How do autocracies use nationalism to normalize and contain unsettled times? The full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 marked a decisive point in Russia’s politics from which there could be no return to an antebellum normality. Rather than attempt to mobilize the Russian public to war, state-run television sought to normalize the war as a banal reality for domestic audiences. Drawing on a content analysis of 1,575 reports from the state-run First Channel [Pervyi Kanal] from 2022 to 2024, this article argues that the Ukrainian regions occupied by Russia — the so-called “new regions” — are crucial to this strategy through their incorporation into banal nationalist depictions of Russia. In turn, televised depictions of residents in the “new regions” confer emotional weight and moral examples for ordinary Russians through their everyday practices: their fortitude in voting for Putin despite ongoing attacks; through their shared excitement in acquiring routine aspects of daily life from passports to pensions; and through their embodiment of Russia’s future. In the process, media depictions normalize imperial nationalist justifications for Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territory in terms of the distinctiveness of the Russian people, Russia’s civilizing mission, and presentation of its war as defensive.

This article examines recent developments in three key areas of nationalism research that integrate emotions into theoretical frameworks and empirical analysis. First, it explores studies that revisit historical nation-building through the lens of the history of emotions. Second, it discusses how the “affective nationalism” literature has shifted the focus of banal nationhood reproduction from mental representations to emotions. Third, it reviews efforts to theorize the emergence of intense national emotions in certain periods and their role in political mobilization and change. The article highlights critical advancements across these areas, particularly in linking emotions to meaning through narratives, expanding research from national centers to the frontiers, and challenging the illusion of national harmony by emphasizing power dynamics and dialectical change. The conclusion suggests future research directions, including investigations of national emotions within diasporic communities and digital networks.

In 1884, Janez Trdina — a retired history teacher, a reasonably popular writer, and a Slovene nationalist activist — published a series of ethnographic reports about the peasant inhabitants of Lower Carniola. In one, he pointed out to the educated readers of the magazine Slovan (The Slav) that the Lower Carniolans were still not very familiar “with their own national name.” Apparently, they still often referred to all Slavs as Slovenci, even though the Slovene language already had a new word, Slovani, for the people belonging to this language group. The word Slovenci was now only supposed to refer to the members of the Slovene nation, a much smaller entity. The Lower Carniolan peasants — Trdina also reported — were somewhat familiar with the modern meaning of the word, but they did not think it applied to them. Namely, peasants also used the word Slovenci as a label for the bourgeois supporters of the so-called national party; that is, Slovene nationalists. To them, the Slovenes — Trdina explained — were “some kind of special caste” that spoke Slovene and sang Slovene songs. Their own language, the peasants had assured Trdina, was not Slovene, but rather Carniolan and so were their songs (Trdina 1884, 118).

This article analyzes four war-themed exhibitions in Ukraine’s two leading national museums and studies their role in documenting, interpreting, and exhibiting the Russo-Ukrainian war. This research intends to prove that since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, museums have been conceptualizing the war through narratives of suffering and sacrifice, grounding tangible historical authenticity through the display of items such as war trophies and personal belongings. The narrative of suffering tends to be based on the opposition of “we” and “they,” where “we” focuses on civilian torment and resurrection as the main metaphor of physical and spiritual survival, and “they” are predominantly depicted as the military enemy, creating strong anti-Russian and anti-Soviet tendencies. The martyrdom narrative of sacrifice focuses on Ukraine’s (fallen) defenders, whose image is created by deep personalization, nationalization, and heroization. This article argues that musealization of the Russo-Ukrainian war exemplifies and represents “warring memory,” which is predetermined and justified by active engagement in an ongoing war while performing the functions of testimony, resilience, and mourning.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has deeply transformed both the victim and the aggressor states and upended the international order with a return to wars of conquest. This special issue of Nationalities Papers features original research that offers new perspectives on how Russia’s war against Ukraine has reshaped political, cultural, and societal structures at multiple levels. The collected studies provide diverse findings and analytical lenses through which to understand how states, institutions, and communities interpret, respond to, and are transformed by the experience of war. This introduction provides an overview of the studies in this special issue, organized into four thematic areas.

