In this introduction, we briefly define Canadian philosophy and discuss its importance before introducing the authors who contributed to this special issue and their articles. The history of Canadian philosophy has been understudied, and there is a need for new philosophical work on the challenges facing Canada. Some articles collected in this special issue examine the history of philosophy in Canada, while others subject contemporary issues to philosophical analysis. The contributors to this special issue include Ian H. Angus, Robert Timko, Anna Brinkerhoff, Stefan Lukits, Charles Blattberg, Ronald A. Kuipers, Jérôme Gosselin-Tapp, Delphine T. Raymond, Frédérique Jean, Rémi Poiré, Matthew Robertson, Janet C. Wesselius, and R. Bruce Elder.

This article explicates the border as a metaphor for an English Canadian nation and for Canadian philosophy in English Canada. The concept of the nation is explicated with reference to Winthrop Pickford Bell. The role of metaphor in philosophy is justified while maintaining its distinction from literature or poetry. Key features of the concept of “border” are division, distinction, and relation. The fact that the border is open to two different interpretations testifies to its viability. Use of the border as a metaphor in philosophy and related cultural expressions suggests that it has a limited, though persisting, duration.

This summary presents the proceedings of the two-day conference held in December 2025 as part of the preparatory work for The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Italian History. Conceived as a collective intellectual workshop, the conference brought together scholars working across chronological, thematic, and methodological boundaries to reflect on how modern Italy’s history can be narrated and rethought in handbook form. Over two days, participants discussed the construction of Italian identity, from the eighteenth century to the present, foregrounding the interaction between political cultures, social structures, and cultural representations. The eight panels explored national identity before and after unification; the role of media, Catholicism, and war; gender, sexuality, and race; crime and deviance; colonialism; urban development and environmental inequality; labour, industrialisation, and economic crises; Fascism and antifascism; and the architectural, cultural, and mnemonic legacies of the twentieth century. The conference functioned not merely as a presentation of individual chapters, but as a forum in which contributors tested interpretative frameworks, identified historiographical gaps, and refined their arguments. In doing so, it played a crucial role in shaping the intellectual coherence of The Bloomsbury Handbook, ensuring that it reflects current debates while offering a critical and inclusive account of modern Italian history.

This article reveals late Ottoman (1876–1908) debates over agrarian policy in the empire’s Arab provinces that set the parameters for a fully articulated discourse of national economy emerging after the constitutional revolution of 1908. Debates between imperial officials, regional capitalists and foreign consular agents produced protectionist restrictions on the newly constructed agrarian land market, especially in an extended geography encompassing Palestine and the Hijaz Railway. Ottoman officials viewed the Arab provinces both as an untapped resource and as a possible alternative base in the event of Anatolia’s occupation. Restrictions on the land market constructed Muslim cultivators as ideal landholders and non-Muslim subjects, both Christian and Jewish, as potentially suspect and unfit for landholding. Protectionist and exclusionary agrarian policies responded to a wider context of imperial capitalism in which Ottoman officials occupied a subordinate, but still sovereign, position. These policies had an unrecognized legacy in the colonial and postcolonial Middle East, creating a durable state domain that aimed to shield large swaths of land as territory from foreign investment and occupation. The much-discussed work of Frederick List on national economy focused on practices of import substitution and tariffs with empirical examples culled mainly from the United States and Germany. In the Ottoman Empire, in contrast, agrarian policy played a crucial role in practices of national economy because of the urgent prerogative to maintain territorial sovereignty in the face of imminent colonial expansion. The article suggests a reappraisal of the contributions of Ottoman policy debates to the broader history of capitalism.

Suzume no tojimari (2022) depicts the coming-of-age road trip of a teenage girl through abandoned places, in order to save Japan from giant earthquake worms, and to confront her own past of 3/11. With hyperrealistic visuals and references to Shinto mythology and folklore traditions, the movie constructs a correlation between human misbehavior and natural disasters. This narrative indicates the restoration of a mythological unity of Japanese land, people, and culture to prevent earthquakes, and to overcome personal and social issues, echoing Japanese national conservative discourse. By doing so, the movie puts moral responsibility to the individual to cope with disasters and decline.

This article examines recent developments in three key areas of nationalism research that integrate emotions into theoretical frameworks and empirical analysis. First, it explores studies that revisit historical nation-building through the lens of the history of emotions. Second, it discusses how the “affective nationalism” literature has shifted the focus of banal nationhood reproduction from mental representations to emotions. Third, it reviews efforts to theorize the emergence of intense national emotions in certain periods and their role in political mobilization and change. The article highlights critical advancements across these areas, particularly in linking emotions to meaning through narratives, expanding research from national centers to the frontiers, and challenging the illusion of national harmony by emphasizing power dynamics and dialectical change. The conclusion suggests future research directions, including investigations of national emotions within diasporic communities and digital networks.

Contention about representations of history and the purposes of History education has long surrounded Japanese History textbooks. From 2012, the ascent of powerful nationalist Prime Minister Abe Shinzō raised questions about possible political pressures on textbook content. This article analyzes recent market-leading junior high school and high school History textbooks to discover how pedagogical format and content related to controversial topics or national identity have changed since 2012. It finds that leading junior high school textbooks have largely maintained their representation of controversial topics, while developing investigative, analytic pedagogical approaches. Coverage of some aspects of ethnic and cultural diversity within Japan has increased. Following the implementation of a new curriculum from 2022, some high school textbooks for the new compulsory subject “Integrated History” facilitate a more analytic, “disciplinary” pedagogy than previously evident in compulsory high school History. Nonetheless, an “enhancing collective memory” approach to History pedagogy remains central throughout secondary education. These developments suggest that power over History education in Japan is distributed between a range of actors. The state, the market, and social pressures all influence the content of History textbooks in Japan.

Iran is one of the most stigmatised countries of the twenty-first century: having been sanctioned by the US since 1979, the Islamic Republic was declared part of the ‘axis of evil’ by President George W. Bush in 2002, and from 2006 onwards, it has been subject to multilateral, comprehensive and wide-reaching economic sanctions. In June 2025, this discursive and economic attack on Iran transitioned to direct military bombardment. For the United States and its allies, Iran is a pariah state. This stigmatisation of Iran is an example of the kinds of practices that contribute to the social construction of the international order, whereby some countries are designated as ‘inside’ and others as ‘outside’ the community of established states. Needless to say, Iran has been placed firmly in the ‘outside’ category ever since 1979. At the same time as accepting and even at times embracing this ‘outsider’ status, however, Iran has also sought to raise its own international standing and to be accepted as an ‘insider’.

It is often suggested that one way to reduce affective polarization is to remind citizens of a common in-group identity – such as the national one – to bridge partisan divides. Yet, to our knowledge, such a causal link has only been found in the United States, and even there, it has not been tested by exposure to the most common national symbol: the flag. Thus, we still do not know if such implicit yet ubiquitous reminders of national identity, rather than those that explicitly invoke national pride, are able to reduce affective polarization. In order to fill this research gap, we conducted a survey experiment in Sweden and Denmark in 2023/2024, two countries where national flags are omnipresent yet often ‘unwaved’. Using two versions of subtle flag treatments, our results show that in Sweden, subjects who were primed with a picture of the national flag showed lower levels of affective polarization measured as social distancing, but not in terms of trait stereotyping or party dislike. This effect was not mediated, however, by the strengthening of explicit national identity attitudes, such as national pride. These results suggest that flags need indeed not be explicitly waved in order to work their unifying magic.