimes.

This article problematizes the study of religious nationalism, which lacks conceptual, religious, and nationalist “seriousness.” These problems of “seriousness” obscure the nature of religious nationalism as they overstretch and do not do justice to the concepts of religious nationalism, religion, and nationalism, respectively. Seeking for the nature of and a path to religious nationalism, it is suggested that the later writings of İsmet Özel, a well-known poet and public intellectual in Turkey, make an emblematic case for a religious type of nationalism, demonstrating not only religious seriousness with his Islamist ideology but also a central orientation to the nation through his exclusive focus on Turkishness and Turkey. In so doing, this article introduces a wide range of categories to specify the ways in which religious nationalism is operationalized and to measure the patterns of religious nationalism in an attempt to overcome the problems of “seriousness.” It identifies and examines six main patterns in Özel’s thinking and shows their interactions: religio-national identity, exceptionalism, religious territoriality, civilizational othering, sectarianism, and anti-secularism.

In 1848, Habsburg Trieste became the target of German nationalists gathered in Frankfurt. The Frankfurt parliament, born out of the revolutions of 1848, has been widely depicted as a liberal experience. Yet its nationalist stances, which included the creation of a unitary German state through the absorption of vast multiethnic regions of the Habsburg monarchy, whose Austrian crownlands were part of the German Confederation, bear witness to the illiberal nature of the Frankfurt parenthesis of 1848–1849. Notwithstanding the assimilatory tendencies of the Frankfurt parliament, Italian activists in Trieste supported the inclusion of the Habsburg port in an enlarged Germany, hoping to break away from Habsburg rule, which they portrayed as oppressive. This article argues that the contradictory Italian support for the German Confederation highlights the paradoxes at the basis of nationalist movements at their onset, while also pointing to the difficulty that nation-states would soon witness in dealing with other ethnic groups within their borders. On the contrary, it was the Habsburg monarchy that, in its centuries-long tradition of accommodating different ethnicities into its fold, represented what to present-day observers comes closer to political liberalism than the so-called liberal national parties that opposed Habsburg rule.

This article uses the French Rassemblement National (RN) as a case study to examine how the populist radical right (PRR) prepares for a world after COVID-19 dominated by climate change concerns. Research suggests that certain measures introduced to contain the virus – such as the establishment of strict border and travel restrictions – may legitimize the PRR’s protectionist and anti-immigration agendas, yet few have examined whether or how PRR parties have used COVID-19 to promote their environmental agenda. If anything, the expectation has been that the pandemic would hurt the PRR precisely because its effects, unlike climate change, cannot be dismissed as a “hoax.” This view overlooks not only the “environmental turn” recently taken by several PRR parties but also the possibility that public awareness of the causal link between climate change and COVID-19 may work to their advantage. The analysis presented in this article highlights this possibility, showing that the RN used COVID-19 not only to capitalize on anti-immigrant sentiment but also to bolster its self-image as a champion of environmental protection.

With over one million people arriving in Europe as refugees, the UN Refugee Agency declared 2015 “the year of Europe’s refugee crisis.” This article explores the meaning-making process surrounding the “refugee crisis” in a Russian context, using discourse theory to analyze representations of refugees, Russia, and the West in opinion pieces and interview articles in three major Russian newspapers. In addition to the humanitarian and security discourses presented in existing studies, I identify a geopolitical discourse that represents refugees as victims of interventionism and democratization processes that the West has promoted in the Middle East and North Africa. More generally, this study adds to the literature on discursive construction of identity and difference.

This article considers in detail the choosing of a language for the liturgy and sermons in Roman Catholic parishes in Belarus. The choice of the Belarusian language is part of a deliberate nation-building policy by the Catholic Church. Moreover, a whole network of local peculiarities, historical stereotypes, and political attitudes is concealed beneath the unified cover of a preference for the use of the Belarusian language. Based on interviews with clergy and religious activists, the article shows that the Roman Catholic Church repeatedly works out compromise solutions that allow it to adapt to the pressures of the state and believers going through a process of contradictory and conflicting nation-building.

Since the early 1990s, large numbers of Polish Roma have emigrated, mainly to Germany and Great Britain. Unlike the migration of Polish (non-Roma) citizens there was an intriguing silence regarding the migration of this ethnic group. The absence of Roma in the grand narrative of migrations from Poland, as we argue, suggests that the notion of belonging and citizenship were unequally distributed among Poland’s population. Based on our ongoing ethnographic research among Polish Roma migrants, complemented by an analysis of relevant documents, we argue that these inequalities and hierarchies are deeply rooted and there is an interesting continuity in how they were produced and reproduced prior to and after the 1989 regime change. We argue that one of the key factors in these movements, the collectiveness of the migration project – i.e. migrating as an extended family group as a component of the moral economy of Roma mobility – is mutually produced by unequal citizenship, mobility regimes and strong moral obligations stemming from kinship ties.