This article focuses on perceptions and attitudes of ethnic minorities toward nation-building processes in Kazakhstan. It provides important insights on how ethnic minorities position and perceive themselves after more than thirty years of nation-building. The article draws on a survey (N=4,000) and semi-structured interviews conducted in 17 regions of Kazakhstan. It concludes that despite some variations in perceptions toward civic and ethnic identities, in general, ethnic minorities positively evaluate the nation-building processes in Kazakhstan. The evidence suggests that ethnic identity continues to play an important role in self-identification of ethnic minorities, while civic identity is important to a limited degree. The study also shows that there is variation across different ethnicities in terms of salience of ethnic and civic identities.

The article seeks to fill a gap in existing scholarship on explicit and implicit linguistic, ethnic, and national classifications in Habsburg schools and their effects. It attempts to reconstruct the classifications that appeared in textbooks and other teaching materials as well as in daily practice, pupils’ exposure to them, and their engagement with these categories. Temporally, the study begins with the establishment of compulsory education (1774) and ends in the revolutionary period of 1848–49 and focuses on the Slavophone population of the Habsburg crownlands Carniola, Carinthia, Styria, and the Austrian Littoral. Our research suggests that systematic and uniform classification schemes were not yet in place in the school environment in the period under review. As a result, the influence of classificatory systems on identifications was limited. If anything, the schools inadvertently reproduced existing local and provincial identifications while the students’ limited internalization of emerging transregional identifications only happened through their personal relationships with a few teachers and peers. The transition from familiarization with emerging transregional ethnolinguistic identifications through personal networks to the systemic (and often completely unintentional) reproduction of nationalist ideology happened only after 1848.

Anthony D. Smith, in one of his earlier, less debated, works – Nationalism in the 20th Century (1979) – examines phases of nationalism in the modern era, suggesting that nationalism has taken various forms before and during the 20th century. He argues that nationalism’s adaptability is at the core of its persistence, adapting to changing situations such as fascism and communism. As a result of this adaptability, nationalism still flourishes today. This article applies Smith’s theory to explore the interplay between cultural and material factors in the evolution of nationalism in Ireland. It identifies five ideological phases – revolutionary nationalist, protectionist, liberalising, neoliberal, and ecological – to which nationalism has adapted, and within which nationalism has influenced various aspects of Irish society. These phases are situated within a broader ideological and material context, analysing obliquely the Irish language (a core element of Irish nationalism), and related to changing processes of individualization.

Critical approaches to research on war-affected societies emphasize the necessity for a more empirically grounded approach to the production of knowledge. Presently, research on war-affected societies is undergoing a shift toward localization with a call for more “voices” with local knowledge and expertise. This research is an attempt to analyze the challenges of reliable knowledge production in war-affected societies and their circulation in academia, the policy-making community, and feeding media discourse. The research focuses on the Russian war against Ukraine since 2014 as a prism through which to examine the main challenges for localized knowledge production. We consider several aspects of knowledge production including the problems and issues of framing and wording that define the character of the conflict, challenges of research design and data collection, researchers’ positioning dilemmas, participants’ responses, differences between policy and academic research, and the role of the media. The purpose of this study is to engage with and attempts to advance the literature on knowledge localization. We argue that a move toward the localization of fieldwork requires a more sensitive and transdisciplinary approach to knowledge production. Based on our own experience of fieldwork during wartime, we point out possible ethical and methodological challenges and offer workable responses to them.

Russian nation-building policy has often been described as ambiguous, blending a rhetorical commitment to the state’s multinational character together with more exclusionary rhetoric and policies. Drawing from original survey questions on national identity commissioned in December 2022, I find that Russian citizens continue to endorse a multinational vision of the Russian state during wartime. Respondents are simultaneously likely to exclude minorities from being fully considered as “true Rossians” [istinnye rossiiane], while socioeconomic and political factors are meaningfully associated with these patterns. In line with previous scholarship, these findings underscore the blurriness of the russkii/rossiiskii distinction in practice: just as russkii should not always be interpreted as an exclusively ethnic term, rossiiskii should not be seen as a non-ethnic category, either. The findings in the Russian case carry implications for understanding how nation-builders in multiethnic contexts may seek to cater to ethnic majorities while simultaneously signaling commitments to ethnic diversity.

