The study of nationalism in North America has focused heavily on national identity. Much of the scholarship in the region indicates that most individuals define their respective national identities as attainable and inclusive. In contrast to these findings, other evidence from nationalism and ethnic politics scholarship in North America suggests a strong racial link to national understandings. Focusing on national identity research in North America, primarily the United States, but also findings from Canada and Mexico, I try to address the connection between national identity, its political effects, and the boundaries of national identity content. This article identifies important findings from research in North America and proposes that scholars look beyond the current research to study national development – understood both historically and through the study of individuals’ constructive deployment of nationalism in everyday life.

To improve the validity of our comparative endeavors in ethno-politics, this piece re-examines the relationship between conceptual definitions, categories of classification used in large-N datasets, and thick description found through case studies. It does this through the lens of claims to autonomy by ethnic minorities, and in particular through a detailed comparative case study of what autonomy means as a programmatic goal for ethnic minority Hungarian elites in Romania and Slovakia. Three unexpected findings emerge which make the case for qualitative research to better inform the categories and variables used in large-N datasets (1) there is a weak relationship between the conceptual definitions of autonomy and the way it is coded in relevant datasets like the Minorities at Risk (MAR) dataset; (2) empirically, the Hungarian comparative case studies show that elites do not think of autonomy in the same way as the conceptual literature nor do their understandings of autonomy easily fit into the coding categories of datasets; (3) there is inconsistency across Hungarian minority elites in their own definitions of autonomy as well as the lack of distinctions between autonomy and other institutional arrangements. This raises issues of equivalence and ambiguity and I conclude with suggestions for better measurement.

Comparative studies of nationalism rarely incorporate China as a case in their observations. Despite the rise of nationalism in salience throughout Chinese society, studies of nationalism in China are frequently tagged as insularly focused and unsuitable for comparison. However, a survey of the literature in Chinese nationalism studies reveals that similar blind spots and limitations challenge studies of China with more general comparative research on nationalism. Given this parallelism in development, I argue that looking to observations of China provides scholars of nationalism with vital opportunities to expand and refine theory to include insights from a non-western, non-democratic case.

Among various features of Ukrainian society that the world has started paying more attention to since the beginning of Russia’s full-blown invasion in February 2022, many commentators have pointed to a surprisingly strong and encompassing national identity. However, scholars of Ukrainian language and identity matters had for years demonstrated an increased civic attachment of Ukrainian citizens, including Russian speakers, and its greater salience compared with ethnic, linguistic, and regional identifications. This article seeks to highlight the main accomplishments and challenges of research on Ukrainian ethnic and national identity. It focuses on a gradual shift from the essentialist understanding of ethnicity as embodied in bounded groups to the interest in individuals’ contextually determined identifications by categories with a changing meaning. Another prominent part of the analysis is the relationship between Ukrainian ethnic and national identity and the amalgamation of these two apparently distinct phenomena into what I propose to call ethnonational identity.

This article provides an overview of the theoretical and empirical contributions made by scholars of ethnic politics in Africa. I first discuss the definitions and measures of ethnic politics most commonly used. I then review the main explanations of the prevalence of ethnic politics. The following sections discuss the consequences of politicized ethnicity, variation in ethnic politics, and the relationship between ethnicity and other social identities, such as national identity. I conclude with some remarks about existing gaps and promising future avenues of research.

In this article, we examine the literature on the topic of Pan-Slavism that has been published in the last 20 years. We do so by paying particular attention to discussions on contemporary perspectives and manifestations of Pan-Slavism that in our view have been largely missing from academic research. We begin the article by introducing a theoretical conceptualization of Pan-Slavism in general, preparing the ground for our inspection of the academic output in the said period. We then continue by presenting our own contribution to the conceptualization and the current state of the field on Pan-Slavism, suggesting venues that future research may take towards broadening the field that has been and remains narrow. We conclude the article by summarizing the key points made therein.

The presence and influence of peripheral elites in national political institutions is frequently handled by the press. But, oddly enough, the lack of a comprehensive vision of this issue tends to feed flashy titles alerting about the influence of some territorial groups in central institutions such as the “Scottish Raj,” the “Tartan mafia,” or the “Cosa Scotia” in London. This article aims to provide a general theoretical framework able to orient those fragmented researches. This literature review was led from May 2018 to June 2020. It presents those results in six sections. The ways in which peripheral elites get access to central institutions are analyzed in the first section. In the second section, we introduce the literature about the presence of peripheral elites in the state apparatus, before stressing the different networks representing the interests of peripheries in the city capitals in section three. Fourth, this article points out the various career orientations of peripheral elected officials. This leads us to question their policy influence in different fields. Lastly, a short section tackles the phobias provoked by the rise of peripheral elites occupying central political positions, before proposing a general framework for orienting future research on this topic.

