The intersection of nationalism and inequality is undoubtedly gaining interest in current debates in nationalism studies. The effects of economic inequalities on nationalist politics are the most researched area; however, there are other ways to explore the relationship between nationalism and inequality. Focusing on economic and political aspects of inequality this state-of-the-field article offers an overview of existing research on the relationship between inequality and nationalism in various areas of nationalism studies, ranging from nationalist politics to exploring the symbolic construction of nationhood. Following the inequality scholars, we highlight the growing importance of capital accumulation and emphasize the spatial aspect of it. We argue that while being largely overlooked, the role of territory—and territorial politics more broadly—becomes crucial for the understanding of the intersection of nationalism and inequality today. Overall, we show that it is necessary for nationalism studies scholars to engage in contemporary literature on inequality and acknowledge the wider implications of growing inequality to various manifestations of nationalism.

This article reviews three recent books on nationalism, each focusing on a different aspect of this multifaceted phenomenon. Mylonas and Radnitz’s volume explores the relationships between nationalism and the politics of treason, Hadžidedic’s book zooms in on the historical interdependence of capitalism and nationalism, while Maxwell’s historical monograph explores nationalist habitus as a form of lived experience. These three insightful contributions show the diversity and plasticity of nationalist ideology and practice.

In the past decades, numerous publications have been addressing questions of national and European Identity on the micro level. Only few shed light on the contents that constitute these identities in the minds of Europeans. As different meanings of national and European identity are connected to different consequences such as hostile attitudes toward immigrants or Euroskepticism, reviewing attempts to measure these contents in existing cross-national surveys seems to be promising. This research note summarizes relevant literature on whether and which different forms of national and European identity have been found empirically, which specific contents constitute them, and which determinants and consequences of them are relevant. By comparing articles relying on cross-national survey data since 1995, it will be shown that the field of forms of national and European identity involves different operationalizations and numerous methodological concerns. This leads to considerations for further research in the field.

Soft power draws attention to the way governments, and other actors, create a positive image of themselves so that they can attract others and influence them. In this article, we examine how Russia and China use education to implement soft power in Tajikistan and the differences between the two approaches. This article examines academic diplomacy and the role of educational programs and research collaboration in the projection of China and Russia’s soft power in Tajikistan. We conclude that a latent geopolitical rivalry exists between the two great powers that is manifesting itself in a number of ways. Russia is in a stronger position to project soft power in Tajikistan, and, although the escalation of the war in Ukraine in February 2022 will undermine this influence, China will not displace Russia’s soft power in the near future.

This article seeks to discover how this contemporary Finno-Ugric identity has been politically instrumentalized and negotiated in Estonia. First, we look at how the Estonian state engages with the concept of Finno-Ugric world and inscribes it into Estonia’s foreign policy goals. Then, we delve into the role of Finno-Ugric traditionalism in Estonian populist and far-right discourses. Third, we discuss how local identity constitutes and cements community building initiatives and projects in the Seto region known for its local specificity and cultural peculiarity.

The article explores how gendered relations of power and masculinity are articulated in the Hungarian illiberal government’s rhetorical, legal, and spatial marking of borders and surrounding right-wing discourses in relation to categories of “East”/“West.” After the Hungarian government declared and gradually normalized its illiberal regime, particularly in response to the European refugee crisis in 2015, it passed various anti-migration, anti-gender, and anti-minority laws and policies in the name of defending Hungarians against both the influence of the “feminine” West and the “hyper-masculine” Eastern Other seeking refuge in Hungary. This article examines how the Hungarian government constructs the illiberal state, negotiates its geopolitical position, and propagates illiberal values as “masculine” to articulate and assert its sovereignty against spheres of the “feminized” international, particularly against the West. In parallel with these processes, subnational competing discourses of masculinized sovereignty emerged between the Hungarian government and the mayor of Ásotthalom. By utilizing an intersectional analytical framework, this article maps how these competing discourses of masculinized sovereignty operate at the national and local levels, against the unfolding of the 2015 humanitarian crisis and its aftermath.

Scholars of American identity have typically concluded that Americans more widely endorse civic values than ascriptive ones in surveys, though IATs suggest that there are robust associations between race and American identity. In addition to this apparent contradiction, these studies share similar methodological limitations: the discrepancy between reported attitudes and real-world behavior. Though these methods are well-cited in the wider literature, attitudes are often conflated to be synonymous with behavior in American identity scholarship. I argue that it is necessary to study how Americans conceive of their national identity in different situational contexts. Using the complementary techniques of semi-structured interviewing and qualitative vignettes, I explore and compare the ways in which 10 American graduate students make sense of their national identity in a series of abstract and concrete settings. Results of a multi-method text analysis approach demonstrate that: 1) there are a multitude of components not currently being discussed or measured; 2) the invocation of American identity components depends on their setting; 3) the ways in which components are characterized are just as important as their invocation; and 4) the difficulty expressed by participants to define a singular American identity underscores the continued salience of the multiple traditions thesis.

