This article reviews the literature on nationalism and ethnic mobilization. I first discuss the different strands of research in the field, highlighting three key sources of division that characterize existing literature: geography, ethnic cleavage type, and strategy of mobilization. Arguing that the lack of dialogue between different niches of research can undermine the accumulation of general knowledge, I propose an integrated perspective on nationalism and ethnic mobilization that serves to assimilate findings from these separate niches. I conclude by discussing how such an integrated perspective can enhance our knowledge of the causes, dynamics, and consequences of ethnic mobilization.

State repression of ethno-religious minorities is a widespread practice among dictatorships. Nevertheless, political science literature on the topic presents inconsistent findings regarding the causes and consequences of this phenomenon, largely due to the challenges associated with researching human rights violations in non-democratic regimes. The present systematic literature review covers theme-related articles indexed in the Web of Science database and published in English, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, or Chinese from January 1990 to December 2022 (n=169). By reviewing a wide array of theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and data collection strategies, this article identifies causes, consequences, and endogenous relationships, as well as key gaps in the literature on ethno-religious repression in non-democratic settings, providing a solid starting point for further research.

In 2018, David Laitin and Pål Kolstø engaged in a discussion at the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Nationalities held at Columbia University, New York. The panel was a 20-year retrospective on Identity in Formation: the Russian-speaking populations in the Near Abroad (Laitin 1998).

Although the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC, also known as Taiwan) and their ruling parties have altered over time, there are quite a few similarities between their models of nation-building, more than is commonly acknowledged. The guofu (father) of the modern Chinese state, Sun Yat-sen, one of the few political leaders who is still honored on both sides of the Taiwan Straits, claimed all the peoples and territories of the former Qing empire comprised a single national community, the so-called Zhonghua minzu. Yet a Han super-majority has long sat at the center of this national imaginary. In this article, we ask what has happened to Sun’s imagined community across the last century, and how it has evolved in the two competing Chinese states the PRC and the ROC. We seek to demonstrate the enduring challenge of Han-centrism for multiethnic nation-building in both countries, while illustrating how shifts in domestic and international politics are altering this national imaginary and the place of ethnocultural diversity within it.

In the early 20th century, Orissa, a province in British India, was marked by dismemberment and fragmentation. Nationalist leaders in colonial Orissa often portrayed the province as a disfigured mother to evoke nationalist sentiment among the Odia people and garner support for the unification of the Oriya-speaking tracts in adjacent provinces to form a separate and complete Orissa province. One painting from the period depicts a woman representing “Mother Orissa” being dissected on a table by an Englishman and surrounded by wolf-headed figures representing Bengal, Madras, and Bihar, who were opposed to the idea of Orissa’s unification. However, these leaders were careful not to create an environment of coercion and sought to allow for expressions of difference to foster a healthy national life. One way they did this was by trying to unite intrareligious groups in Orissa while also calling for the need to bring together people of different regions living in Orissa. Additionally, they balanced their allegiance and devotion among three mothers: Mother Orissa, Mother India, and Mother Victoria.

The 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath provided fertile soil for criticism of and alternatives to the international liberal order, including the rise of financial nationalism. Contemporary financial nationalism is a view of the world that is nationalist in its motivation for political action, financial in its policy focus, and illiberal in its conception of political economy. At the same time, it is fundamentally shaped by its emergence from within the international liberal order, which both constrains the policy options of financial nationalists and provides opportunities for them to draw on transnational financial resources and institutions to advance nationalist causes. This article offers a conceptual analysis of contemporary financial nationalism that explores its fundamental characteristics, explains what is distinctive about it, delineates its four major policy subtypes, identifies the resources and capabilities required to successfully engage in it, and discusses the implications of doing so. It aids researchers in thinking about financial nationalism’s internal workings across different contexts, in understanding why it has lasted as long and spread as far as it has, in considering how it may evolve, and in contemplating how it can affect domestic and international political economies.