As nationalist and populist rhetorics have gained momentum in Central and Southeastern Europe, there is an urgency to disentangle the historical narratives and political agendas displayed by national museum paradigms. And yet, equally significant is the urgency to illuminate the strategies and mnemonic devices through which the past is rendered worthy of commemoration, both in those memory cultures that come to life in opposition, or those which are complementary to the national museum’s paradigms. In line with these considerations, this special issue addresses the vernacular dimension of public memory, with a special focus on those memory cultures instantiated by mnemonic actors who do not necessarily possess the public epistemic authority to materialize their narratives about violent pasts as official memories.

This study employs the “everyday nationhood” approach to explore how ordinary, ethnically diverse, native-born Germans in Berlin, Dresden, and Leipzig understand what it means to be German and whether outsiders can join that group. It puts findings from qualitative interviews conducted in Berlin in fall 2015 and in Dresden and Leipzig in April 2016 into conversation with two large-scale surveys conducted at about the same time. The interviews complicate the surveys’ finding that Germanness is now based primarily on language skills, citizenship, and workforce participation, as the respondents indicated that phenotype, ethnicity, and religion act as daily barriers to membership. This highlights the utility of the everyday nationhood approach for identifying how social categories are both understood and enacted through everyday practices of social inclusion and exclusion.

How can and should we analyze mass mobilization and its outcomes in authoritarian (and potentially democratizing) states as social scientists? Are there any distinctive features to the study of mass mobilization and its outcomes in Eastern Europe? And how much should we focus on comparative analyses versus context and country specificities? The case of the 2020 mass mobilization in Belarus offers an opportunity to engage with and answer these questions in a reciprocal dialogue between scholars of protest and activism, politics of competitive authoritarian and democratizing contexts, and regional and country experts. This symposium brings together a diverse set of scholars and combines comparative and case-specific analyses and empirically driven and interpretive analyses that focus on different political, social, and cultural angles of this episode of mass mobilization and its aftermath.

This article explores the role of place-based identity politics in constructions of the Russian nation by nongovernmental actors in the cities of Kazan and Ekaterinburg. Departing from more established approaches to the study of nation building concerned with elite strategies and actions, it contributes to an emerging line of inquiry focused on the agency of mesolevel actors. Drawing on interviews and analysis of public communications, the article demonstrates that actors such as museums, activist groups, and religious institutions creatively employ mainstream discursive practices present also in state narratives to anchor the nation in local symbols. At the same time, they position themselves in locally specific identity cleavages concerning city, regional, and ethnonational minority identities. The findings show that the imbrication of local identity politics in their narratives can problematize nation building by exposing contradictions in federal discourses or troubling the association of nation and state. Emphasizing the importance of locally situated processes of constructing the nation in conjunction with other scales of belonging, the article argues that nation building in Russia is complicated by mesolevel practices of identity making that can simultaneously support and subvert it.

Who are the people who, in the face of extreme repression, unexpectedly take to the streets en masse in an authoritarian state? This article aims to answer this question with reference to the case of the Belarusian anti-Lukashenka mass mobilization of 2020. It employs unique data from an original online protest survey among citizens of Belarus who were 18 or older and residing in the country at the time of the protests (Onuch et. al.; MOBILISE 2020 & 2021; n = 17,174), fielded August 18, 2020–January 29, 2021.2 This survey was designed to: (a) capture as many protesters as possible; and (b) capture a large enough sample of non-protesters as a comparative reference group enabling us to better understand how different anti-Lukashenka protesters (n = 11,719) were from non-protesters (n = 5,455). Guided by theoretical and empirical expectations of contentious politics scholarship, we first provide descriptive statistics about the socio-demographic characteristics of the protesters, self-reported protest grievances and claims, and median protester preferences on a range of attitudes and policies. This portrait of the protesters is followed up by regression analysis to test whether these patterns hold at a statistically significant level when comparing protesters and non-protesters.

This article attempts to explore the link between education and democracy. Education is supposed to serve as a unifying factor and socialization agent among citizens of a state; teaching them who they are and what their country expects of them. The role of the educational system is important for the state in building a civic identity and patriotism among students. In Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), students complete a “Democracy and Human Rights” civics education course in primary and secondary schools; however, the current pedagogical implementation of instilling a civic identity is low, with little attention paid to civic identity promotion. This article examines the notions of civic pride and education among high school seniors in BiH via statistical analysis of original field data (n=5,749 surveys; 78 high schools in 53 towns). Identity politics and ethnic saliency are explored, with concluding views on the lack of (perceived) rights among the Croat student population. Cross-cutting cleavages and interpersonal trust are low, with the ethnic promoted over the civic.

