This article reviews the current scholarship around racism and nationalism, two of the mostly hotly debated issues in contemporary politics. Both racism and nationalism involve dividing humanity into groups and setting up some groups as innately superior to others. Until recently, racism and nationalism were both widely seen as unpleasant relics of times past, destined to disappear as the principles of equality and human rights become universally embraced. But both concepts have proved their resilience in recent years. Scholars have been devoting new attention to the “racialization” of ethnic and national identities in the former Soviet Union and East Europe, the regions that are the main focus of this journal. The article examines the prevailing approaches to understanding the terms “racism” and “nationalism,” which are distinct but overlapping categories of analysis and vehicles of political mobilization. Developments in genomics have complicated the relationship between perceptions of race as a purely social phenomenon. The essay explores the way racism and nationalism play out in two self-proclaimed “exceptional” political systems – the Soviet Union and the United States – which have played a prominent role in global debates about race and nation. It briefly discusses developments in other regions, such as the debate over multiculturalism in Europe.

Since its inception, Pakistan has faced challenges of ethnic-nationalism from her ethnicities. State efforts to mold these diverse identities into one communal Muslim identity have been continually resisted by the different nationalities comprising Pakistan. The demands of ethno-national movements have fluctuated between independence and autonomy, depending upon the relation between the state and the respective ethnic group. Sometimes the demand for autonomy has expanded into a desire for independence, as was the case with Bengali ethnic nationalism. At other times, the desire for independence has shrunk to a demand for autonomy, as manifested by Pashtun nationalism. This shift is explicated through the relationship between the state and ethnic groups. The author analyzes this shift through the prism of Paul Brass’s instrumental theory of elite competition. The factors that contributed to the success of Bengali nationalism in achieving statehood and the failure of Baloch nationalism to do so are viewed through Ted Gurr’s concept of relative deprivation. The integration of Sindhi and Pashtun ethnic groups into the state structure is explained via Andreas Wimmer’s notion of ownership of the state.

The present article focuses on the period between 1848 and 1906—between the politicized “discovery” of Balkan Aromanians as a kinfolk by Romanian nation-state builders and the aftermath of the community’s recognition by the Ottoman government. Examining how Romania imagined its own entanglement in the Macedonian Question, the article aims to raise the broader question of how a nation-state imagined the agency of kinfolk beyond its borders and, as part of a geographically distributed national division of labor, ascribed a specific task to one part of its ethnic body. In Romania’s case, this had a double thrust. One, Aromanians were imagined as the natural bourgeoisie of the southern Balkans, a people superior in their origins, culture, and mores to other ethnic groups—and a natural vanguard for Romania’s economic interests in the region. Two, they were imagined as a vanguard for catalyzing the internal development of a native merchant class in Romania proper, which was understood as a primary agent for economic and social progress but perceived to be problematically absent. Thus, this study hones in on the process of ascribing the status of a “prosthetic bourgeoisie” to the Aromanians, and its insistent discursive recurrence.

In national historiography, estate (social) divisions are typically disregarded in favor of supposedly shared ethnicity, which is proposed to have united a given nation for centuries. Hence, the Polish national historiography is unable to account for the Galician Jacquerie (1846), when serfs were killing nobles, despite their (retroactively) assumed shared Polish ethnicity. On the other hand, the 1994 mass massacre of the Tutsis by Hutus is recognized as the Rwandan Genocide, though both groups share the same language, culture, and religion—or what is usually understood as ethnicity. What has sundered the Tutsis and the Hutus is the estate-like socioeconomic difference, or a memory thereof. It appears that under certain conditions estate (social, class) difference may become an ethnic boundary. In the case of the aforementioned jacquerie, the estate difference made the serfs and the nobles into two different de facto ethnic groups. Similarly, in Rwanda, estate (social) difference is implicitly posed as ethnicity, thus making the Hutus and the Tutsis into separate ethnic groups. However, the official definition of genocide as adopted by the United Nations explicitly excludes social groups (for instance, estates) from its purview, leading to terminological paradoxes.

