Why did the nation-state emerge and proliferate across the globe? How is this process related to the wars fought in the modern era? Analyzing datasets that cover the entire world over long stretches ...of time, Andreas Wimmer focuses on changing configurations of power and legitimacy to answer these questions. The nationalist ideal of self-rule gradually diffused over the world and delegitimized empire after empire. Nationalists created nation-states wherever the power configuration favored them, often at the end of prolonged wars of secession. The elites of many of these new states were institutionally too weak for nation-building and favored their own ethnic communities. Ethnic rebels challenged such exclusionary power structures in violation of the principles of self-rule, and neighboring governments sometimes intervened into these struggles over the state. Waves of War demonstrates why nation-state formation and ethnic politics are crucial to understand the civil and international wars of the past 200 years.
From Kurdistan to Somaliland, Xinjiang to South Yemen, all secessionist movements hope to secure newly independent states of their own. Most will not prevail. The existing scholarly wisdom provides ...one explanation for success, based on authority and control within the nascent states. With the aid of an expansive new dataset and detailed case studies, this book provides an alternative account. It argues that the strongest members of the international community have a decisive influence over whether today's secessionists become countries tomorrow and that, most often, their support is conditioned on parochial political considerations.
Building Modern Turkeyoffers a critical account of how the built environment mediated Turkey's transition from a pluralistic (multiethnic and multireligious) empire into a modern, homogenized ...nation-state following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. Zeynep Kezer argues that the deliberate dismantling of ethnic and religious enclaves and the spatial practices that ensued were as integral to conjuring up a sense of national unity and facilitating the operations of a modern nation-state as were the creation of a new capital, Ankara, and other sites and services that embodied a new modern way of life. The book breaks new ground by examining both the creative and destructive forces at play in the making of modern Turkey and by addressing the overwhelming frictions during this profound transformation and their long-term consequences. By considering spatial transformations at different scales-from the experience of the individual self in space to that of international geopolitical disputes-Kezer also illuminates the concrete and performative dimensions of fortifying a political ideology, one that instills in the population a sense of membership in and allegiance to the nation above all competing loyalties and ensures its longevity.
In this article, several scholars of nationalism discuss the potential for the COVID‐19 pandemic to impact the development of nationalism and world politics. To structure the discussion, the ...contributors respond to three questions: (1) how should we understand the relationship between nationalism and COVID‐19; (2) will COVID‐19 fuel ethnic and nationalist conflict; and (3) will COVID‐19 reinforce or erode the nation‐state in the long run? The contributors formulated their responses to these questions near to the outset of the pandemic, amid intense uncertainty. This made it acutely difficult, if not impossible, to make predictions. Nevertheless, it was felt that a historically and theoretically informed discussion would shed light on the types of political processes that could be triggered by the COVID‐19 pandemic. In doing so, the aim is to help orient researchers and policy‐makers as they grapple with what has rapidly become the most urgent issue of our times.
Nation-states employ visa restrictions to manage the complex trade-off between facilitating the entrance to their territory by passport holders from certain countries for economic and political ...reasons and deterring individuals from other countries for reasons of perceived security and immigration control. The resulting system is one of highly unequal access to foreign spaces, reinforcing existing inequalities. Transnational mobility is encouraged for passport holders from privileged nations, particularly rich Western countries, at the expense of severe restrictions for others. Visa restrictions manifest states' unfaltering willingness to monitor, regulate and control entrance to their territory in a globalized world.
In the era of state socialism under Mao, land in China was treated as a means of production and was allocated administratively by the state free of charge. To accommodate the interests of foreign ...investors without violating the socialist principle of public ownership, the Chinese state has, since the 1980s, separated land use rights from land ownership and opened up a new market track for the conveyance of land use rights to commercial users. The result has been a distinct dual-track land system in the new political economy, characterized by significant asymmetry for arbitrage. Discrepancy between the state's intention and actual outcome has been a consequence of the internal diversity of power relations concerning land development. Our data analysis reveals that the loss of farmland to nonagricultural developments has slowed down in recent years, that the state's intention to increase land use efficiency has been severely compromised by the socialist legacy, and that illegal activities are pervasive. The Chinese socialist state is better seen as a dynamic, complex, heterogeneous, and self-conflictual institutional ensemble in and through which the forces and interests of different levels of the state are contested, negotiated, and mediated.
Recently, earth scientists have been discussing the idea of the ‘Anthropocene’ – a new geologic epoch defined by human geological agency. In its concern with the crossing of thresholds in Earth ...systems and the shift into whole new systemic states, the Anthropocene thesis might be viewed as the positing of a disaster to end all disasters. As well as looking at some of the motivations behind the Anthropocene concept, this article explores possible responses to the idea from critical social thought. It is suggested that the current problematization of planetary ‘boundary conditions’ might be taken as indicative of the emergence of a new kind of ‘geologic politics’ that is as concerned with the temporal dynamics and changes of state in Earth systems as it is with more conventional political issues revolving around territories and nation state boundaries: a geo-politics that also raises questions about practical experimentation with Earth processes.
Migration and integration research has been institutionalized over the last few decades. However, an increasing number of voices has been calling for more reflexivity, criticizing the nation-state- ...and ethnicity-centred epistemology that often informs this discipline. Consistently with this line of reasoning, I argue that migration and integration research originates in a historically institutionalized nation-state migration apparatus and is thus entangled with a particular normalization discourse. Therefore, this field of study contributes to reproducing the categories of this particular migration apparatus. This entanglement poses some serious dilemmas for this research tradition, dilemmas that ask for further consideration and possible solutions. My main proposition is to 'de-migranticize' migration and integration research. I outline possible ways of doing so and discuss the consequences of such a strategy for the future of migration and integration studies.
University curricula are overwhelmingly Eurocentric, providing a narrow framework of knowledge through which to view the world. Issues of race and racism when taught tend to be marginalised as ...something additional, extra, a disposable luxury. The key to transforming teaching is to embed race ethnicity in the core ideas, transforming some of the key concepts at the foundation of knowledge. The example that this paper will use is that of Blackness, the diasporic connection between those with roots on the African continent. Blackness remakes the way we understand the nation, troubling one of the most taken‐for‐granted notions in the academy. Through the lens of Blackness, the nation‐state becomes a social construction, largely used to mask Empire and as a tool to maintain an unjust social order. So Blackness is not an addendum, we cannot fully understand the concept of the nation‐state without engaging with the critique it presents. The challenge for the academy is not just to include concepts such as Blackness on the edges, but to accept that without engaging with them the core ideas of knowledge are incomplete.
Black Studies transforms the curriculum by changing key conceptual frameworks. This paper examines how the nation‐state and migration are redefined through a Black Studies lens.
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