What has nearly 20 years of study of everyday nationalism accomplished?

The maturation of everyday nationhood has advanced both theory and method in the study of nationalism. In focusing on how nationhood is experienced by ordinary people in the course of their daily lives, everyday approaches have allowed scholars to overcome difficulties of Eurocentrism, groupist assumptions, and preoccupations with state-centered narratives and instances of conflict.

As modernist approaches to studying nationalism rose to predominance in the field, critics noted that its key axioms — particularly those about the origins of nations — were largely derived from the cultural and historical context of Europe in the age of nation-states after the Treaty of Westphalia. As opposed to historicized approaches that observe nationhood over the “longue durée,” everyday nationalist approaches center their analysis in “the here and now” (Fox and Miller-Idriss Reference Fox and Miller-Idriss2008b). Following this logic, everyday nationalism primarily seeks the “micro-interactional moments” in which ordinary people maintain the boundaries of the nation through their daily practices (Fox and Miller-Idriss Reference Fox and Miller-Idriss2008a).

The focus placed by everyday approaches on the “here and now” of nationhood eschews questions of how nations are born. In so doing, studies of everyday nationhood have been able to advance and develop a theory that is not bounded by particular temporal or geographic contexts (Fox and Miller-Idriss Reference Fox and Miller-Idriss2008b). Unlike previous modernist approaches, which locate the origin of nations in the specific contexts of modernity — and which have been critiqued for depicting the cases of nationalism that emerged from nineteenth-century Europe as universal — everyday approaches build theory grounded in observational data. Rather than looking for the emergence of the nation in specific sets of historical conditions, everyday approaches allow observers to see how nationhood arises in a wide range of ordinary contexts. While detractors have accused studies of the everyday of sidestepping these historical questions, a quotidian focus nonetheless helps scholars to avoid falling into Eurocentric frames of analysis. An adoption of bottom-up studies has allowed for theoretical contributions from non-Western and non-democratic contexts (Kudaibergenova Reference Kudaibergenova2021; Stroup Reference Stroup2023).

Everyday approaches have also helped to decenter the state from the analysis of the nation. By exploring nationhood as a “bottom-up” phenomenon, studies of everyday nationhood have shown how day-to-day life is a domain for the construction and maintenance of nationhood, independent of formal institutions and official narratives. Rather than studying elite discourse in and of itself, everyday nationalism’s focus on how ordinary people experience state narratives has added nuance to academic understandings about the use of the nation as a tool of ideology or political mobilization. By focusing on how individuals outside the state replicate (or reject) official discourses on nationhood, these approaches helped illustrate how citizens may selectively adopt nationalist narratives (Goode Reference Goode2016).

These examinations are especially useful in understanding the way nationalist discourse operates in non-democratic contexts. Not only does examining the expressions of nationhood that unfold from outside the purview of the state provide an illustration of how states attempt to harness public sentiment in legitimating official policies or directions, but these examinations also allow scholars to better develop understandings about the limitations of autocracies to impose particular visions of nationhood (Goode Reference Goode2021b). As Fox (Reference Fox, Tsang and Woods2013) remarks, the private practices of ordinary people may assign different meanings than those projected by the state in official displays. Individual actions and observations of nationhood may thus be sites of resistance and dissent — even if only implicitly. Turning to everyday practices, then, allows researchers to ascertain where and to what degree popular conceptions of nationhood align with or diverge from official ones. This bottom-up approach also illustrates how non-elite actors play significant roles in knowledge production about nationhood. The attention given to non-elite actors has provided a wealth of insight about how national boundary formation and maintenance processes unfold. Studies of the everyday have done much to illustrate how inclusions or exclusions from expressions of national solidarity work on a personal level (Knott Reference Knott2017; Singh Reference Singh2022). Likewise, the focus on private observation of nationhood yields insights about how feelings of national belonging become personalized and how individuals engage in the process of self-identification across a range of political and social identities (Zhang Reference Zhang2022; Gaufman Reference Gaufman2023).

