“National group” is one of four victim groups that is explicitly protected by international criminal law from genocide. At the core of any genocide lies an element of identity. Yet, the fixed group categories that the law provides for seemingly do not conform to the fluidity of group identities. Is the law at all able to account for identity fault lines? By recourse to research on identity construction and otherness, this article argues that the interpretation of the law of genocide can benefit, structurally and legally, from insight into the forces at work before a genocide erupts. In recognizing the perpetrator’s definitional power over the victim group, the courts should increasingly focus their investigation into the mind of the génocidaires and their perception of the national victim group. In addition to discussing the dynamics of intergroup conflicts leading up to a genocide, this article also looks at the jurisprudence of criminal courts on the issues of nationality, national groups, and national identity for the crime of genocide.

Previous research has either equated religion- and language-based group identities or asserted that their social effects are the same. This article proposes a novel differentiation between religious and ethnic self-identification that accounts for in-group income inequality and the social role of the group. The study argues that ethnicity-based identities tend to be associated with economic activities, thereby increasing the demand for income equality within such groups. Religious identities, on the contrary, are centered around noneconomic activities and have the ideological framework for reconciling material inequalities. The observable implication of this distinction is that the high-, low-, and middle-income categories of the multicultural society will display differential association with ethnic and religious identities. Ethnic groups will have lower in-group income inequality as a result of the exclusion of the poor and the departure of the rich. Religious groups, on the contrary, will have higher in-group income inequality due to the capacity of religion to accommodate both poor and rich. Relevant empirical tests from the ethnically and religiously diverse Russian North Caucasus region indicate support for the proposed theory.

Yugoslavia’s military internationalism was one of the most practical expressions of the country’s policy of nonalignment. Beginning with Algeria in the 1950s until its demise in the 1990s, Yugoslavia was an ardent supporter of liberation movements and revolutionary governments in Africa and Asia. This article argues that Yugoslav military internationalism was at the heart of Yugoslavia’s efforts to reshape the post-1945 global order and represented an extension of Yugoslav revolution abroad. Military aid was an expression of personal identification of Yugoslavia’s “greatest generation” with decolonization struggle. However, Yugoslav military aid to other countries went beyond a single foreign policy issue. Yugoslav military internationalism touched upon many other issues that included problems related to finances, economic development, the acquisition and transfer of military technology, relations with the superpowers, national security, ideology and politics, and prestige and status in global affairs. By the end of the 1970s, with the departure of the World War II generation and the looming economic crisis, Yugoslav military involvement in the Global South became increasingly driven by economic reasons. Former Yugoslav republics, after a short hiatus in the 1990s during the wars for Yugoslavia’s succession, are still present in the arms trade in the Global South.

The article analyzes the approach of the Ukrainian state to criminal accountability for crimes associated with the ongoing Donbas conflict: crimes against state security, which led to the outbreak of the conflict, and crimes committed by persons directly engaged in the conflict. The main question addressed in the article is whether there is any trace of a deliberate policy of mitigating punishments to those who engaged themselves in different sorts of anti-government actions associated with the Donbas conflict, for the sake of achieving peace. The article contains a comparative analysis of relevant court decisions in order to identify the combinations of conditions that led to the issue of suspended prison sentences (less punitive judgements). The findings suggest that Ukrainian authorities have consistently punished their adversaries in accordance with existing regulations. During the first four years of the conflict, the authorities have not appeared to provide any sort of concessions to their adversaries that could be justified by the circumstances of an armed conflict, and have acted in a manner that can be called “legalist.”

This article investigates the role of 1918, the end of the First World War, and the establishment of the Yugoslav state in public memories of post-communist Croatia and Serbia. Analysing history schoolbooks within the context of major works of history and public discussion, the authors trace the developments of public memory of the end of the war and 1918. Drawing on the concepts of public memory and historical narrative, the authors focus on the ways in which history textbooks create historical narratives and on the types of lessons from the past that can be extracted from these narratives. While Serbia and Croatia have rather different patterns of First World War memory, the authors argue that both states have abandoned the Yugoslav communist narrative and now publicly commemorate 1918 as a loss of national statehood. This is somehow paradoxical, since the establishment of the South Slav State in 1918 was supposedly an outcome of the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination. In Serbia, the story of loss is packed in a fatalistic narrative of heroism and victimhood, while in Croatia the story of loss is embedded in a tale of necessary evils, which nevertheless had a positive outcome in a sovereign Croatian state.