Despite the creation of regions and communities in the second half of the 20th century for resolving ethnic tensions between the French- and Flemish-speaking communities, provinces are still relevant to understand contemporary Belgian politics. Observing provincial political dynamics is essential to understand multi-level political elite dynamics and territorial cleavages in contemporary Belgium. For instance, political parties are internally structured in provincial federations, and federal elections rely on provincial electoral districts. Combined with constitutional factors such as language and region, this article investigates the provincial origins of ministerial elites in all Belgian federal cabinets between 1980 and 2020. It observes that provinces are far from being perfectly present in a balanced manner in the federal government: some provinces are overrepresented while others – in particular large provinces – are underrepresented. This provincial imbalance is stable over time and independent on the types of cabinet but can be explained by party strategies and vote-seeking considerations.

This article brings to light the lesser-known case of Gagauzia, an autonomous region in Moldova, to examine how global frameworks of authenticity and heritage are drawn upon and performed in three local ethnically centered initiatives. Drawing on data from twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2015 and 2018, this case study provides insight into the ways that notions of nationhood are constructed and perpetuated, with a focus on the role of a specific segment of society, ethnopolitical entrepreneurs. These are neither fully top-down nor bottom-up actors. Focusing on three Gagauzian “firsts” that claim to represent the “last” of disappearing cultural practices and identities, this article interrogates how the given initiatives fuse heritage and innovation to create metacultural discourses that advance notions of Gagauzian ethnic or national particularism. The article gives food for thought about the salience – or not – of elite actors’ articulations of nation, particularly within post-Soviet societies and underscores the array of social actors involved in any nation-building activity. Further, by highlighting the heterogeneity of intersectional, lived experience and articulations of belonging, the article problematizes group-based analysis and methodological nationalism.

This introduction to the special issue looks back at 30 years of nation-building in the post-Soviet states. Initial hopes that national self-determination would reinforce democratization proved misplaced. While that synergy worked well in the Baltic states, elsewhere authoritarian leaders embraced nationalism, while democracies like Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine lost control of parts of their territory to secessionist movements backed by Russia. Each of the post-Soviet states promoted a national language (except for Belarus) and forged a new historical narrative for their “imagined community,” but in most cases they remained multi-ethnic and multi-lingual communities. In recognition of this persisting ethnic diversity, nation-building was accompanied by policies of ethnicity management. The international economic environment was rapidly changing due to globalization, posing new challenges for nation-builders. The gender dimension is important to the new national identities being forged in the post-Soviet space: the categories of race and class, less so. The article concludes with a review of the salient features of each of the newly-independent states.

The article deals with archives of memoryscapes as remembered landscapes of a past society by Hungarian women authors from Yugoslavia. Divided into two separate cycles, it explores how an inhabited geography transgressed from the present into a past, and how it evolved via belletristic practices from the 1990s onward. The archive is therefore assessed as a cumulative development of text-worlds in prose, poetry, and drama by Hungarian women, who either remained in disintegrating Yugoslavia or emigrated to Hungary, both of which led mostly to uprootedness and a misinterpretation of their work. Accordingly, displaced as authors, who remember landscapes that are beyond official memory politics, their archive remained largely unnoticed and marginalised throughout the decades. Emerging in autobiographic writing and literary fiction equally, these memoryscapes are not idiosyncratic but are regulated and systemic representations of a time, a space, and a society. To display such a mnemonic agency, the article integrates the foucauldian notions of the archive with the thirdspace perspective of geocriticism within literary representation, as used in post-colonial thought. Eventually, this enables the exposition of the archive of these female memoryscapes of an ethnic minority not in relation to other “national” archives, or as auxiliary archives of a male perspective, but as a system of thirdspaces and representation in itself.

In the 1980s, the Soviet Union and China resurveyed their border in order to restart their long-stalemated border negotiations. These negotiations resulted in only a partial border settlement: the agreement was signed in 1991. By the end of 1989, nationalities openly expressing their wish to secede from the Soviet Union caused the Soviet government to slow down the negotiation process, and Moscow insisted on setting aside the most contentious sections. China’s nationalities issue had the opposite effect on Zhongnanhai: Chinese leaders wished to settle the entire Sino-Soviet border as quickly as possible. However, once the collapse of the Soviet Union became imminent, the Chinese saw advantages of delaying the negotiations on the disputed sections of the border. They calculated that would allow for China to negotiate with weaker, newly independent countries.

This article assesses Moldova’s political evolution during its first 25 years of independence. It argues that while the country has gone through 3 very distinct periods of governance during that time, the underlying conditions that have hobbled efforts to establish a stable democratic regime remained consistent. These included the country’s precarious location in the international system, weak institutions and the rule of law, and a deep cleavage regarding national identity. Consequently, the country settled into a pattern of systemic corruption and, at best, a deeply flawed form of democracy. By the end of this period, Moldovans faced the task of mounting a renewed effort to regain control over their political institutions.