Festive culture is often analysed as a manifestation of spontaneity, creativity, popular culture, and humour, as well as an opportunity to express territorial identity. However, these rituals and their artistic expressions can also manifest hateful and contemptuous discourses toward national and cultural minorities, as observed in some European carnival celebrations. In the case of Valencia, from the Francoist dictatorship onwards, the festive culture was controlled by a political and social elite right and extreme right group, which instrumentalised the celebration as a political tool. Thus, these phenomena can be observed with the proliferation of hate speech against social and political minorities as Catalan and Valencian nationalists, depicting them as animals, traitors and enemies of Valencian and Spanish identity and exposing them in public space to shame them. This phenomenon was radicalised at the end of 2015 with the mobilisation of the Spanish right and far right to counter the left and nationalist government of the city, despite the Fallas’ adherence to UNESCO principles to promote understanding and dialogue between cultures and nationalities.

This article takes xenophobia in right-wing ecological conservation in contemporary Germany as its research object, first examining its manifestation in the history of right-wing ecotourism. Then, using species and animal protection as examples, it specifically analyzes the ways, argumentative characteristics, and underlying motives of the NPD, the AfD, and the Third Way in combining ecological topics with xenophobia. This article emphasizes the continuity and importance of xenophobia in the history of right-wing ecological conservation in Germany and its new characteristics in contemporary times. My conclusion is that xenophobia has always been an important objective of right-wing ecological conservation, and contemporary German right-wing ecological conservation has both maintained historical traditions and undergone contemporary updates. In right-wing ecological conservation in contemporary Germany, far-right parties and organizations use both traditional biologism and more covert cultural racism to incite xenophobia. However, whether advocating the superiority of “species (race)” or “culture,” the underlying ideology is one of inequality. Similar to the argumentation methods in the history of right-wing ecological conservation, species conservation and animal protection in right-wing ecological conservation in contemporary Germany ultimately equate to homeland protection. Therefore, species conservation and animal protection are merely tools for far-right parties and organizations to build their image, disguise xenophobic ideas, and greenwash their agenda. This article contributes to research on immigration and the far right in contemporary Germany.

The study explores the engagement of Russophone Ukrainians with educational policies that increase the status of the Ukrainian language, the standardized tests of Ukrainian, and the subject tests that could be passed in Ukrainian. It argues that this centralized unitary language policy has received support from Russophones. It does so by analyzing the language choices of Russophone students when taking standardized tests in various subjects, as well as admission policies and discussions of relevant policies in local media and social media of the Russophone city of Kharkiv. It shows that following the introduction of standardized tests, the value of Ukrainian has increased across various actors: students have been choosing Ukrainian more, universities have valued Ukrainian in the admission process, and local citizens have defended the status of Ukrainian, relying on decolonial rhetoric. It shows that the decolonial framing of the Ukrainization policies resonated with Russophones enough for them to support them, and not to result in a backlash.

This article examines how issues related to World War I were remembered and represented during the Single Party Era of the Turkish Republic (1923–1945), focusing on the political elite’s narrative strategies. The study situates the persistence of a positive perception of Unionism in contemporary Turkey within the historical remembrance shaped by the early Republic’s identity politics. Drawing on newspaper analyses from the 1930s and 1940s, the article reveals how narratives surrounding prominent Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) figures — such as Talat, Enver, and Cemal — evolved. Initially, the Kemalist regime distanced itself from the CUP by framing World War I (also referred to “the War” in this article) as the product of a few Unionist leaders’ recklessness while celebrating the War of Independence as the foundation of a new, victorious Turkish identity. However, by the 1930s, publications began to reinterpret and partially rehabilitate the CUP leaders’ reputations, emphasizing their dedication to state interests and leadership qualities.

Since 2019, Ethiopia has embarked on a new “national project of peace and unity”. The government’s official discourse has been characterised by an uptake in the use of Pan-African and Pan-Ethiopian rhetoric. Strategically invoking visions of a united Africa and shared continental prosperity, the Abiy administration seeks to enhance its international reputation and rally African support for its domestic agenda. To overcome the pervasive ethnofractionalist tendencies in Ethiopia’s political landscape and consolidate the Ethiopian state within its present boundaries, the current government is selectively borrowing political strategies from previous administrations. This has produced a unique, new form of Pan-Ethiopian governance ideals. So far, the repercussions of this government discourse on political tensions in Ethiopia and the Ethiopian diaspora has received no scholarly attention. This academic article analyses the implications of the current Ethiopian government’s deployment of Pan-Africanist and Pan-Ethiopianist rhetoric on Ethiopia’s current political crises. This article argues that these Pan-Africanist and Pan-Ethiopianist rhetoric and ideals are paradoxically perpetuating divisive identity politics in Ethiopia’s domestic and diasporic political realm. This, in turn, exacerbates the most serious threat to Ethiopia’s national unity.

