By asking how political communities are constructed and with what boundaries, this book has explored different conceptualizations of nation, different perceptions of territory and dynamics of unity and division. It has presented alternative notions of political community outside of the nation-state paradigm, in communities smaller than the state and going beyond the boundaries of the state. My work has devoted attention to the beginnings of political communities or to their reshaping processes. By establishing boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’, these communities defined themselves at different levels: the local, regional, transnational and national levels. In the border region between Ghana and Togo, these political communities were built on top of each other, like a palimpsest, and intersected with the Ghanaian and Togolese states that used these dynamics to their advantage. This book endeavours to make us rethink the notion of the nation-state and its associated concepts in light of these dynamics: citizenship, elections, border and nation-state.

Enlightenment thought contributed to developing and reinforcing white supremacy in the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. While often celebrated as promoting universal liberty, Enlightenment scholarship was deeply intertwined with colonization and slavery, with many prominent thinkers either benefiting from or actively justifying human trafficking and racial hierarchies. Figures like Hans Sloane and John Locke developed new systems of human classification that departed from earlier Greek environmental theories, instead positing fixed racial categories with Europeans at the top. This early scientific racism provided justification for colonial exploitation while being funded by slavery-derived wealth. Additionally, emerging concepts of liberty and rights were explicitly limited to white men, with writers contrasting “freeborn” Englishmen to supposedly inferior races. These ideas culminated in new forms of race-based or “nation” states, exemplified by the USA, which formally enshrined white supremacy in law. While some contemporary voices criticized these developments, the profitable alliance between Enlightenment thought, colonialism, and slavery proved difficult to stop.

The Ewe-speaking region straddling the border between Ghana and Togo has not been envisioned by much of the scholarship as a viable political community capable of forming a nation-state. Yet this interpretation does not account for the continued identity claims arising from this transnational region. By looking more closely at grassroots perceptions of what constitutes a political community, the diagnostic may be different. This chapter considers how the scalar and genealogical principle underpinning the local indigenous political space, the dukɔ , has come to underpin the transnational Ewe-speaking region to form a larger political community. This is notable in the Ewe Newsletters, which aimed to convene and construct a transnational Ewe nation based on mutual recognition and oral tradition but also today across the border in both oral tradition and the performance of festivals.

This final chapter opens with the universal adoption of the principle of the nation’s right to self-determination, which, applied in the Paris Peace Treaties of 1919, was meant to stabilize international relations and which turned the central tenet of nationalism into a cornerstone of international law. In a European continent purportedly divided into ethnoculturally defined nation-states, the culture of nationalism continued to be operative. Many post-1918 nation-states slid (partly because of an unresolved ambiguity between civic and ethnic definitions of the nation) from parliamentary and constitutional governance towards authoritarianism and dictatorships. Meanwhile, a new cultural medium emerged: cinema. This medium is surveyed to explain the remarkable survival of nationalism across the totalitarian dictatorships and devastating wars of the mid-century, and across the internationalist and anti-totalitarian recoil that dominated the post-1945 decades. It is suggested that this survival, and the renewed contemporary dominance of nationalism as an ideology, is due in large part to its ability to shift back and forth between anodyne and virulent states, latent and salient. The alternation between those states served to proclaim the nation’s charisma both as a merely cultural (unpolitical) feel-good factor and as a political imperative, a commanding, inspiring validator for belligerent heroism.

This chapter explores the relationship between imperial and national subjectivities. Empires have dominated the planet for thousands of years, but in a relatively short period of time they have been completely delegitimised by national projects. Hence, this chapter aims to explain how and why this has happened. Using historical examples of Japanese and Hungarian nation-formation, the chapter traces the transformation of local and religiously based subjectivities into nation-centric subjectivities.

In this chapter the role of (nationalist) agency in the collapse of imperial order is questioned. Drawing on the primary archival research, the chapter zooms in on the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina under Austro-Hungarian rule (1878–1918). The chapter contests the view that the imperial state was severely undermined by the presence of strong nationalisms. It also challenges the notion that most of the Bosnian population remained ‘nationally indifferent’ during this period. Instead, the chapter argues that understanding the character of Austro-Hungarian rule is a much better predictor of social change that took place in this period. Rather than stifling supposedly vibrant nationalisms or operating amidst widespread national indifference, the imperial state played a decisive role in forging the nation-centric world through its inadvertent homogenisation of discontent.

This concluding chapter reflects on the relationship between transitional justice, power, and law at the current global conjuncture of the alleged end or “eclipse” of liberal democracy and human rights and the rise of rightwing authoritarian populism and fascism. It recapitulates the major interventions of the book that critically interrogate the binary of liberalism and authoritarianism and the abstract idealization of the virtues of transparency and the right to know in dominant transitional justice and human rights politics. The chapter organizes the concluding reflections under five headings that draw attention to the making of rightwing authoritarian populist legalism and transitional justice; the problem of Eurocentrism; capitalist and nation-state-centric politics of transitional justice; and reflections on the alternative notions of truth and political responsibility that the book has developed as part of its attempt to envision socially transformative justice beyond moral autopsy and heated political struggles.

