The relationship between Islam and ethnicity has generally been studied almost exclusively from a theoretical (theological) and/or practical (historical) viewpoint of the Muslims themselves. If we observe this problem from another point of view, that of the Islamized natives, we discover that there exists a tacit consensus as to the three levels or degrees according to which Islamized peoples can be classified: (a) a maximum or even total confluence of Islam and ethnicity, as in the Arab lands and in Daghestan; (b) a partial distinction between Islam and ethnicity, stemming from a certain ‘ethnicization’ of Islam, as in Shia Iran; and (c) a somewhat vague decentralization between these two focal points, as in Turkestan, Subsaharan Africa and Southeast Asia.

On 26 February 1925, the Soviet government, or the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, passed a resolution that, in effect, ensured the continuation of the separate development of the southern and the northern Komi, that is, the Komi-Permiaks and the Komi-Zyrians. In more detail, the Presidium decided,

Popular protest, which repeatedly occurred in Communist regimes, turned into massive mobilizational waves in the late Communist period. Why did some protests result in state cooptation and particularist nationalism (Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union), and others in state-society polarization (Poland) and protest containment (China), when these states shared important historical, political, and institutional legacies? Political regimes with origins in indigenous popularly-based revolutionary movements are more resilient to popular protests and other major crises than other authoritarian regimes. Protracted ideological armed struggle largely overlaps with broader patriotic causes, such as liberation wars or struggles against foreign intervention. The revolutionary regimes thus acquire patriotic credentials, while boundaries between partisan and patriotic identities become blurred, which strengthens their elite unity and popular base. Popular protests thus facilitate a complex political game of old and new actors that may result in regime survival or transformation. In other regimes, popular unrest tends to produce state-society polarization and, ultimately, regime delegitimation and breakdown. Popular contention in complex multinational institutional settings, if there is no major external threat, highlights old and triggers new conflicts along these structural and institutional divides and, where dual political identities prevail, facilitates identity shifts in particularist direction.

This article is the fifth and final in a Nationalities Papers series providing an overview of the development of Romani political group representation and administration, from the arrival of Roma to Europe up to 1971, the landmark year of modern transnational Romani politics. The article concentrates on the period between the Second World War and 1970 and the emergence of the following phenomena which distinguish this period from those covered in the previous articles: some limited Romani participation in non-Romani mainstream political or administrative structures, an international Romani evangelical movement, reconciliation between Romani political representation and the Catholic Church, national institutions created by various governments to aid the administration of policies on Roma and rapid growth of non-governmental organizations addressing Romani issues.

The territory of this new European state is crossed by strategically important passes, the lowest in the entire Alps, leading from the Danubian basin to the Mediterranean (Italy). Thus, the Slovenes had been under cultural, civilizational and political domination of centers from these two parts of Europe until 1918. Because the mountainous land forms, dissected also by valleys and basins, were prone to processes of diffusion rather than fusion, the Slovenes became a national and political subject of their own as late as the nineteenth century. From 1918 to 1990 they were joined to Yugoslavia, a South-East European state, and learnt, to their cost, all the differences between the cultures of West and Central Europe on the one hand, and South-East and Eastern Europe and the Near East on the other. Hence the plebiscite decision by the nation for an independent state.

This article uses the French Rassemblement National (RN) as a case study to examine how the populist radical right (PRR) prepares for a world after COVID-19 dominated by climate change concerns. Research suggests that certain measures introduced to contain the virus – such as the establishment of strict border and travel restrictions – may legitimize the PRR’s protectionist and anti-immigration agendas, yet few have examined whether or how PRR parties have used COVID-19 to promote their environmental agenda. If anything, the expectation has been that the pandemic would hurt the PRR precisely because its effects, unlike climate change, cannot be dismissed as a “hoax.” This view overlooks not only the “environmental turn” recently taken by several PRR parties but also the possibility that public awareness of the causal link between climate change and COVID-19 may work to their advantage. The analysis presented in this article highlights this possibility, showing that the RN used COVID-19 not only to capitalize on anti-immigrant sentiment but also to bolster its self-image as a champion of environmental protection.

