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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Since 2019, Ethiopia has embarked on a new “national project of peace and unity”. The government’s official discourse has been characterised by an uptake in the use of Pan-African and Pan-Ethiopian rhetoric. Strategically invoking visions of a united Africa and shared continental prosperity, the Abiy administration seeks to enhance its international reputation and rally African support for its domestic agenda. To overcome the pervasive ethnofractionalist tendencies in Ethiopia’s political landscape and consolidate the Ethiopian state within its present boundaries, the current government is selectively borrowing political strategies from previous administrations. This has produced a unique, new form of Pan-Ethiopian governance ideals. So far, the repercussions of this government discourse on political tensions in Ethiopia and the Ethiopian diaspora has received no scholarly attention. This academic article analyses the implications of the current Ethiopian government’s deployment of Pan-Africanist and Pan-Ethiopianist rhetoric on Ethiopia’s current political crises. This article argues that these Pan-Africanist and Pan-Ethiopianist rhetoric and ideals are paradoxically perpetuating divisive identity politics in Ethiopia’s domestic and diasporic political realm. This, in turn, exacerbates the most serious threat to Ethiopia’s national unity.

In settler colonies such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand, “memory wars” have, driven by conflicting narratives about colonial history, intensified in recent years. Indigenous counter-narratives challenge Euro-centric master narratives, particularly in public spaces such as museums and monuments. This article explores the impact of such conflicts on national identity, focusing on Aotearoa New Zealand, where the history of colonization has long been framed as a relatively benign process, underpinned by the Treaty of Waitangi. Through application of a comprehensive narratological framework, the article reveals how the Waitangi Treaty Grounds’ permanent exhibition, Ko Waitangi Tēnei: This is Waitangi, employs the quest masterplot to weave Māori memories of the mid-1800s New Zealand Wars into the national master narrative. The analysis highlights that this narrative emplotment – by “naturalizing” the events of the New Zealand Wars – serves to elide difficult questions about colonial violence, thus protecting the image of a tolerant and respectful nation. More generally, the article contributes to our understanding of national identity construction in the context of difficult histories, while also advancing theoretical approaches to narratology in museum storytelling.