By examining social media interactions, the analysis that is presented in this article reveals how hashtags are adeptly used to reframe the lithium mining issue, embedding it within wider narratives. The article investigates narratives surrounding lithium mining protests in Serbia, using digital ethnography and narrative analysis to study the discourse of ecology activists on the social platform X (formerly known as Twitter). It illuminates the fluid, rhizomatic, and puzzle-like nature of hashtags that helps to achieve online visibility, mobilize audiences for street protests, and appear as narrative building blocks. Hashtags operate as algorithmic signifiers that create additional layers of meaning and fine-tune narratives toward either the left or right side of the political spectrum. This article focuses on how activists use hashtags not just as tools for categorizing content but also as essential components in shaping their narratives. This approach reveals the dynamic engagement of a broad political spectrum in the lithium mining debate, forging connections between different actors. The analysis demonstrates how interconnected hashtags modulate the narratives so that they can transgress from the right to the left side of the political spectrum, indicating that lithium mining is a global rather than a local problem.

This article analyses the scholarly results concerning the social phenomenon of intermarriage. It specifically focuses on the similarities and differences in the latter in Europe, between migrants and host society members, and between national minorities and majorities. The study shows that while intermarriage between migrants and host society members is often seen as a vehicle for bridging social gaps and promoting social cohesion, intermarriages between national minorities and majorities is more likely to lead to erosion of minority identities and cultural traits. Common challenges faced by intermarried couples include resistance from family members and bureaucratic obstacles, with gender dynamics playing a crucial role, particularly in traditional societies where women often bear the brunt of cultural assimilation. Intermarriage also promotes the perspective of the integrative nature of nation-states without requiring intervention by the states themselves. The article underscores the importance of deepening the discourse on intermarriage and focusing on the impact of the latter on both migrant and national minority communities through both quantitative analyses and qualitative approaches. This may improve the understanding of the transformative potential and challenges of these unions.

There is tension between manipulation of national identity construction and agency in the literature on ingroup identification, especially in authoritarian contexts. In China, the past is very relevant with regards to legitimacy of the Communist Party. Yet, we cannot just assume that what the state propagates is what can also be found at the bottom-up level. This article analyses social representations of history in China combining the top-down perspective of state education policies and curated historical narratives to the bottom-up perspective formed through analyzing two student surveys, collected first in 2007 and again in 2011-2012, and 11 interviews. Earlier research indicates that in most countries representations of history concentrate on negative issues and their time span is short. Chinese representations of history are divided into narratives of glory and humiliation, and respondents have a much longer perspective to national history than typical participants in international surveys. Finally, although problematic periods such as the Cultural Revolution get less coverage in political speeches and school textbooks, they are not forgotten among students. Furthermore, the view that people should have their own ideas about history and China rather than having to adopt the government promoted narrative was visible in multiple student interviews.

This article examines the writings of late 19th and early 20th-century Marxist theorists and political leaders from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires and their influence on the chief Bolshevik theorist of Soviet nationality policies, Joseph Stalin. It argues that although many early Marxist theorists held divergent views on managing nationalism, they uniformly rejected biological or romantic spiritual conceptions of the nation and instead posited that nationalism and contemporary nations are relatively new, socially constructed phenomena arising from processes linked to economic and political modernization. These perspectives align with what contemporary academia labels as “modernist” theories of nationality and this analysis therefore challenges prevailing views on the genesis of these theories, tracing them back to early Marxist thinkers rather than late 20th-century Western European theorists such as Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner. This modernist understanding of nations as products of material forces and processes enabled socialists to envision steering nation formation. For the Bolsheviks and some of the later international revolutionaries they inspired, this meant that just as they believed they could accelerate the transition to a socialist future through active class management, so too they believed they could control and expedite the construction of national identities through carefully designed policies.

