Among various features of Ukrainian society that the world has started paying more attention to since the beginning of Russia’s full-blown invasion in February 2022, many commentators have pointed to a surprisingly strong and encompassing national identity. However, scholars of Ukrainian language and identity matters had for years demonstrated an increased civic attachment of Ukrainian citizens, including Russian speakers, and its greater salience compared with ethnic, linguistic, and regional identifications. This article seeks to highlight the main accomplishments and challenges of research on Ukrainian ethnic and national identity. It focuses on a gradual shift from the essentialist understanding of ethnicity as embodied in bounded groups to the interest in individuals’ contextually determined identifications by categories with a changing meaning. Another prominent part of the analysis is the relationship between Ukrainian ethnic and national identity and the amalgamation of these two apparently distinct phenomena into what I propose to call ethnonational identity.

This article assesses the processes and trends of desecuritisation through the deradicalisation of identity politics within the higher education sector in Afghanistan. It examines the desecuritisation of radicalisation through efforts directed at deradicalisation in the context of a securitised conflict environment. The article draws on the data generated through interviews and discussions with actors engaged with higher education. Higher education, while manipulated by numerous actors for ideo-political purposes, can function as a ‘desecuritisation’ and ‘deradicalisation’ mechanism by supplementing the statebuilding efforts, and more subtly, by providing a venue for critical teaching and learning processes. This article highlights that while the sector is typically a very low reconstruction priority, if addressed strategically, it has the potential to contribute to the desecuritisation of ethnic politics through the deradicalisation of ethnic grievances and hence function as a catalyst for effective and sustainable postwar recovery.

Efforts to understand racial microaggressions have focused on the impact on targets, but few studies have examined the motivations and characteristics of offenders, and none has examined microaggressions committed by members of racialized groups. The purpose of this study is to determine if racial microaggressions should be conceptualized as a form of aggression when committed by racialized individuals by examining the relationship between propensity to commit microaggressions and aggressive tendencies to help inform interventions. This nationwide survey recruited 356 Asian, Black and Hispanic American adults. Participants completed measures of likelihood of committing anti-Black microaggressions, aggression, negative affect, and ethnic identity. There was a significant negative correlation between ratings by diversity experts of microaggressive interactions being racist and participants’ likelihood of engaging in those same interactions. For each ethnoracial group, likelihood of committing anti-Black microaggressions was significantly positively correlated with all measures of aggression examined. The correlation between microaggressions and aggression was strongest for non-White Hispanic participants and weakest among Asian participants. A linear regression showed that aggression uniquely predicted microaggression likelihood, after controlling for respective co-variates within groups. Among non-White Hispanic participants, there was a significant positive correlation between negative affect and propensity to commit microaggressions, but this association disappeared in the regression analysis after accounting for aggression. A positive ethnic identity was not correlated with microaggression likelihood among Black participants. Findings indicate that microaggressions represent aggression on the part of offenders and constitute a form of behaviour that is generally socially unacceptable. Implications and cognitive behavioural treatment approaches are discussed.

Whether or not nationalism fuels terrorist violence by ethnic groups is an important yet underexplored research question. This study offers a theoretical argument, empirical analysis and a case study. When political leaders such as presidents and prime ministers use nationalism to shore up legitimacy, they threaten the existence of disfavored ethnic groups. In turn, those groups are more likely to respond with terrorist attacks. The author tests this argument using a sample of 766 ethnic groups across 163 countries from 1970 to 2009. The multilevel mixed-effects negative binomial regression results provide evidence that leader nationalism is a significant driver of ethnic terrorism. The detrimental effect of nationalism remains the same after using a generalized method of moments method to account for possible reverse causality. A case study of Sinhalese nationalist leaders versus Tamil Tigers also supports the nationalism and terrorism nexus.

Korean shantytowns existed in every large Japanese city from the postwar years through the late 1960s. Japanese people recall them as secluded, dirty, impoverished, and dangerous. To many scholars, their existence confirms the transwar continuity of Japanese oppression of underclass ethnic minorities. But zainichi Koreans who grew up in such slums, which they called tongne, offer inspirational stories and fond memories of living there. This article sheds light on Koreans’ postwar experiences by discussing the important sociopolitical functions of the tongne and their continuing symbolism among the zainichi population. Viewing the tongne as zainichi's postliberation place of origin and paying attention to the reproduction of its meanings in hakkyo (schools) helps us understand the uneven terrain of power relationships in zainichi society, including why the Chongryun exercised great cultural power at least until the 1970s.

This article examines the early history and evolution of the concept of jiaohua (教化 “educational transformation”) as a reference to civilizing missions in China. It explores Ru (Confucian) concepts advocating the widespread education of the masses, showing how such concepts were linked to notions of ethnicity and moral attainment. Then it contextualizes the first uses of educational transformation in writings concerning statecraft. Xunzi emerges as a pivotal figure who helped adapt the statecraft rhetoric on educational transformation to the largely Ru goal of spreading a morally superior Huaxia culture among the masses and to peoples of other cultures. I then move beyond this conceptual history to examine a few civilizing missions in the Han era. My purpose is to link large-scale, civilizing missions in Chinese history with the early philosophical rhetoric and show how history was shaped by these underlying conceptual orientations.

Ethnoregionalist movements across Western Europe are gaining scholarly attention. Central European states usually have limited places in those studies. Still, in Polish Upper Silesia, ethnoregionalist movements have been present since 1989 and have stable support from the inhabitants of the region. Since at least 2002, ethnoregionalists have attempted to secure political representation among the Upper Silesians. Recently registered parties have used the ethnic identity of this minority group as the main tool to gain support in political elections in the region. This article applies social science and political science perspectives to the politicization of ethnicity. These equip the researcher to answer the question: How has Silesian ethnic identity become politicized? In responding, the researcher explores the consequences of the emergence of the ethnoregionalist movement in Upper Silesia.