How does a newly formed state and its newly created nation present itself at world’s fairs? This article focuses on the interwar period and the impact of the political restructuring of Central Europe in order to examine the strategies and motivations of Czechoslovakia for participation in exhibitions around the globe. It takes Czechoslovakia as an example of a country, created in 1918, that constructed and displayed its image in a comprehensible and uncomplicated way to international audiences. World’s fairs that were primarily organized to promote trade relationships thus gave the opportunity to countries like Czechoslovakia to validate its existence, internal composition, and domestic politics through carefully crafted narratives that were showcased. The article primarily addresses the question of who creates these narratives and why, while scrutinizing the transfer of domestic politics into international displays.

This article revisits the debate on the modernity of nations considering recent critical approaches to national phenomena. It proposes an alternative model that addresses the existence of empirical evidence about nations before the 19th century without erasing key changes in the history of nationhood, such as the rise of the principle of national sovereignty. The model draws on existing literature and a corpus of British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese ego-documents from the Age of Revolutions. The study of patterns of usage of national languages in these life narratives supports the abandonment of the premodern/modern antinomy and the implementation of a more complex account. The proposal distinguishes republican, genetic, nonpoliticized ethnotypical, politicized ethnotypical, liberal, romantic, biological, cultural, and democratic forms of nationhood. It then develops the genetic and the ethnotypical forms using source materials and readdresses the issue of “modernity” in the light of this evidence.

Discrimination against minority ethnic groups has often been analyzed through the lenses of institutional action, antiminority rhetoric, and media framing in the countries of residence. However, we know little about how ethnic discrimination is approached in the home countries of these minorities. To address this gap in the literature, our article seeks to explain how Romanian parliamentarians address discrimination against coethnics abroad. We use inductive thematic analysis conducted on all of the parliamentary speeches about the discrimination of coethnics abroad in the Chamber of Deputies between 2008 and 2020. Our results indicate a relatively high degree of descriptive representation and an extensive concern about discrimination of coethnics abroad from parliamentarians across the political spectrum. The speeches about discrimination differ in content relative to the coethnic community of reference.

Among the numerous relations between the rulers of the Imperial Russia and the USSR on the one hand, and Georgia on the other, the question of national self-determination deserves a position of a paramount importance. An adequate treatment of this perplexing topic requires a broader theoretical framework dealing with nationalism in general and its historical significance in particular.

Since the end of World War II more than one million citizens of the USSR have emigrated to the West in a unique and unprecedented movement today called the “Third Soviet Emigration.” In contrast to two earlier flights of refugees from the Revolution and from World War II, the Third Emigration is a voluntary, legally-sanctioned process involving mainly three nationalities—Jews, ethnic Germans, and Armenians. The origin of the exodus goes back to the early postwar years, but the vast majority of the emigrants have left since 1971, when the Soviet government relaxed its historic antipathy to free movement by its citizens.

At the end of 1928 Matvyi Iavorskyi, head of historical studies in the Ukrainian Institute of Marxism-Leninism and hitherto considered a sort of court historian of Ukrainian communism, was attacked for allegedly committing “nationalistic deviations” in interpreting Ukrainian history. Iavorskyi was in no sense a “dissident” like Oleksander Shumskyi or Mykola Khvylovyi; he never, so far as is known, questioned the official Party line. Rather, he was a close associate of Mykola Skrypnyk, the political strongman of the Soviet Ukrainian regime, and the hue and cry raised against “Iavorskyism” in historial scholarship was actually an indirect attack upon Skrypnyk. It had the distinction of being the first such attack; it would not be the last.

Tackling the role of state symbols in negotiating national identity and political development, this research focuses on Belarus where the alternative white-red-white flag became instrumental in protests against the dominant political discourse. Since 1995, oppositional mass media have been reporting about cases of this tricolor being erected in hard-to-reach and/or politically sensitive places. These actions were mainly attributed to some “Miron,” whose identity remained concealed and served as a simulacrum of a national superhero in non-conformist discourse. The image of Miron immediately acquired multiple functions: condemning the Soviet colonial past, struggling for the European future, and creating a nation-state rather than the Russian-speaking civil-state of Belarus. Yet, first and foremost, Miron became a means for contesting the authority of the president who has been in power since 1994. Concentrating on the methods employed for the construction of the counter-hegemonic fakelore project of Miron and its aims, this article explores the vernacular response to its creation.