The redirection of focus away from official nationalist narratives also holds methodological implications for how mass nationalism is studied. Everyday nationalism scholars have pioneered research designs which make social practices — not individuals — the main unit of analysis. Thus, the everyday approach has expanded the range of observations covered in studies of nationalism to include areas like gastronomy and cuisine, sport, holiday celebration and festivals, and religion (DeSoucey Reference DeSoucey2010; Koch Reference Koch2013; Fox Reference Fox, Tsang and Woods2013; Stroup Reference Stroup2017). Observing the way that nationhood is engendered through practices has helped scholars to locate the interactions and spaces (physical, discursive, and ideological) where nation-building, identity contestation, and boundary negotiation occur, and to better understand when taken-for-granted expressions of nationhood become hotly contested (Jones and Merriman Reference Jones and Merriman2009; Malešević Reference Malešević2019). These studies have illuminated how the roots of violent conflict often lie in ordinary practices, and how micro-level grievances between ordinary people may accumulate into larger clashes (Collins Reference Collins2022; Malešević Reference Malešević2025b). Shifting toward this practice-based focus has restored agency to individual actors in studies of nationalism. No longer are non-elite figures treated as part of large, undifferentiated masses to be mobilized by state rhetoric, but rather possess the ability to engage directly in the contestation of national boundaries.

The latter development — everyday nationalism’s focus on individual agency — also illustrates a success of the paradigm: its ability to move nationalism studies away from “groupist” conceptualizations of nationhood (Brubaker Reference Brubaker2004). Turning away from groupist logic, everyday nationalism has helped develop a theory about nationhood that avoids naturalizing nations and allows for examining how national identity interacts with other, cross-cutting identity cleavages.

The Quotidian Nationalism of Tomorrow: Where do studies of the everyday go from here?

While the accomplishments of scholarship on everyday nationalism discussed above have no doubt pushed the field of nationalism studies forward both theoretically and methodologically, there remain many opportunities for the field to expand. The study of the everyday, as Goode notes in his contribution to this exchange, faces a number of challenges — methodological and theoretical — that demand to be addressed. While these limitations might stall the progress of the field, they also present opportunities for evolution. Looking ahead, I contend that opportunities to extend the study of the everyday to include everyday transnationalism and contemplations of how everyday experiences of nationhood persist despite — or perhaps even because of — the advent of unsettled times, provide researchers with opportunities to reach beyond particular cases and move theoretical development forward.

The outbreak of COVID-19 as a global pandemic in the early days of 2020 provided a grim illustration of how contemporary globalized society blurs the line between local and global phenomena. Simultaneously, the rise of far-right and populist nationalisms over the last decade illustrates the virality of ideas, as well as disease (Goode et al. Reference Goode, Stroup and Gaufman2022). Increasingly, conversations about nationhood and nationalism exist in a context defined by transnational exchange and the dissemination of ideas across borders. As such, scholars of everyday nationalism might well question whether the practices associated with the expression of nationhood have also diffused across national boundaries. As Jon Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss point out in their contribution to this exchange, the advent of the Internet, and social media in particular, allows for the instantaneous circulation of ideas. Are shared tropes about what counts as threatening to (or constituent of) national identities currently transmitting between ideologically sympathetic communities around the globe? Chandra’s examination of everyday majoritarianism in this exchange provides one possible example of the ways in which ideologies of inclusion and exclusion circulate globally and become embedded in societal divisions and even institutions of governance.

Examinations of exclusionary practices enacted in daily life provide opportunities to observe how tropes associated with nationhood spread across contexts. In doing so, everyday nationalism can build on the insights of social movement theory and modular diffusion (Beissinger Reference Beissinger2002). Observing how localized nationalisms intertwine with globalized extremist ideologies (for example, Islamophobia, antisemitism, anti-Black racism, right-wing xenophobia, and so on) to target “others” in order to exclude them from expressions of nationhood can deepen our understanding of ethnic conflict, or illiberal mobilization (Ganesh et al. Reference Ganesh, Frydenlund and Brekke2024; Zhang Reference Zhang2024).