By examining various literary and visual representations of rivers, this article addresses meaning-making processes related to memory, identity, and belonging in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. Focusing on representations of the border rivers – the Drina, the Sava, and the Una – this article explores how postwar social transformations, including coming to terms with war-time loss, displacement, and destabilized meanings of homeland, are understood when the narrative focus shifts from landscapes to riverscapes. Concurrently, this article also contributes to scholarly discussions on representations of posttraumatic landscapes by redirecting attention from wounded landscapes, where the impact of violent human interventions is evident, to wounded waterscapes, which elude such identification. Generally, rivers symbolize steady and uninterrupted historical progress in nation-building narratives and the formation of national identities. In the Balkans, rivers are usually appropriated by nationalistic narratives tied to territorial claims, which resurface during times of crisis. Following the Bosnian War of the 1990s, in literature, cinema and arts rivers have become sites of multiple and overlapping meanings, suggesting a possible new emotional geography of the country beyond the exclusionary ideas of homeland and belonging.

In this article, we analyze the influence of the colonial policy of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union on Ukrainian art-historical writing. As we shall reveal, the mechanisms of knowledge production created during that period continued to operate after the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine in 1991. The limitations that were imposed on the art-historical community, which can be regarded as colonial, shaped the crucial narratives (of the “triune nation”) and dictated the thematic scope of Ukrainian scholarship. The new notion of “mysteztvoznavstvo,” introduced in 1937 instead of the previously established Theory and History of Art, eventually led to a profound rift between Soviet Russian and Ukrainian scholarship and the Western world more generally. “Mysteztvoznavstvo” was supposed to be an umbrella term for art history, theory, and art criticism but ended up doing a disservice to each domain. Art theory in Ukraine was virtually nonexistent, whereas art history was mixed with art criticism, resulting in writing that did not meet widely accepted academic standards. This led to the isolation of Ukrainian scholars, who were confined to the Russian-speaking community and had very limited access to foreign scholarship. We also analyze the decolonization processes in the history of Ukrainian art prompted by the invasion of the Russian Federation into Ukraine after 2013, such as The Revolution of Dignity and “decommunization.” We argue that horizontal art history and decolonial approaches cannot adequately be applied if colonial tools are still used by the discipline. Epistemic decolonization can only be achieved after challenging the standards of “mysteztvoznavstvo” and, thus, by dividing art studies into three separate domains: art history, art theory, and art criticism, as each discipline has its own goals and methods.

In settler colonies such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand, “memory wars” have, driven by conflicting narratives about colonial history, intensified in recent years. Indigenous counter-narratives challenge Euro-centric master narratives, particularly in public spaces such as museums and monuments. This article explores the impact of such conflicts on national identity, focusing on Aotearoa New Zealand, where the history of colonization has long been framed as a relatively benign process, underpinned by the Treaty of Waitangi. Through application of a comprehensive narratological framework, the article reveals how the Waitangi Treaty Grounds’ permanent exhibition, Ko Waitangi Tēnei: This is Waitangi, employs the quest masterplot to weave Māori memories of the mid-1800s New Zealand Wars into the national master narrative. The analysis highlights that this narrative emplotment – by “naturalizing” the events of the New Zealand Wars – serves to elide difficult questions about colonial violence, thus protecting the image of a tolerant and respectful nation. More generally, the article contributes to our understanding of national identity construction in the context of difficult histories, while also advancing theoretical approaches to narratology in museum storytelling.

In Croatia, due to local histories of violence, purist language ideologies, and the essentialist belief that nations and languages form an inseparable nexus, the ability to speak pure “Croatian” (čisti hrvatski) is perceived as a sign of morality while the use of “Serbian” indexes immorality. Through repetition over time and institutional support – through ethno-linguistic enregisterment – linguistic practises are able to map ethnicity and morality onto the bodies of speakers, making the use of language in Croatia a delicate and politicized performance. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores the ways in which linguistic performances of čisti hrvatski by the newly minoritized Serbs in Vukovar become an integral part of performing political subjectivity. The eagerness of some of my interlocutors to perform čisti hrvatski in the public sphere becomes a way to embody exemplary minority subjectivity and to negotiate their stigmatized ethnic difference by demonstrating a sense of belonging to the Croatian nation-state.

The Cominform resolution was a turning point in the history of Yugoslavia. In the context of the Cold War, the conflict between Yugoslavia and the Eastern Bloc also had serious consequences on a global level, representing the first major split in the international communist movement after World War II. However, echoes of the split within the million-strong Yugoslav overseas diaspora have not drawn much scientific interest, despite the diaspora’s extensive involvement in the socio-political situation in Yugoslavia throughout the 20th century. The goal of the article is to study the Tito-Stalin split as an international crisis of enormous significance through the local politics of diaspora to better understand its nature and impact. The influence of the diaspora’s host countries’ communist parties must be emphasised in order to understand why most Yugoslav emigrants in the west supported Cominform, as shown through the analysis of sources originating from archives in Australia, New Zealand, Croatia, and Serbia.

The 2022 war in Ukraine has produced the biggest virtual humor archive in the history of wars. We argue that Ukrainian war humor is a form of civic activism in the name of Ukraine’s sovereignty. This civic activism is defined by resistance, solidarity, vigilance, and dedication to victory. The war humor circulates locally as well as on a global stage. It expresses the government’s positions and the people’s voices and empowers those affected by this war. Ukrainian war humor documents experiences of war realities; provides moral commentaries and emotional and aesthetic interpretations; and articulates visions for the future of Ukraine as a sovereign European state.