This article traces debates and policies of the Russian imperial administrators toward the Korean population in the Far Eastern provinces of the Russian Empire. Koreans were initially treated as de facto members of the peasant estate, and in the 1890s many were granted the status of Russian subjects. Yet the rise of settler colonialism and a nationalizing empire from the 1880s, and especially after the Russian revolution of 1905, complicated the issue of Korean subjecthood and led to policies that excluded Koreans from the regulations normally applicable to peasants, such as the right to increased land allotments. At the same time, the neotraditionalist approach to the management of difference in the empire was still present in the 1910s, albeit never clearly articulated to compete with the nationalizing idiom.

The vast body of inquiry into nationalism has traditionally seen Europe as a main center for the emergence of nationalism, but scholars of “national indifference” have countered with the idea that nationalism may not matter much at all as a motive for most people. The concept of national indifference calls into question the power of nationalism as a motive for action and the mass appeal of nationalism. Studies of national indifference have constructed an alternative non-national narrative, but face particular challenges accounting for major themes and episodes of discrimination and violence. At its core, national indifference paradoxically both rejects and accepts binary notions of identity and incorporates binary assumptions about motives. It is tempting to resolve the contest between parallel accounts of pervasive, powerful nationalism and national indifference by choosing a victor, but this contrast between models shows the fluidity and dynamism of nationalism. The debate between the now classic accounts of nationalism and the alternative of national indifference points to the importance of often overlooked variables: frames and sense of time.

This article addresses women’s cross-border internationalist connections within the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), focusing on the exchanges between women’s organizations in socialist Yugoslavia and the Global South during the 1950s and 1960s, as well as during the UN Decade for Women (1975–1985). As a result of the Soviet-Yugoslav split, Yugoslavia was expelled from the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), the main organization federating antifascist, communist, and socialist women, in 1949. To overcome international isolation, Yugoslav representatives established their own bilateral connections with women’s organizations internationally, particularly in the Global South. Throughout the Cold War, the main figure behind women’s internationalism in Yugoslavia was Vida Tomšič (1913–1998), a former partisan and leading politician, trained as a lawyer, who had a fundamental role both in nonaligned and UN settings. In this article, I further analyze Vida Tomšič’s visits to India, and examine her correspondence with Indian scholar and Women’s Studies pioneer Vina Mazumdar (1927–2013). The exchanges between Vina and Vida, as they amicably addressed each other, exemplify the significance of the alliance between activists from socialist countries and activists from the Global South during the UN Decade for Women.

The region of Khevsureti in Georgia is the historic home of a group of Kartvelian highlanders known as Khevsurs. As Khevsureti’s popularity as a mountain tourist destination has grown, so too has the popularity of an old story that asserts the Khevsurs are the descendants of a lost band of Crusaders. For 200 years, this meme has manifested itself in books about the region, newspaper articles, the work of a few scholars, and now much Internet discussion. The growing collection of cases has created the illusion of an unconsolidated quantity of evidence and many commentators have since taken the story to be a credible theory or actual legend. A systematic deconstruction and analysis of this story shows how this set of details initially formed, grew, and spread based on a few unreliable accounts in circulation beginning in the early 19th century. This article offers a case study of how such memes form and propagate; it provides an additional example of a Western tendency to romanticize and project elements of their own ethnicities into the Caucasus; and it examines this false history in terms of cultural appropriation and the relationship between ethnicity and narrative, adding to the literature on invented histories and pseudoarchaeology. Finally, this careful deconstruction and repudiation will help remove this story from serious discussions of cultural heritage in Khevsureti and show how historical memes and popular examples of pseudoarcheology spread and capture imaginations.

Basic Law: Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People declares that Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people. It also includes several symbolic and operative provisions which are designed to strengthen the Jewish character of the state. The Basic Law purports to legally define and entrench the particular rather than universal values of Israel—the values that distinguish Israel from other nations rather than those that are shared by other nations. It anchors the Jewish identity of the state in its formal constitutional structure. My aim in this article is to present the history of the constitutional evolution of Israel and then to describe the conservative reactions to the constitutional liberalization of Israel. Then, I turn to examine the Basic Law, its provisions, and the arguments of advocates and opponents. Last, I evaluate its impact on the Israeli legal system. I shall argue that the Basic Law is part of a systematic attack on democratic liberties in Israel that may eventually transform Israel from a liberal democracy to an authoritarian democracy.