Likewise, though everyday nationalism has long focused its attention on “settled” or “quiet” times, it may shed light on the importance of nationhood in unsettled, eventful times. At the time of writing, unsettled times appear to have become the norm. Within the last decade, countless events have contributed to the persistence of “eventful” time. War, pandemic, genocide, revolution, natural disaster, and domestic unrest have become part of the fabric of daily life. Throughout such noisy and cataclysmic happenings, practices of nationhood persist. As Fox and Miller-Idriss remind us in this exchange, the significance of these everyday markers intensifies during eventful times. Everyday nationalism can help us to understand why these global challenges are met with nationalized responses. To what extent are daily practices and tropes of nationalism mobilized in response to calamity? An examination of the everyday during times of high salience for nationhood can help push the field to break new theoretical ground.

The convergence of transnational flows of rhetoric and eventful times returns scholars of the everyday back to familiar conversations about the symbols and practices of nationhood. Once again, we need to talk about flags. Particularly, the field might seek to understand how and why particularized symbols of nationhood diffuse across national boundaries and take on larger significance. Currently, netizens of the world adopt national flags as their profile pictures in the wake of tragedies, as was the case when French flags filled online platforms in the wake of the 2015 Paris attacks. Users fill their social media handles with national flags — often in inscrutable combinations — to show solidarity, or signal ideological bona fides. What is the national significance of placing a flag of Palestine, or Ukraine — or indeed Israel or Russia — in one’s username? What can be made of protestors advocating for Hong Kong Independence while waving flags of the UK or the USA as they did during the Anti-ELAB protests of 2019? Scholars of the everyday may explore how these symbols of nationhood have also become internationalized symbols of larger causes. Is the digital everyday a part of “real life?” All of these avenues point toward the important role that studies of the everyday can play in explaining the persistent salience of nationhood even in an era defined by global interconnections. Though many have pointed to nationalism’s persistent power in discussing subjects like the rise of right-wing populism or xenophobic exclusionism since the mid 2010s, these studies typically focus on organized political movements and the rhetoric of political elites. Everyday explanations for the power of nationalism are still largely ignored. How do quotidian experiences of nationhood become the basis for contentious social mobilization? Looking to everyday, even in these moments of high salience, may help to explain the conditions, mechanisms, or external triggers that activate nationalist sentiment.

Everyday nationalism, by taking social practices as core units of analysis, is ideally suited to help understand the power of nationalism in these moments. Understanding how daily practices constitute boundaries, diffuse across contexts, or vary between regime types can shine a light on the ways in which nationalism and the expression of nationhood drive political phenomena across the globe.

The problem of comparability

Chandra (Reference Chandra2001) once critiqued the literature on constructivism for failing to move past arguments about the origins of nations and nationalism. Today, one could say similarly for everyday nationalism that much of the literature remains preoccupied with documenting its existence. Because the categories of practice are inductively derived and the findings are treated as case-specific, illustrating how everyday nationalism manifests in a variety of domains does little to advance the comparative study of nationalism. In this sense, everyday nationalism as an approach has done little to draw area experts into a common dialogue in the field. Ironically, what began as an attempt to reconnect nationalism with constructivist insights arguably has become a way of preserving area studies silos and their biases.