This article aims to analyse the historical, political, and socio-cultural significance of the Alash Orda movement in shaping Kazakh national identity and the quest for autonomy during the early 20th century. The research draws on a range of primary sources, including archival documents and speeches, as well as scholarly works by Kazakh and international historians. It analyses how Alash leaders developed a multifaceted political strategy to secure autonomy amidst the chaotic transition from imperial rule to revolutionary governance. Central to their approach was diplomacy: the Alash Orda government sought to establish ties with the Russian Provisional Government and A. Kolchak’s White Army, aiming to build alliances supportive of Kazakh autonomy. The movement also reached out to international organisations, seeking external recognition and assistance. Despite these efforts, the study demonstrates that Alash Orda ultimately failed to achieve lasting success in establishing a stable autonomous Kazakh state. Alongside this political narrative, the study highlights the cultural and educational initiatives of Alash Orda, particularly its promotion of the Kazakh language and national identity in the face of Russification policies.

The article explores the interplay between imperialism and ethnonationalism, revealing how these seemingly conflicting ideologies coalesced in Russian political thought. The period of 1989–1994 saw a struggle between civic nationalism, which sought to redefine Russia within its existing borders, and imperialist-nationalist currents that viewed Soviet disintegration as a geopolitical catastrophe. Within this ideological conflict, the “time bomb” metaphor emerged as a potent rhetorical device, encapsulating anxieties about territorial fragmentation and national decline. The study identifies Russian émigré intellectual Gleb Rahr as a key figure in introducing the metaphor, later popularized by figures such as Dmitry Rogozin and Vladimir Putin.

This article examines Putin’s expectations prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and seeks to answer the following question: Why did Russia invade Ukraine regardless of the West’s threats of severe economic penalties raising the cost of an attack? I argue that the confidence in Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, despite his awareness that the stakes could go well beyond the borders of Ukraine and increase the cost of war for the Kremlin, was based on Putin’s calculations that the West would be reluctant to change or substantially displace established rich-get-richer economic structures and would not apply high costs on the Kremlin for military aggression against Ukraine in case of a successful blitzkrieg campaign. By utilizing an extended deterrence game analysis, the article demonstrates how Russia, Ukraine, and the West interacted in decision-making, taking into account the reactions and choices of the other players, and adds to the current body of knowledge by introducing an expanded approach to deterrence strategy based on economic interdependence and the scale of the anticipated conflict.

This article explores the relationship between ethnic diversity and intermarriage in Vojvodina, Serbia, a highly diverse region with a history of shifting political landscapes. Unlike many studies focusing on migration, this research examines autochthonous settings from a quantitative perspective, offering insights into how diversity and intermarriage intersect locally. Findings indicate that greater ethnic diversity is generally associated with higher interethnic marriage rates within sub-regions. However, these rates have not always paralleled changes in diversity, especially during disruptions like the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. The study reveals that declining diversity tends to reduce intermarriage by creating more homogeneous marriage markets, while intermarriages may also―albeit intermittently, under specific political circumstances, and indirectly―influence diversity trends. Results highlight small social distances and permeable ethnic boundaries among Vojvodina’s ethnic groups, though significant ethnic asymmetries remain. This study contributes to understanding the dynamics of diversity and interethnic relations, specifically through marriage, within national minority contexts.

We outline a framework for comparative analyses of minority education and present four illustrative Central and Eastern European (CEE) cases: Bulgaria, Estonia, the Republic of North Macedonia and Romania. The fourfold typology we develop relies on literature on minority rights and diversity management and proposes a holistic approach, differing from narrower legal analysis. We investigate education as part of larger macro-approaches of minority policies and focus on the interrelation between educational equity and identity reproduction. In our case studies, we employ a diachronic perspective, focusing on historical dynamics and pathways of educational policies, aiming to identify both gradual change and more radical shifts in institutional processes. The concept of de facto discrimination plays an important role as well: next to the historical analysis of legislative and policy changes, we use various statistics to measure educational equity. We rely on the 2022 PISA results, a tool popular in the comparative research of educational systems but underutilized in the fields of minority rights and minority policies. In our comparative inquiry, we argue that the educational systems of CEEs diverge in terms of minority identity reproduction, but few of them can be labelled as integrative, as intercultural elements are rather weak, while education usually fails to provide equity for minority students.