This article explores Russian occupation policy in Ukraine as an adaptive tactic of Russia’s grand strategy and a manifestation of its military culture. Based on a comparative analysis of the Russian occupation policy during the hybrid and conventional stages of the Russian-Ukrainian war, including the employment of a de facto state playbook, we find both continuity and shifts in Russia’s approach. Although the main shift lies in the change of Russia’s conflict management in neighboring countries from reactive to proactive, the main continuities are the subordination of occupation policy to Russia’s geostrategic interests and path dependence in its military culture, which together lead to the employment of brutal violence against civilians and the demodernization of occupied territories.

The article examines the aspects of contention and conflict escalation before and during the period from November 2013 till February 2014 in Ukraine that have not yet received due attention in research. It studies the contention between the government and the opposition and the concomitant Maidan protest mobilizations by groups advocating unity with Russia, and opposing the visions of political community of the radical groups making up part of the Maidan coalition. Conflict escalation is studied as a combination of structural conditions, choices and actions taken by conflict agents, and evolving discursive factors that enable political violence. The analysis indicates that while structural conditions played a role, conflict escalation is a nonlinear and agency-driven process, evolving through mutually influencing choices and actions of the competing parties, that either drive escalation or lead to deradicalization. The article suggests that the modes of contention and radicalization between the government and the opposition opened opportunities for groups supporting unity with Russia to escalate their demands, to radicalize their visions of political community, and to build leverage with Russia. In conclusion, several key narratives and discursive processes enabling the legitimization of the use of force and the implications for peacebuilding are discussed. The findings help to understand better the environment in which violent conflict further escalated in 2014.

This article aims to make a threefold contribution to the study of soft power. First, considering that the potential of soft power of illiberal states is both underestimated and distorted, this study presents a two-dimensional conceptualization of Russia’s soft power, distinguishing between Russia’s posture toward the liberal international order, and sources of Russia’s foreign policy. Second, it analyzes whether Russian soft power in the Western Balkan countries remains ideologically relevant beyond its hitherto conceptualizations as either the result of its historic cultural ties with the region, or a reflection of Russian foreign policy strategies. Through an analysis of elite discourses and news media as exemplified in speeches, press releases, and interviews, this article locates, challenges, and develops on Russia’s soft power indicators in the Western Balkans. Finally, it contributes to surmounting the residing liberal democratic bias in the study of soft power of illiberal states, showing that not only can they be ideologically attractive but that their scope of influence differs according to the multi-layered nature of soft power.

Political objects, like national flags, arouse emotions even when they are subliminal stimuli. Through two experiments that show subliminal stimuli to the subjects, this article analyzes if those emotions are positive or negative ones—that is to say, if they enhance an inclusive reaction or an excluding one. Besides, the article compares the intensity of the flag’s emotional effect with that of the emoticons, which are figures intended to represent emotional reactions or states. Findings confirm that the Spanish flag, as a subliminal stimulus, influences the opinions of the participants. However, it has had a lower effect than that obtained in previous, similar experiments. Emoticons produce a much more intense type of response than flags. The experiments (n = 85; n = 126) enlarge the knowledge about the emotional effects of political objects of nonconscious perception. Besides, we present an original methodological contribution: the use of emoticons to alter political views.

Since emerging in the early 1990s, Estonian hip-hop has developed in line with other cultural and artistic projects in the country, reflecting attempts to foster a homogeneous society, yet ultimately cultivating one where diversity and multiculturalism prevail. As a genre where minority groups are frequently presented as “authentic,” hip-hop and its visual and performative manifestations provide a valuable platform to examine expressions of identity. To this end, several Estonian hip-hop musicians have explored aspects of being “post-Soviet” in contradistinction to official hegemonic discourses, which outright reject the Soviet past and emphasize titular ethnicity as a cornerstone of national identity.

This article uses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Multi-Modal Discourse Analysis (MMDA) to examine the lyrics and accompanying video of popular hip-hop song “für Oksana” by “Nublu featuring Gameboy Tetris.” Doing so highlights how the song’s basic narrative acts as a metaphor for experiences of integration processes between ethnic Estonians and Russophones since Estonian independence. I argue that through a combination of linguistic and cultural codeswitching, “für Oksana” constitutes an expression, performance, and negotiation of Russophone Estonian identity from both insider and outsider perspectives, emphasizing the need to understand Russophone Estonians as more than simply “Russians who live in Estonia.”

The existing literature explains the war in Donbas and the rationale for why conflict broke out there while failing to do so in other Ukrainian provinces, such as Odesa or Kharkiv. Local pro-Russian organizations could not attract considerable attention and support in the pre-war period in all parts of Ukraine, except for Crimea. The social marginalization and negligible influence of the pro-Russian organizations among the locals presumably stemmed from their weak social ties among the local population. The question is why they had such weak social embeddedness in the local societies despite relatively popular pro-Russian sympathies in these regions? Surprisingly, nobody has sought to explain the social origins of the pro-Russian movements as a source of their weakness and failure to be sparked by the anti-Ukrainian rebellion in 2014.