The problem of conceptual blurring

Banal nationalism and everyday nationalism share a common intellectual origin, and both approaches share a focus on the pervasively unnoticed ways that the nation is practiced in routine, daily life. However, as Trošt notes in this exchange, everyday nationalism is more closely tied to Brubaker’s practice-based work (influenced by Pierre Bourdieu) on everyday ethnicity, though few authors seriously engage with it. Rather, the concepts increasingly tend to be used interchangeably, and often to refer to a general quotidian milieu. What makes everyday nationalism distinctive is the focus on “bottom-up” or quotidian social practices, which are presented as sites where people exercise agency, and which serve as the unit of analysis (Goode and Stroup Reference Goode and Stroup2015). Fox and Miller-Idriss (2008) articulated the range of practices related to everyday nationhood in the form of talking with/about the nation, performing the nation, consuming the nation, and choosing the nation/national choices. By contrast, banal nationalism is arguably more about the structural reproduction of the nation in everyday life — in Billig’s (Reference Billig1995, 40) formulation, it is about the millions of “mindless flags” that mark the homeland, yet are “unwaved, unsaluted, and unnoticed.”

Furthermore, there are distinct research agendas for both banal and everyday nationalism that flow from this distinction.Footnote ⁶ For example, one of the more recent threads of research at the intersection of authoritarianism and everyday nationalism examines how social practices are co-opted by autocracies at various points of contact between the state and society — including markets or historical commemorations — in attempting to confer (not always successfully) a sense of authenticity upon the state’s legitimacy-seeking claims and narratives (Dukalskis and Lee Reference Dukalskis and Lee2020; Goode Reference Goode2021b; McGlynn Reference McGlynn2020). However, such observation is only possible to the extent that everyday nationalism is understood as conceptually distinct from banal nationalism: for banal nationalism, the omnipresence of the nation — symbolically or rhetorically — serves as the explanation for its effect, while everyday nationalism asks what people actually do with those ubiquitous symbols and rhetorical devices in their daily lives in their relationship with states, regimes, markets, transnationalism (as Stroup proposes), or majoritarianism (as Chandra discusses).

The problem of methodological conformity

At its core, ethnography remains the default approach to researching everyday nationalism. While ethnography yields nuanced insight into individual cases, it compounds the problem of area studies silos. Of course, this is not to say that ethnography cannot produce insights that are potentially relevant for comparative research. Rather, it would be more accurate to say that scholars working in everyday nationalism often present the theoretical framework as an entry point for discussing a topic, often producing what Harry Eckstein (Reference Eckstein, Greenstein and Polsby1975) categorized as a “confirming case” study, which contributes very little to theoretical development.

In connection with this problem, it is perhaps worth noting the subtle influence of vested interests — at least insofar as those who engage in ethnographic research tend to do so only after years of language study and immersion. From the vantage point of comparative research, their training and experience ought to be valued especially for what they can contribute to inter-disciplinary studies; yet within academic disciplines (perhaps especially for the social sciences), those skills and experience are valuable sources of intellectual capital that risk being devalued as soon as they can be decontextualized for comparative research.Footnote ⁷

The problem of generalizability

As Brubaker et al. (Reference Brubaker, Feischmidt, Fox and Grancea2006, 15) pointed out, “Ethnicized ways of experiencing and interpreting the social world can only be studied alongside a range of alternative, non-ethnicized ways of seeing and being.” While scholars of everyday nationalism have embraced indirect observation, much current research features limited engagement of everyday nationalism with adjacent phenomena like authoritarianism, conflict, or migration (notable exceptions include Skey’s (Reference Skey2011) work on globalization and Sanja Vico’s (Reference Vico2025) work on cosmopolitanism and nationalism). Consequently, data gathered on everyday nationalist practices remain largely case-specific, while the relevance of findings for other fields is not immediately apparent. In turn, this lack of generalizability undoubtedly has a knock-on effect on the availability of funding as well as publication space for projects concerning everyday nationalism.