This article examines how self-managed faculties in socialist Yugoslavia adopted market mechanisms in the 1970s and 1980s to attract international students and thus contributed to a commercialization of higher education. In the 1950s, Yugoslavia became a destination for students from postcolonial states because of its nonaligned politics. While Yugoslav officials first emphasized aid to students through scholarships, this article argues that projects based on profit seeking began to dominate thinking about aid in the late 1960s. Using archival records in Croatia and Serbia as well as UNESCO and World Bank reports, this article shows how domestic and international factors influenced these changes. Domestically, decentralizing political reforms and decreased funding for higher education allowed republic policy makers to disconnect technical aid from political priorities and to pursue self-financing international students. Detached from centralized policy making, Yugoslav university and republic leaderships, primarily in SR Croatia and SR Serbia, chose the immediate profits of international students over long-term investments in scholarship students. Internationally, reforms promoted by UNESCO and the World Bank shifted aid away from university training abroad to vocational training in situ. These new policies complemented an emerging international division of labor suited more to the economic interests of OECD states and multinational corporations than developing states.

The collapse of the Soviet Union set Russia’s ruling elites the challenge of nation-building: while “Russians” had to be imagined as a political community on behalf of which the newly established Russian state was ruled, their national history needed to be narrated. Crucial for this enterprise was interpreting the Soviet past. Although the latter was used for political purposes by both Boris Yeltsin (who attempted to break with it) and Vladimir Putin (who established continuity with it), a politically usable interpretation of the Russian Revolutions was never found. Such is the consensus that emerged in 2017. Challenging this consensus, I argue that a specific interpretation of the Revolutions—nested within a narrative that covers Russia’s history from Kievan Rus to the contemporary Russian Federation—has been developed in Russia. Turning Russia’s politically problematic past into a politically usable one, this interpretation is (re)produced through the project Russia—My History. As Russia—My History (initially developed within the Russian Orthodox Church) is becoming a part of state-sponsored efforts to forge an “official” vision of Russian history, the interpretation of the Revolutions (re)produced through it is growing in influence in present-day Russia.

This article examines the social and political effects produced by the most recent wave of emigration in postwar Bosnia, widely understood to be the result of continued political instability and economic decline that followed the 1992–95 war. Drawing on ethnographic research in a deindustrialized Bosnian town and analysis of popular discourses seeking to make sense of this new wave of departures, I show how the phenomenon of postwar exit impacts those staying behind and inspires new forms of reflection that link past histories of violence to more recent forms of dispossession. The emergence of such forms of historical consciousness reveals that postwar migration is haunted both by the memory of wartime expulsions and ethnic cleansing, as well as by the often-unacknowledged violence of postwar economic restructuring glossed as the postsocialist transition. In asking what happens to nationalist regimes, as well as scholarship on nationalist politics, when the “people” leave, I demonstrate the need to analyze the ongoing out-migration both in terms of Bosnia’s historical specificity and global political-economic dynamics. In so doing, I show how absences created by these departures create new vantage points that bring to light and expose unsettling political configurations left behind by the Bosnian war.

This article analyses a popular survey on national identity in Poland. However, the analysis of the survey is a pretext to remind one of the limitations of crude quantitative methods and to look at the Polish national identity itself. The article shows that the survey questions are far from unambiguous, and respondents might attribute different meanings to them. The survey does not “measure” national identity existing in the world, rather it serves to maintain the hegemonic concept of Polishness. It diminishes the significance of Catholicism and the perceived biological dimension of Polishness. It ignores public sentiment linking Whiteness and Polishness, contributing to maintaining the dominant image of Polishness as free of racism. Under the guise of objective research, the survey is one of the elements sustaining the image of a relatively open and inclusive Polishness. Referring to my own qualitative research and recent literature on the topic, I argue that Polish identity must be seen in terms of selective racism without racism—that is, it is an identity based on racial premises but which at the same time neglects its racial character.

Irish Travellers are a traditionally nomadic ethnic minority indigenous to Ireland. Although recognized as an ethnic minority in adjacent jurisdictions, the Irish state persistently and explicitly denied recognizing Travellers’ separate ethnicity and pursued assimilationist policies designed to eradicate Travellers’ differences. However, in the late 1980s and 1990s, the state recognized the structural disadvantage and social stigma to which Travellers are subjected, naming them as a protected group in equality legislation, as well as laws addressing incitement to hatred. Through these interventions, the state afforded Travellers rights on the basis of their collective identity as Travellers, while continuing to deny their ethnicity. After sustained campaigning, Traveller ethnicity was recognized by the prime minister of Ireland in 2017. This article explores the reasoning behind, and legal significance of, that statement of recognition in Ireland.1 We outline the evidence in support of ethnic recognition as a prelude to addressing the question of whether recognition is likely to afford the community any additional rights. We conclude that this is unlikely given the protections afforded to the group prior to ethnic recognition, though we argue that recognition may give the community a firmer basis for arguing for the activation of these preexisting rights.