This research explores how the post-Yugoslav film-makers, in particular Nebojša Slijepčević, Goran Dević, and Srđan Keča, investigate the dilemma of ethnic identity and face the cultural division in the post-conflict societies. The article aims to discuss cinematic representations of the other and conduct a deeper textual analysis of the film Srbenka (2018), in comparison to After the War (2006) and Imported Crows (2004). Also, the article bridges the gap between more conceptual literature on transnational cinema (Stephen Crofts, Steven Rawle, Saša Vojković), nationalism studies (Benedict Anderson, Rogers Brubaker, V.P. (Chip) Gagnon Jr.), as well as history (Tara Zahra) and more empirical analysis providing examples from the contemporary post-Yugoslav cinema. Therefore, the article demonstrates how applying theories from different disciplines enrich film analysis when investigating the otherness.

This article explores the subjective experience of nationality and (trans)national belonging based on biographical interviews with two groups of Jewish participants born in Bulgaria before the Second World War, and residing in Bulgaria and in Israel, respectively. I focus on their retrospective accounts of the mass exodus to Israel in 1948–1949 and the maintenance of transnational family and kinship ties thereafter, during the Cold War. The comparison brings into relief the challenges of their integration into the respective national contexts, and the ways in which the memory cultures in the two countries have molded biographical reminiscences. I argue that despite these differences, a unique case of a transnational generation is at hand, formed by their past experiences as well as by the re-negotiation of these experiences, which was made possible from the 1990s on.

The last Prime Minister of Yugoslavia Ante Marković was considered by many within the country and in the international community to be Yugoslavia’s last chance for a peaceful transition toward democracy and capitalism. In spite of his popularity, the Reformist party he created failed decisively in the first democratic elections of 1990. We expose the reasons for this failure by analyzing electoral, economic, and sociodemographic data on the level of more than two hundred Yugoslav municipalities where the Reformists put forward their candidates. Our analysis shows that the party’s failure had little to do with the voters’ exposure to the effects of the free market reforms undertaken by Marković’s federal government during this period. Instead, the Reformists’ results were largely determined by the communities’ ethnic makeup and interethnic balance. The Reformists suffered at the hands of a strong negative campaign by the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milošević, and they were squeezed out by the ethnically based parties that benefited from voters behaving strategically in the electoral marketplace dominated by questions of nationalism. The analysis presented here offers important lessons for our understanding of Yugoslavia’s breakup, post-communist transitions in general, and electoral politics in societies on the verge of ethnic conflict.

The high infant mortality rate of illegitimate children in Dualist Hungary urged politicians to create a modern state child welfare system for the protection of abandoned children whose upbringing became a national matter. Their main concern was providing adequate nutrition for infants and increase their chances of survival. The article examines how demographical concerns and national-political ideals influenced the evolution of the child welfare system in multi-ethnic Transylvania, first as part of the dual monarchy and after the First World War as a province of Romania. The Hungarian state children’s asylums offered a variety of nursing programs for abandoned infants, where the foster-care system often resulted in their Magyarization at a later age. During the First World War, the new objective was the protection of infants together with mothers and the promotion of breastfeeding in order to ensure the viability of the Hungarian nation. National arguments were used in both time periods to support infant protection initiatives. In interwar Transylvania, the urban-rural ethnic distribution influenced the development of infant protection facilities: all state investments were channeled toward the “authentic” Romanian countryside, while in the “foreign” urban environment ethnic minorities focused on their own institutions.

Jews of Turkey have been applying for citizenship restitution from Spain and Portugal through processes formalized in 2015. Using 29 interviews, I analyze applicant motivations and find that cultural connections play a minor role in applicant decisions. The citizenship application process did not lead to self-questioning of identity for these applicants, unlike Sephardic Jews in other contexts. The more important motivators were Jewish fears about the future of Turkey, the practical benefits of easy travel on a European Union passport, and the desire for global mobility, allowing individuals to chase prosperity wherever it may go. While Jewish fears are mostly in the background, the other two motivations were more pressing. I place these motivations in the context of changing conceptions of citizenship in Europe and the global inequality of citizenship, crystallized in a hierarchy of passports. I find that after acquiring Iberian citizenship, Jews from Turkey relate to their new citizenship solely in practical ways.

Several watershed events preceded the dissolution of Yugoslavia. One of these was the toppling of the Vojvodina autonomist leadership in October 1988. This was preceded by a series of rallies throughout Vojvodina in the summer of 1988, which may have seemed like a spontaneous affair and the work of “ordinary citizens.” It was called “the antibureaucratic revolution.” However, these rallies, including a standing group of demonstrators, continually and always referring to the grievances of Kosovo Serbs, turned out to be supported by the Serbian political elite centered in Belgrade. The elite, still headed by the Serbian Communist Chief Slobodan Milošević, gave thrust and coordination to efforts to organize the rallies. The Vojvodina leadership was toppled for their alleged “failing to understand the plight of Kosovo Serbs.” The overthrow was, further, with a view to achieve the Serbian elite’s pet project, the “united Serbia”—that is, doing away with Vojvodina’s and Kosovo’s autonomy. Written sources (including recollections by Yugoslav leaders of the time) and written sources are considered in research on the events.