One possible remedy for this problem might be to re-purpose existing data (for example, interview transcripts or field notes), though this raises a number of complications: first, qualitative data often isn’t available for re-purposing/secondary analysis (though new repositories like Discuss Data may help to overcome this issue); second, the secondary use of ethnographic data is limited on ethical grounds related to the lack of informed consentFootnote ⁸; third, ethnographic data are often gathered inductively and sampling methods tend to be snowball or purposive, meaning that interpretive data is unsuited for secondary use in comparison with other cases.Footnote ⁹ These are not trivial concerns, and they are increasingly pressing as the social sciences increasingly move towards the use of machine learning to analyze massive datasets. The longer that everyday nationalism researchers avoid the problem of comparability, generalizability, and methodological conformity, the more likely it is that data scientists and funders will simply shrug and move on.

The problem of real world and policy-relevance

Many of the key insights of everyday nationalism address theoretical concerns at the heart of nationalism studies or expose blind spots in existing approaches, though they struggle with asserting real-world relevance. Part of the problem may be that everyday nationalism has been focused mainly on so-called “settled” times (Bonikowski Reference Bonikowski2016), and the reproduction of the status quo is often less relevant to policymakers than the potential for it to change. However, as both Stroup and Fox and Miller-Idriss note in this exchange — following on from the first Trump administration, COVID-19, war in Syria, Ukraine, Gaza, and the second Trump administration — it is worth asking whether unsettled (or ontologically insecure) times are now the rule rather than the exception? Indeed, the desire or even demand for a return to normal, the “before times,” or an idealized version of how things used to be, can be a source of social, economic, and political power (Goode et al. Reference Goode, Stroup and Gaufman2022).Footnote ¹⁰

Where does everyday nationalism go from here?

Looking ahead, the most likely avenues for advancing research on everyday nationalism that is comparable, generalizable, and has a broad appeal are those that contrast everyday nationalizing practices with globalizing or antinational practices. In particular, there are global forces that now intrude on everyday life around the world, that potentially represent existential threats, and which are mediated by nationalizing practices.

Everyday Ethnic Majoritarianism and Democratic Theory

By “everyday majoritarianism,” I mean the routine and mindless use of the term “majority” as if it were real. This concept is an adaptation of Billig’s concept of “everyday nationalism,” which, in his words, is “a form of national identity which is embedded in routines of life, which constantly “flag” nationhood, but are so numerous and so familiar that they operate mindlessly, rather than mindfully” (Billig Reference Billig1995). Everyday majoritarianism is something that social scientists who study the genealogy of ethnic categories repeatedly warn us against. Consider, for instance, what the historian Robert Frykenberg (Reference Frykenberg and Bjorkman1988) says about South Asia: “No country nor region of South Asia has ever had a ‘majority’ as such. Neither in terms of caste, community, ethnicity, or religious identity, has there been a thing such as a ‘majority’.” Thomas Mullaney (Reference Mullaney, Mullaney, Leibold, Gros and Vanden Bussche2012) makes much the same point about the “Han” majority in China: “The group now referred to in the singular as ‘Han’ appears less like a coherent category of identity and more like an umbrella term encompassing a plurality of diverse cultures, languages, and ethnicities.” Other social scientists have made the same point about every one of the cases discussed here and many more besides. But these insights have not travelled to the literature on democratic theory, which refers to “the” majority as a taken-for-granted background against which a concern for minority rights plays out (Goode and Stroup Reference Goode and Stroup2015). This is true even of the strongest critiques of ethnic majoritarianism and of work grounded in the constructivist assumptions that ethnic identities can change over time.

Take, for instance, Lani Guinier’s argument that cumulative voting can limit the tyranny of the majority by enabling minorities and majorities to take “turns.” In her words: “Structuring decision making to allow the minority ‘a turn’ may be necessary to restore the reciprocity ideal when a fixed majority refuses to cooperate with the minority. … Giving the minority a turn does not mean the minority gets to rule; what it does mean is that the minority gets to influence decision making and the majority rules more legitimately” (Guinier Reference Guinier1995). For Guinier, it is self-evident that “the majority” exists, and that it is a unified, coherent whole. Her concern is over how to prevent this majority from running roughshod over the minorities outside it, not to problematize its existence.