In the wake of Brexit, how has the framing of the EU and independence evolved among regionalist parties in the devolved regions of the UK? The effects of a multilevel structure such as the EU on regionalist parties has been examined, yet European disintegration is novel and thus yet to be fully explored. Has the framing of the EU by these parties shifted, and if so, how? In this article, I analyze 19 regionalist party manifestos between 2011 and 2022 through the lens of rational choice and discursive institutionalism to examine the effects of Brexit on the framing of the EU. At a rhetorical level, these parties have engaged in the subsuming of the EU, rhetorically tying their independence or enhanced autonomy to Brexit. Sinn Féin, Scottish Nationalist Party, and Plaid Cymru have used the critical juncture of Brexit to incorporate the EU into their regionalist rhetoric. By examining the effects of European disintegration on regionalist political parties, we can better understand the role that current events play in the fluidity of party positions as presented in manifestos.

What shapes a country’s foreign policy formation in times of crisis? This article explores the factors that were behind the response of Ukrainian decision makers in their relations with Russia and the European Union during the annexation of Crimea between February 21 and March 26, 2014. I view Ukraine’s foreign policy through the lenses of an analytical framework inspired by game theory, where the decision-making process is divided into four parts—information about others’ preferences, trust in interlocutors, everyone’s payoffs, and resources. This article employs a rigorous qualitative thematic analysis of 38 elite interviews, numerous primary documents, and media reports. The core finding suggests that the uncertain times and unpreparedness of Ukrainian decision makers obstructed them from a comprehensive analysis of the environment and formation of the country’s foreign policy strategy, which, consequently, facilitated Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

This article deals with the confiscation of property from the German-speaking inhabitants of Czechoslovakia and its redistribution to the new settlers of the Czech borderlands. It shows how the social revolution—that is, the emergence of an egalitarian postwar society—was made possible by the national revolution—that is, the expulsion of the German-speaking inhabitants of Central Europe. Using the example of the industrial center of Liberec in northern Bohemia, the author shows how the Czech administration that was established after the Second World War applied the dichotomy of the Czech–German conflict to an ethnically complex postwar society and how, despite the ideology of distributing property to the “Slavs,” non-Czech minorities were discriminated against with respect to redistribution. Eventually, she analyzes how postwar Czechoslovak society was shaped, with an emphasis on the material demands of workers and collectives, even as individuals sought to achieve a middle-class lifestyle through participation in property distribution.

In most accounts of peacemaking after World War I, “flawed” decisions at “Versailles” caused the ethnically mixed states of Central and Eastern Europe to descend into violent ethnic clashes, while the allegedly more homogenous Western European states faced few issues with minorities. This article challenges this simplistic view by examining the treatment of German-speaking minorities in the borderlands of Alsace-Lorraine, South Tyrol, and Eupen-Malmedy between 1918 and 1923 in the immediate post-war and the early interwar period. Building on an innovative comparative framework of five key variables, we find that, in all three cases, post-war borders generated incentives for the respective governments to suppress their new minorities, and that states used ethnic markers to target them. The strength of state institutions and liberal principles account for a reversal (Alsace-Lorraine), moderation (Eupen-Malmedy), or hardening (South Tyrol) of measures. International commitment to defend the new borders and the absence of a tradition of ethnic conflict also had a significant impact.

Poland remained a popular destination for migrants from Ukraine for many years before February 24, 2022, the outbreak of full-scale Russian aggression on Ukraine. Ukrainian communities in Polish cities, including local autochthonous Ukrainians (the Ukrainian national minority), are already well-established and well-organized, although they are very diverse. Drawing from anthropological fieldwork conducted in 2021 and at the beginning of 2022, this article seeks to address the nexus of the diaspora and culture and explores the imaginations of “common culture” in diaspora-forming processes. We treat “culture” as diasporic imaginings of naturalized and reified representations of what is to be a Ukrainian in Poland. The essentialized notion of putative “common culture” is routinely discursivized and maintained by diasporic elites. Exploring this as an empirical phenomenon captured in the field helps reveal the internal tensions and that this imagining empowers the production of cultural differences. We argue that imagined “common culture” may actually activate “othering” of the diasporic Other and might not be as unifying a factor in diaspora-forming processes as it appears.