This article analyzes how institutions influence the process of identity formation within the Polish minority communities in Belarus and Lithuania. We focus on ways that the identities of people who consider themselves Poles in Belarus and Lithuania are targeted by institutions like the state, schools, and nongovernmental organizations. We aim to shed light on how these processes are shaped by institutional settings and broader political contexts. The authors take a bottom-up approach to institutions and look at how members of the Polish communities in the two neighboring countries conceptualize the role of various institutions—NGOs, schools, Karta Polaka (the Polish Card)—to shape their sense of ethnic belonging. The article is built on a cross-case analysis. Data for the Lithuanian and Belarusian cases, consisting of interviews and secondary sources, were collected independently and then reread in light of a common research question. Through our analysis, we show differences and similarities in how analogous institutions function on the two sides of the border and elaborate on the reasons why these differences occur and what role state policy and supranational regulations play in the process.

Members of the Kerinci ethnic group area migrated to and settled in Malaysia centuries before the nation-state era arrived on the Malay Peninsula. Their migration continues in the present, and they face a range of problems, such as ongoing changes in the nation-state in the Malay Peninsula, migration policies, available types of occupations and aspects of their social-economic and cultural context. This paper focuses on the lives of members of ethnic groups from the regency of Kerinci, Sumatra, who have been living as migrants in Malaysia for more than three generations. It explores the ethnic identification of Kerinci migrants in Malaysia and investigates how they have preserved their legacy and protected the land that was inherited from their ancestors. This paper argues that the migration of some Kerinci to Malaysia entails a preservation of cultural differences and reunification of some families, as well as the continuation of certain family inheritances.

Corruption is widespread in many developing countries, though public officials’ discretion in the solicitation of bribes may expose some citizens to more corruption than others. We derive expectations about how shared ethnicity between government officials and citizens should influence the likelihood of bribe solicitation. We evaluate these expectations through a field experiment in which Malawian confederates seek electricity connections from real government offices – an interaction that is often accompanied by bribe solicitation. Our field experiment exogenously varied coethnicity between the official and the confederate. We find that coethnicity increases the likelihood of expediting an electricity connection, both with and without a bribe, which we interpret as evidence of parochial corruption.

Identity has been treated in relevant literature predominantly as a dynamic, fluid, multidimensional, and ongoing process. Currently, identity is viewed as a process, as something achieved, and as a product of social relations. Scholars have acknowledged that members of minorities and diasporas can have very complex multiple identities, which are both dependent on social context and changeable over time. This article explores the national and ethnic identifications of Slovaks living in Serbia. Its main objective is to examine how the members of the Slovak diaspora identify themselves and what kind of national and ethnic awareness and pride they hold. As well, this paper explores their opinions and attitudes on language and cultural identity. This study used a web-based survey and basic statistics. The results of the explorative study indicate that members of the Slovak diaspora living in Serbia have multiple identities that coexist, do not conflict, and vary in their importance for respondents. Distinct national and ethnic identifications are perceived in different ways and have divergent emotional intensities. This study proposes further research on the importance of civic and ethnic values and on different perceptions of identity, citizenship, length of residency, and minority rights for collective identifications of minorities and/or diasporas.

This paper presents one case study of state-sponsored cultural activities that occurred throughout 2014, Turkmenistan's Year of Magtymguly, the 290th anniversary of this Turkmen poet's birth. Such activities constitute examples of public culture; they can organize representations of a society's past and present to reaffirm for participants the values and power structure of their society and revalidate its philosophical underpinnings. After examining this Turkic poet's iconicity, this paper compiles 2014's celebratory events from disparate sources, complementing broader general literature on Central Asia's spectacles of public culture and their role in nation-building and identity-formation. Rather than merely resulting from any top-down decision specifying required activities nationwide, the year's events involved numerous synergies as artists, museum and theater administrators, composers, and other cultural-sector workers benefited by responding to the potential of aligning their work with a theme as broad, as widely appreciated, and as eligible for various forms of support as this one. In addition, Turkmenistan's strong central leadership benefited from this widely shared and highly visible celebration, especially emphasizing one element within Magtymguly's eighteenth-century vision, an end to his people's tribal conflicts within a unified Turkmenistan under one leader.

The paper examines how the tiny ethno-cultural group of Setos constructs its identity in the multicultural context. The study examines the validity of three acculturation models and tests earlier findings on the relationship between identity and well-being. The results suggest that Setos have clearly adopted a multicultural identity strategy while not merging different identities, and that they have managed to separate the material well-being from the pride of their identity. Despite its small size and peripheral location, the Setos' way to preserve their identity in a constantly changing context is an interesting lesson for other indigenous groups, and also for bigger neighbors.

The main research problem addressed in this article is the pattern of reacting to stigma based on ethnic origin expressed by the representatives of different generations of Belarusian and Ukrainian minorities in Poland living under different political and ideological conditions before and after 1989. This paper is based on a qualitative empirical study that comprised 22 in-depth biographical interviews with representatives of Belarusian and Ukrainian minorities, who varied in age. The research found that while the elderly see their minority identity in terms of danger or threat, the middle generation perceives it as an obstacle in fulfilling their life aspirations in a society fully dominated by the Polish majority. The youngest interviewees seem to be the most willing to perceive their minority characteristics positively in terms of uniqueness as well as particular competences, especially bilingualism, which may give them an advantage in the labor market.