Global patterns of political violence and war have changed across the course of the twentieth into the twenty-first century. We have seen the decline of inter-state wars – Ukraine being a testing exception – and the emergence of localised transnational conflict. At the same time, modern reconciliation processes have been globalised with a particular institutional form, usually conducted under the auspices of a nation-state. This chapter examines the mismatch between these forms. It asks whether a nation-based approach can adequately respond to local–global violence. It argues not for replacing national forums of reconciliation but for reframing them in terms of a new emphasis on global–local reconciliation forums. This will entail an understanding of the way in which contemporary social life is lived across different levels of integration and spatial extension. It requires a recognition that in the contemporary world we are seeing the continuing clash of ontologically different ways of life – customary, traditional, modern, and postmodern – and that this needs a different kind of cultural and political sensitivity than that offered by modern juridical proceduralism.

This chapter examines the transition from the “Ottoman Empire” into the “post-Ottoman” worlds that succeeded it. Rejecting the conventional narrative, in which “Westernization” caused the empire’s fragmentation and final collapse, it highlights instead the perpetuation of Ottoman institutions within the polities that emerged out of the sultanate. It argues that achieving this more nuanced periodization requires questioning the three normative oppositions that have structured the historiography of the late Ottoman Empire: between Ottoman and European, Empire and Nation, and Tradition and Modernity. It proposes three research objects (among other alternatives) to apprehend the layered temporalities at work in the post-Ottoman imperial transition: the emergence of citizenship in lieu of imperial subjecthood; biographies (including sociographies and intellectual histories) of actors having lived through that transition; and the transformation of property regimes. The chapter’s broader goal is to incite awareness of how context sensitive categories we use in history – such as Ottoman/Ottomanness – remain.

Nationalism represents, advances, and protects the interests of a national “people,” but the metaphor of bodily nativity at the core of claims to national unity proved increasingly implausible for a United States that, in the buildup to and the aftermath of the Civil War, proved to be more of a politically divided house than a corporeally singular nation. Efforts of mid-century writers like John W. Deforest and Walt Whitman to imagine a US nation-state as a heterosexual conjugal union between a single, feminized, national body and its governing state-as-husband would face challenges from later writers like William Dean Howells, who imagined increasingly intensive ways for racial difference within this single national body to undermine national unity figured as corporeal nativity. Responding at century’s end to such racial fractures in corporeal unity, W. E. B. Du Bois would displace the now-untenable conjugal union of the US nation-state with a double-consciousness located within the US citizen’s individual self. This hyphenated identity, grounded in a color line, installs the failed legacy of nineteenth-century US nationalism at the core of how twentieth- and twenty-first-century US citizens understand and describe their own and others’ imperial Americanness.

This chapter discusses the role of Imelda Marcos in the diplomatic practice and foreign policy of the government of Ferdinand Marcos. At the outset, Imelda is cast not only as a First Lady but as a vital colleague and co-operator in running the affairs of the Philippine state from the 1960s through the 1980s, the other half of the so-called conjugal dictatorship. At one point in time, she was simultaneously governor of Metro Manila, Minister of Human Settlements, member of the Interim Parliament, and Ambassador Plenipotentiary and Extraordinary. This being said, her status as First Lady and Patroness of the Arts is not dismissed as mere tangent or appendage; it was as First Lady that Imelda became a compelling presence in the political theatre. The combination of her beauty and her charisma formed a particular aesthetic that inevitably evolved into a policy of culture and democracy so central in the formation of a post-independence nation-state in Southeast Asia.

The chapter analyzes the place of the German nation in politics and society, particularly nationalist activism and ethnic conflict between Germans, Poles, Danes, and French speakers.

In this chapter the “Pashtun Borderland” – a key concept throughout the book – is framed as a distinct physical and geopolitical space. This space, it is argued, is shaped by the complex interplay of imperial aspiration by larger polities claiming their authority over this space and ethnic self-ascriptions arising as a consequence. The heavy ideological baggage both practices pivot on is somewhat disenchanted by significant lines of conflict which traverse the region and its communities: between lowland and upland communities, between local elites and subalterns and between urban and rural communities. It is claimed that the persona of the discontent, or troublemaker, is a systemic result of these complex constellations, heavily fuelled by the agendas of successive imperial actors and the making and un-making of temporary pragmatic alliances typical for this kind of environment, ideal-typically cast here as “Borderland pragmatics”.