This article explores the context of the first parliamentary elections in independent Poland in January 1919, focusing on the National Democratic Party’s (ND) election campaign addressed to Polish women and how anti-Jewish slogans were used to mobilize the participation of the female electorate. Before the First World War, ND, led by Roman Dmowski, was the most fervent opponent of women’s enfranchisement (Gawin 2015); yet, after the introduction of suffrage, and one month before the elections, the party created the National Women’s Organization (NOK), affiliated with ND, tasked with running an election campaign aimed at ethnically Polish women. The article demonstrates that ND instrumentalized female voters and their newly obtained right to win the elections and gain advantage over its largest rival, the Polish Socialist Party (PPS, Polska Partia Socjalistyczna). It argues that members of NOK, who used antisemitic, ultra-nationalistic, and Catholic propaganda in the election campaign, became one of the major advocates of the party’s ethno-nationalist vision of Poland; consequently, they significantly contributed to the worsening of Polish-Jewish relations in the interwar period. The article also looks at the critique of the extreme nationalism and antisemitism within ND and NOK by individual female activists and groups not affiliated with Dmowski’s party.

Following the October Revolution, tens of thousands of White Russians sought refuge in China and became inevitably involved in the escalating Sino-Japanese War (1931–1945). The Japanese deployed measures of coercion, material incentives, and ideological indoctrination to recruit White Russians for Japan’s military and political maneuvers in the China theater of WWII. With the conclusion of the war, the Chinese Nationalist government launched a legal campaign against all collaborators with Japan and labeled them hanjian, “traitors to the Han Chinese,” regardless of the race and nationality of the defendants. Based on archival materials in Chinese, English, Japanese, and Russian, this article examines the context and process of the incrimination of White Russians in China’s postwar trials of traitors. With no consular support and little diplomatic significance, the White Russians became the ideal foreigners for the Chinese government to exercise its newly recovered judicial sovereignty and to claim its legitimacy in administering justice related to war crimes. Dozens of White Russians were convicted of the crime of hanjian and sentenced to prison terms of varied lengths.

The article explores the idea of Ukraine in the imagination of the Little Russian politicians during the revolutionary period of 1917–1919. It chiefly focuses on figures of the Little Russian movement, such as Vasiliy Shulgin (1878–1976), Anatoliy Savenko (1874–1922), Andrey Storozhenko (1857–1926), Aleksandr Bilimovich (1876–1963), and others. This article explores the ideas of the Little Russians regarding the term Ukraine and their views concerning the Ukrainian people and its ethnographic and historical boundaries. It argues that Ukraine and Ukrainians were perceived as a Little Russia, Southern Russia, Southern Rus’, and Little Russians accordingly. By their assessment, Ukraine had not included the Taurida (the New Russia region) and the Crimea, but had included Eastern Galicia and Volhynia.

This article maps out a network of cinematic collaboration established between Yugoslavia and the non-aligned countries in Africa, primarily via the institution of the Yugoslav Newsreels (Filmske novosti). Yugoslav newsreel activities developed to accompany the performative diplomacy of President Tito’s “Voyages of Peace,” playing a role both in cementing his image internationally and his political status at home. By the late 1950s, cinema would become one of the central instruments of Yugoslav information activities abroad, capitalizing on an expanding diplomatic network. In this context, Filmske novosti became the bearers of Yugoslav technical aid in the domain of cinema. Building on a trope of shared revolutionary struggles, they boosted Yugoslavia’s international reputation through the filming of the Algerian Liberation Movement. The unique nature of the cinematic aid provided by Filmske novosti to liberation movements such as the ALN and FRELIMO was continued, with assistance in setting up of national film centers in countries such as Mali and Tanzania. Throughout, Yugoslavia maintained a praxis of non-conditional and non-credited transnational ciné-kinship, which is one of the reasons this remains an unknown chapter in the history of Third Cinema and militant ciné-geographies.

What role do nationally celebrated holidays play for groups that are not considered—or do not consider themselves—to be part of the majority nation of a state? What function do holidays specific to minority group cultures serve under regimes that discriminate against those groups? This article explores holidays as a forum for contestation for the national identity proposals promulgated by the state in repressive regimes. We argue that national holidays are meaningful sites of identity contestation for four reasons: the role of holidays in heightening identity salience, the malleability of identity narratives, the relative lack of institutional barriers to acts of celebration, and the significance of refusing to participate in celebrations. We collected the data through interviews and participant observation of the Hui in China and the Kurds in Turkey. We employ ethnographic observation and intertextual analysis to compare these identity narratives. We find that the Hui legitimize their group’s existence by co-opting the traditional Spring Festival, or by outwardly insisting they are not celebrating while still engaging in festivities. In contrast, Turkey’s Kurds resist the government’s co-optation of the spring celebration of Newroz as a Turkish national holiday.