Joseph Stalin and the Soviet party leadership launched a major propaganda campaign in 1931 that called for a new approach to Soviet history, not only for scholars and pedagogues but for society as a whole. A veritable “search for a usable past,” this initiative was to bolster the authority and legitimacy of the state and rally the population together in patriotic unity by connecting the prerevolutionary past to the Stalinist present. When this new historical line was finally unveiled in 1937, it challenged earlier Soviet sloganeering on subjects like nationalism, imperialism, and colonialism. This article examines how Stalin attempted to reconcile his new “usable past” with these other ideological priorities, focusing on a case study of the so-called Ukrainian question within the context of the USSR’s broader reevaluation of tsarist-era imperialism and colonial policy.

In this article, we explore intra-ethnic aspects of co-ethnic migration by members of the Slovak community from Serbia to Slovakia, both at the institutional level and at the level of intra-ethnic relations, and the boundaries between migrants and the established population. In the first part, we focus on the institutional framework of co-ethnic migration: the politicization of diaspora issues in Slovakia, the Slovak community in Serbia in the hierarchy of Slovakia’s diaspora policy, and co-ethnic relations as a subject of negotiations. In the second part, we investigate the role of language in co-ethnic migration, the situation of nonrecognition by co-ethnics in Slovakia, intra-ethnic boundary-making in everyday interactions, and the consequences of migration on intra-ethnic relations among those members of the community who did not migrate. We thus analyze the ongoing migration of the Slovaks of Vojvodina from Serbia into Slovakia, from the early 1990s onward, through a blend of perspectives “from above” and “from below.” This article is based on extensive fieldwork conducted among members of the Vojvodina Slovak community, both migrants and non-migrants who have remained in Vojvodina. Thus, the sending country (Serbia) and the receiving country (Slovakia) represent one research field. The data collected in the field have been complemented by legal documents and statistical data to gain an overview of the wider social and political structures within which the migration is taking place.

The securitization of Russian-speakers has been central to nation-building in Estonia and Latvia since they regained their independence in 1991. Securitization at the levels of discourse and policy varies over time as a result of historical legacies, Russia’s kin state activism, and the minority protection requirements of European institutions. This article introduces a typology that links discursive frames with policies to map securitizing trends in Estonia and Latvia after the Soviet collapse: securitizing exclusion — less accommodating policies are justified by presenting the minority as a threat to the state or core nation; securitizing inclusion — more accommodating policies are justified to “win over” the minority in order to decrease the threat; and desecuritizing inclusion — more accommodating policies are justified on grounds of fairness or appropriateness without reference to security. The utility of the typology is demonstrated by analyzing frames in the public broadcast media and recent policy developments in Estonia and Latvia immediately following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The analysis points to increasing convergence across countries in favor of securitizing exclusion. The analysis points to increasing convergence across countries in favor of securitizing exclusion. We conclude by evaluating these trends in light of minority mobilization and recent data on support for the active defense of the state among Russian-speakers and titulars.

This article analyzes the key factors behind the securitization of Ukraine’s small ethnic Hungarian minority in recent years and how they affect local interethnic as well as interstate relations. It draws on elite interviews conducted in the Ukrainian-Hungarian borderland, and other sources including speech acts. Four underlying factors were identified. The first two are Hungary’s kin-state aid and dual citizenship law, which have empowered Ukraine’s ethnic Hungarians, with the community appearing larger and potentially more threatening in the eyes of the majority population than its mere size justifies. The other two factors are Ukraine’s language policy and Transcarpathia’s future being subject of conspiracy theories in light of Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine, which have negatively affected interethnic ties, although somewhat less in the borderland than between Hungary and Ukraine at large. In Transcarpathia, our different informants had diverging perceptions of who is stirring tensions but agreed that actors from outside their region were to blame. Overall, what has emerged is a clash of Hungary’s kin-state politics and Ukraine’s nation-state-building efforts. The article ends with more general implications for kin- and host-state relations in times of conflict.