This article focuses on the project Sacred Geography of Kazakhstan, launched in 2017 in Kazakhstan as part of the nationwide program Ruqani Zhangyru (Modernization of Spirituality). The officially stated goal of the project is to cultivate a sense of patriotism in the country’s residents related to places and geographic sites that are important for the historical memory of independent Kazakhstan. The authors assume that the real goal of the project is national territorialization, or recoding of the semantics of space, by selecting, codifying, and articulating some symbols and practices, while leveling and “forgetting” others. The analysis, which is based on expert interviews and official documents, shows that this postcolonial process fits into the tendency toward ethnonationalization of Kazakhstan, in which discourse on the civil nation continues to be reproduced at the official level, while real activity is more focused on reinforcing the idea of Kazakhstan as the state of the Kazakh nation. The institutionalization of organizing and recoding the sacred landscape involves a wide variety of groups and actors. These factors may explain the success of the project in comparison to other projects being implemented under the Ruqani Zhangyru program.

This article critically examines the prevalent nationalist interpretation of historical images featuring textiles from rural regions. In an effort to disentangle the threads of folk costumes, it proposes a conscious unlearning of the way we read images of rural material culture from the late 19th century. This period has entered historiography as a period of intensifying national movements and political use of rural culture, in particular in Central and Eastern Europe. So-called folk costumes have been viewed as a symbolic representation of the nation, whereas their broader social and economic role in the history of industrial society has been overshadowed. By bringing together the production, collection, and exhibition of rural material culture, this article reveals processes in industrial society that shaped the modern history of folk costumes. It draws on late-19th-century source material stemming from a network centered in Prague that promoted textiles from rural Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, and Galicia as ethno-commodities. Textiles were integrated into women’s industrial education and presented at events promoting national economy and the latest technological innovations. Thus, this article contributes to nationalism studies by discussing capitalism and industrialism and seeks to further scrutinize the history of nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe.

In this article, I examine early religious literature in the Albanian language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which, in combination with ecclesiastical rivalries and a differential opposition to Ottoman rule, must have promoted an inherent cultural process of differentiation, especially between Greek-speaking and Albanian-speaking Orthodox Christians. In particular, I argue that the contradicting motivations of political contradistinction, Enlightenment propagation, Orthodox evangelism, ecclesiastical confrontation, and missionary counteraction lead inadvertently to a boundary work of the social reorganization of linguistic and cultural difference.

The youngest generation of the Azerbaijani diaspora in Turkey was formed almost immediately after the downfall of the Soviet Union, resulting in the increased emigration of Azerbaijanis to foreign countries, in particular to Turkey, where the language barrier is minimal due to linguistic proximity. This article is an attempt to investigate the dynamics of identity production (and, consequently, senses of belonging) of the most recent generations of the Azerbaijani diaspora in Turkey in relationship to their linguistic and cultural repertoires. While language and culture are key factors in identity production, linguistic and cultural practices may be influenced by various social factors. I have therefore tried to examine the identity paradigms of Azerbaijanis living in Turkey in the frameworks of their ethno-national, socio-cultural, and socio-communicative perceptions. The survey I conducted for this purpose mostly covers post-Soviet immigrants to Turkey and, to a lesser extent, earlier generations of Azerbaijanis who settled in Turkey during Soviet times.

The Lezgin irredentist movement is one of the less-studied national movements in the post-Soviet space, despite affecting the strategically important Russian-Azerbaijani borderlands and the bordering process between the two post-Soviet states. This article aims to fill this gap and to examine the impact of the Lezgin national movement on the development of territorial nationalism in early post-Soviet Azerbaijan. Based on the analysis of media publications in three Azerbaijani newspapers between 1992 and 1996, I argue that the movement contributed to consolidating the territorial vision of the Azerbaijani nation as incorporating groups historically settled in this territory. While media coverage stressed friendship between ethnic Azerbaijanis and Lezgins, the responsibility for secessionist claims was placed on external forces, particularly Russia and Armenia. In the long term, this framing led to the securitization of ethnic minority activism as a major threat to Azerbaijani statehood.

The aim of this article is to shed light on the process of nation-building and the formation of national identity in post-Soviet Azerbaijan. The peculiarity of Azerbaijani nation-building is that the debates on how to build a nation and define national identity were nourished by two discourses: Azerbaijanism (Azerbaycançılıq) and Turkism (Tűrkçűlűk). The article focuses firstly on the discourses on national identity and nation-building in the pre-independence period while elaborating on the roots and premises of the nationalist independence movement. Secondly, it highlights the discourses of nation-building in the post-independence period while discussing the meanings attributed to national identity and nationhood. It shows how these two discourses shaped the existing identity formation in Azerbaijan with a particular emphasis on citizenship identity, marked by multiculturalism, hospitality, tolerance, and patriotism. Yet one can still categorize the country as having an incomplete nation-building process, due the violation of territorial integrity as a result of the Karabakh conflict.