This article investigates the transformation of the official historical narrative of the Golden Horde in Kazakhstan, tracing a significant shift from Nazarbayev to Tokayev’s presidencies. The narrative of the Golden Horde became a strategic component of the second president, Tokayev, who announced the commemoration of 750 years of the Horde foundation in Kazakhstan and proclaimed that it laid the foundations for Kazakh statehood. The research explores the abrupt transformation of the official historical narrative and underscores the pivotal role of historians as memory actors. The study investigates the “memory game” between two schools of historians in independent Kazakhstan, revealing the agency of a new generation of historians in reshaping the national historical narrative through historicizing strategies, thus engaging in memory politics. This contribution extends the literature on the mnemonic context in Kazakhstan and non-state memory actors in authoritarian settings, shedding light on the dynamics of historical representation and memory politics in evolving mnemonic landscapes.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, Austrian schools effectively developed a robust system of civic education that attempted to cultivate the patriotism of all students, regardless of their nationality. While the ultimate goal of Habsburg civic education was loyalty to the imperial state, officials realized that this loyalty would not be able to supplant regional or national identities. Instead, officials designed a curriculum that would enhance these other identities hoping they would contribute to imperial patriotism. Students learned they shared their home with different national groups and that they belonged to a larger family of nations. While this concept was earnestly supported by the school curriculum, the way in which this material was taught may have impacted its effectiveness. For example, when discussing national groups, educators often drew from prevailing ethnographic theories that relied on stereotypical assessments. Moreover, compromises made in the early 20th century complicated these efforts. As nationalists gained increased control over school administration, the emphasis on shared local identity weakened. These factors did not necessarily alter Austrian civic education, but they do point to the ways in which it would have needed to adapt to the Monarchy’s changing political circumstances.

When a country sees multiple mass mobilisations over time, what accounts for variation in where protest occurs across the different protest waves? This article examines the case of mass protests in Ukraine 1990-2004, exploring how the emergence and development of activist networks aligns with changes in the geospatial dispersion of protest over time. It draws on archives and interviews with activists made available by The Three Revolutions Project, and newspaper reports from Ukrainska Pravda, Korrespondent.net and Radio Svoboda, utilising protest event analysis, along with QGIS software to visually represent findings. The article presents novel empirical findings on the geospatial scope of protest events across Ukraine from 1990 onwards, and demonstrates some of the ways in which regional activist networks expanded, developed, and sought cross-cleavage collaboration, aiming to facilitate increasing nationwide mobilisation. It provides valuable context for understanding subsequent Ukrainian mobilisation, such as the 2013-14 Euromaidan protest, and ongoing resistance to Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Drawing from the experiences of thirty-two refugee women who fled with their children from Ukraine to two German cities, Berlin and Frankfurt Oder, this article explores how being a refugee and a mother affects the anchoring, along with the un-anchoring and embedding of Ukrainian refugees in their new environment. It illustrates that solidarity practices and (inter)actions play a crucial role in mobility considerations, as the interlocutors engaging in solidarity work find meaning in building lives in their new environment. The identities of the interlocutors as refugees and mothers play an important role in shaping the solidarity they articulate as they work to support others in a similar situation in cultivating agency, which, at the same time, gives the interlocutors comfort in their own struggles. This article also makes a valuable contribution to the scholarly literature on transnational family ties through the case of Ukrainian refugee women in Germany, who often have family members remaining in/returning to Ukraine. The interlocutors positioning as mothers and refugees means that they engage in negotiating mobility considerations with these positions in hindsight — providing new avenues of enquiry into the agency of refugee-mothers, reflecting on life aspirations, and considering their specific positionalities and forced migration context.