The association of nationalist consciousness and feminist ideology in Slovakia in the late nineteenth century was a protracted and uneven process. This conclusion rests upon the results of this study which examines the feminist and nationalist views of Slovak women intelligentsia who were at the forefront of Slovak nationalist efforts. It explores responses of leading Slovak women to the following issues of nationalist concern: traditional Slovak patriarchy, women's education, and Western feminism. It demonstrates that in Slovakia, gender was not the primary factor determining women's loyalties; there were other connecting allegiances and loyalties to the nation and the community. Slovak women developed their own unique concept of gender equality that aided Slovak nationalist efforts. In doing so they employed the language of motherhood, domestic duties, and religious commitment.

Around the turn of the century, a small group of Slovak women intelligentsia attempted to reconcile their own agenda with contemporary nationalist, social, and political currents. Spurred by nationalist efforts of the Slovak male intelligentsia, middle-class women tried to determine what type of new nationalist woman should replace the traditional woman. This question was answered by five women, in four very distinct ways: (1) Ľudmila Ríznerová-Podjavorinská portrayed the goals of Western feminism as a danger to Slovaks; (2) Elena Maróthy-Šolthésová and Terézia Medvecká Vansová encouraged the growth of Christian feminism; (3) Marína Ormisová-Maliaková favored the introduction of pragmatic feminism in Slovak nationalist efforts; and (4) Hana Lilge-Gregorová argued for the establishment of Western feminism as the basis of social and national development. Although the personal lives of these five women represent the social and national distress of the Slovak people, they also show women's fight for the acceptance of new ideas which would improve the fate of their sisters and their nation. Yet this small collection of feminist intellectuals could not and did not effect Slovak public opinion in any substantial way. Their influence, except perhaps that of Hana Lilge-Gregorová, did not stretch beyond the Slovak urban middle-class milieu.

War crimes and genocide are as old as history itself. So are regulations and laws that protect individuals during time of war, whether they be combatants or civilians. The Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu wrote in the fifth century BCE that it was important to treat “captured soldiers well in order to nurture them [for our use]. This is referred to as ‘conquering the enemy and growing stronger.'” Yet several centuries later, Qin Shi Huangdi, China's first emperor, committed horrible atrocities during his military campaigns to unite China. Eric Yong-Joon Lee adds that it should be remembered that the Qin emperor also created that country's “first managed international legal order.” But, according to Robert Cryer, it was the West, not Asia, that created the world's first “international criminal law regime.” This “regime,” R. P. Anand argues, was, in many ways, a form of “Victor's Justice“ or “ruler's law,” since it was forced on Asia and Africa by the West in the nineteenth century.

This article examines the divide between national and local collective memory in Poland and investigates the role of “memory activists” in mediating and exploiting this divide. It narrows its focus to the ethnic cleansing of Poles by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) from 1943 to 1944 and the forced relocation of Ukrainians in Poland, Operation Vistula, in 1947. It surveys local and national newspapers to understand competing interpretations and analyzes what incidents (e.g. protests, disputes, commemorations, reenactments, etc.) related to these events take place in local communities. It highlights the many actors, “memory activists,” and associations involved in pushing specific, often ahistorical, interpretations of these events – motivated by political gain, careerism, or personal conviction. It uses the theoretical works of Maurice Halbwachs and Karl Mannheim to effectively distinguish between local and national phenomenon and to elucidate the various nuances of collective memory.

This essay is an attempt to chart recent developments in the field of Modern Greek Studies, focusing on shifting perceptions regarding Islam and Muslims. To do so, the essay positions the relevant literature in its historical context, touching upon both accomplishments and limitations. Its main proposition is that the Greek case is distinct yet connected to contemporary global contingencies and broader long-term regional dynamics. Athens remains the only European capital without a mosque. Moreover, despite recent academic endeavors, there exists today no coherent Greek field of Islamic Studies. That these absences have been brought recently under political and academic scrutiny constitutes, however, a noteworthy change. Most important, the traditional exclusion of Islam from the field of Modern Greek Studies does not suggest lack of relevance between the two but, quite to the contrary, reveals a set of loaded and complex socieconomic, geopolitical, and historical links that deserve to be studied in their own right.