Godwin Mbikusita-Lewanika, the founding president of Zambia’s first nationalist organisation, is now remembered as a staunch supporter of colonial rule. Such figures are not uncommon and are often termed “loyalists,” a term that is usually understood in the literature as a fixed category that either dwindled in the face of racial oppression or was a choice shaped and hardened by conflict. Lewanika, however, moved easily between different sides, reinventing himself as an anticolonial nationalist, trade unionist, colonial loyalist, and Lozi traditional monarchist as circumstances warranted. The tumult of the mid-twentieth century opened up new opportunities and Lewanika seized roles that were not previously available. Biographies of anticolonial nationalists often argue they turned to political action when their education and ambitions clashed with the highly-circumscribed roles available under colonialism. Lewanika’s life was the opposite. He carved out a prominent place for himself in the colonial order and then in independent Zambia.

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.

What explains voter attitudes toward immigration in Latin America? This article argues that increased refugee arrivals moderate the impact of social identities on immigration attitudes. We propose that informational cues associated with increased immigration make cosmopolitan identities less important—and exclusionary national identities more important—determinants of immigration preferences. Analyzing 12 Latin American countries from the 2017–2022 wave of the World Values Survey, we demonstrate that cosmopolitanism is positively associated with pro-immigration attitudes, but only in countries experiencing low-to-moderate refugee inflows. Conversely, nationalism is negatively associated with pro-immigrant attitudes, and increasingly so as refugee inflows increase. The uneven distribution of refugee migration has therefore reshaped public opinion in Latin America by moderating the effects of competing social identities (i.e., cosmopolitanism and nationalism). These findings contribute to broader debates on the behavioral impacts of immigration by highlighting an indirect mechanism by which increased immigration may generate anti-immigrant hostility.

This article offers a nuanced examination of the complex identity dynamics among the Christian and Muslim communities in Cyprus during the late 19th and early 20th century, particularly in the aftermath of British administration replacing Ottoman rule in 1878. The article draws attention to the profound impact of this historical transition on the identity formation processes of both communities. Despite the shared wartime experience of the First World War, the Christian and Muslim communities in Cyprus failed to construct a cohesive identity rooted in their common geographical space. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of ambivalence, the article explores the complex process by which Cypriot communities sought to align their identity with larger nations, namely Greece and Turkey, rather than grounding it in their local context. The article contends that the genesis of their ambivalence can be traced back to 1878 when British administration replaced Ottoman rule on the island.

The international solidarity movement for the East Timorese was developed in Southeast Asian nations during the 1990s as ‘the issue of East Timor’ became a primary concern for the ASEAN countries’ civil society. Proponents of liberal democracy have assumed that international solidarity movements for human rights and democracy during the 1990s resulted from the powerful momentum of liberal democracy that universally linked foreign people. However, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri and their marxist followers have explained these transnational movements as a transnational network that overcomes national borders against the capitalist Empire. Nevertheless, the political history of transnational solidarity movements from East Timor to Southeast Asia in the post-Cold War 1990s makes clear that nationalism has continued to be an ideological driver to link people from different nations.

Focusing on the international solidarity for the East Timorese independence struggle, this paper demonstrates a transnational function of nationalism through which international solidarity movements are created, resonate and function. The East Timor international solidarity struggle successfully created a transnational platform through the APCET conferences held in the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand in the 1990s. Socio-historical analysis of APCET reveals that nationalists in Southeast Asia shared collective memories of national struggles beyond their spaces and times to create a transnational force to support self-determination for the East Timorese. Through its analysis, this article extends the theoretical framework of nationalism that has explained nationalist movements to serve as a more powerful tool to explain international solidarity in the age of globalisation. (247 words)

Research on the nexus between education and nationalism in the Habsburg Empire has often focused on the role that language may have played in top-down nationalization processes and the popular dissemination of national thought. According to contemporary nationalist logic, undergoing education in a certain language of instruction also entailed the internalization of nationalist values inherent to its corresponding nationalist movement. The present article argues that the Habsburg educational experience was much more contingent, and draws attention to the diversity of pedagogical approaches towards nationalism and nationality that could be encountered in Austrian schools during the last five decades of Habsburg rule. By using examples from German- and Slovene-language textbooks, it shows that sociopolitical, temporal, as well as institutional factors played an important role in determining the practical values and attitudes towards the nationalism that students encountered during their school years. With systematic empirical studies remaining rare, further research will be necessary to gain a fuller insight into the complexities of the Habsburg education system and its potential effects on popular collective identity formation.

In this paper, I examine the relationship between community-level exposure to war losses and long-term patterns of electoral behaviour. Using novel data that identifies and geolocates all French soldiers who died during World War I, I show that communities that experienced higher death rates exhibit greater levels of electoral support for the far-right. Subsequently, I provide both theoretical and empirical evidence on how such persistent effects propagate: communities more exposed to the horrors of war develop stronger in-group preferences at the expense of the out-group. In cases like France, where the in-group is defined primarily in terms of the nation, this preference translates into a higher demand for nationalism, which is supplied by far-right political parties.

Social Darwinism was a pathbreaker in the history of Chinese international thought. In this study, we explore the hitherto sparsely discussed process of the reception of social Darwinism in China, which led to a fundamental transformation in Chinese thinking about the international order and the position of China vis-à-vis Western powers. Drawing on the work of three leaders of that intellectual transformation – Yan Fu, Kang Youwei, and Liang Qichao – we analyse issues such as the struggle for existence and survival, national and racial competition, and statism. We demonstrate how the three aforementioned thinkers modified the original Darwinist thought, enriching it with voluntarism and radical collectivism, all in order for the emerging set of ideas to suit China’s historically determined needs. Overall, our analysis contributes to both the history of International Relations thought in China and the broader debate on the globalisation of IR theory and IR knowledge production.

This paper analyzes the Jin Yong novel The Deer and the Cauldron through the lens of Etienne Balibar's theory of super-nationalism and supranationalism. The novel employs a pan-Asian racial ideology to expand national identity from Han Chinese to other ethnic groups (supranationalism) by introducing a racial Other, white Europeans, to unify warring groups. Simultaneously, Han culture is consistently uplifted as superior (super-nationalism). A critical sequence features the Kangxi Emperor asserting his legitimacy as the ruler of China to the protagonist Wei Xiaobao by claiming the Mandate of Heaven has passed from the Ming to the Qing dynasty. However, Han Chinese gallants and intellectuals constantly challenge his legitimacy because, as a Manchu, he is considered foreign. To resolve this issue, Wei Xiaobao begins constructing a racial national framework that includes Manchus. This paper further argues that Wei Xiaobao's moral relativism, unusual for a protagonist in martial arts fiction, enables the flexibility to redefine Chinese identity on racial grounds instead of moral or cultural. The Deer and the Cauldron illustrates the transition from the Mandate of Heaven to modern nation-state ideology in China, in the form of an irreverent martial arts fiction novel, crafted by the genre's greatest master.