By assembling more than fifty hours of interviews with eleven former Uyghur students and teachers, alongside an array of published and unpublished textual documents, this article offers the most complete history of the Uyghur student movements of the 1980s—in the face of considerable neglect and confusion. It argues, first, that the university functioned as a social, intellectual, and political space that allowed Uyghurs to develop their ethno-national identity, build shared grievances, and mobilize politically. Second, it argues that the December 1985 Uyghur student movement was a foundational turning point in the erosion of Hu Yaobang's accommodationist ethnicity policies of the early 1980s, changing how the Party-state diagnosed the reasons for Xinjiang's instability and delimited Uyghur political participation in the People's Republic of China. This article further unsettles later attempts by Chinese scholars to retroactively characterize the student movement as essentially separatist and the work of behind-the-scenes plotters.

Bosnia Herzegovina is a consociational democracy grounded on three ethnic constituencies. The postwar implementation of power-sharing mechanisms ended to favor ethnocracy and ethnopolitics, eventually compromising an inclusive democracy untied from ethnonational issues. This contribution explores the positive potential held by political parties and ordinary citizens “nonaligned” with the ethnopolitical scaffolding—therefore and consequently not explicitly included in the power-sharing system—because they hold and promote “alternative,” civic, and nonethnic forms of identification. Drawing upon interviews performed in Sarajevo, this article argues that citizens’ political disappointment and dissatisfaction are among the reasons contributing to the existence of a small, yet potentially critical, mass of citizens able to help adjusting an ethnically exclusive model of democracy.

This article provides a normative analysis of the rationale behind the creation of the Chinese unitary multinational state. Far from being irrelevant in the face of the well-known aversion of scientific socialism for normative thinking, such analysis illuminates the Chinese Communist Party’s long-standing commitment to the unitary multinational state as the best response to the national question. It shows that the Party’s leadership, in a conscious effort to adapt Stalin’s theory of nationality to Chinese revolutionary praxis, substantially revised the standard conception of national self-determination. Relying on its own materialist logic, it made participation in the struggle against alienation the normative basis to justify granting ethnic minorities special rights of regional autonomy under a common state. The creation of the Chinese unitary multinational state appears in this light as a normatively coherent attempt to guarantee that all ethnic groups that contributed to national liberation benefit equally from their imprescriptible right to collective self-determination.