Consider now Eric Kaufmann’s book Whiteshift, where he writes: “Together with New Zealand, North America is projected to be ‘majority minority’ by 2050, with Western Europe and Australia following suit later in the century. This shift is replacing the self-confidence of white majorities with an existential insecurity channeled by the lightning rod of immigration” (Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann2019). Kaufmann’s starting point is different from Guinier’s: while he, too, is concerned with preventing the adverse consequences of ethnic majoritarianism, his concern is with majorities, not minorities. He is aware that ethnic majorities are not fixed in nature, that they can and do change over time — that awareness is embedded in his title “Whiteshift.” But he, too, believes that at any given point, the white ethnic majority is a single unified actor. What is more, he imbues this supposedly unified actor with an internal emotional life, and therefore a collective “existential insecurity.”

Majorities are a Mosaic of Minorities Lumped Together by the Census

But the things we call “majorities” are never unified wholes: they are merely collections of minorities given a common label by the census — a label which we breathe life into when we speak of these census categories as if they describe real communities of people. America’s so-called white “majority,” for instance, is a census category that groups together at least 104 smaller categories, which are themselves composed of tens of dissimilar others.Footnote ¹¹ The UK’s so-called “white ethnic majority” is also an amalgam of minority identities, including the regional identities of English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish, some of which are expressed in resurgent regional nationalisms of their own; religious identities such as Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Buddhist, and Jewish, and class identities which reflect not merely income or education but distinct cultural worlds. India’s so-called “Hindu majority” is an “artefact of categorization” that includes thousands of groups professing distinct religious beliefs and practices, assigned to the Hindu category using census codes that do not stipulate a common “essence” in order to be classified as Hindu.

Similarly, the so-called ethnic Russian majority of the Russian Federation (RF) corrals a diverse number of minorities under the same label, including Ukrainians, Tatars, Belorussians, Siberyaks, Cossacks, and others. Several of these groups would have been counted as members of the Russian majority category based not on their self-identified answers but on the instructions given to the enumerators about whether to recode these answers as “Russian” (Arel Reference Arel2002). Some of these minorities may not even be ethnically identified: the so-called ethnic Russian “majority” is based on a census question about “nationality,” a term for which the criteria are ambiguous. Those who answer “Russian” for the census question on nationality are not always referring to ethnic membership (Arel Reference Arel2002). Finally, an estimated one-fifth of those counted as Russian by one estimate live in ethnically mixed households and have “a greater likelihood of having a complex or even changing ethnic identification” (Stepanov Reference Stepanov2006).

The so-called Han ethnic “majority” in China, usually described as constituting over 90 percent of the Chinese population also consists of a mosaic of minorities, including eight speech communities and mutually unintelligible dialects, large regional groupings (for example, Northern and Southern) and smaller ones (Hakka, Cantonese, Hokkien, and Subei), as well as a host of local identities, so much so that “it might be more accurate to think of intra-Han” divisions and Han “subsets” in terms of ethnic difference and ethnic groups (Mullaney Reference Mullaney, Mullaney, Leibold, Gros and Vanden Bussche2012).

These statistical categories have never come together as a political whole, even episodically, and even after the rise of ethnic majoritarian nationalisms. When the leaders of ethnic majoritarian nationalisms call to these majorities, they are trying to bring into existence something new by pretending that it has always existed, and they are rarely successful.

In the USA, for instance, the majority of whites have voted for the Republican candidate in every election in the last fifty years (Phillips Reference Phillips2016). But this reflects not the coalescence of a political community, but decentralized decisions made by the many minorities within the category “white” for different reasons. This continued to be the case in Donald Trump’s campaign, which also appealed to many minorities within the “white” category, including the white working classes, evangelicals, rural voters, veterans, and others. In Britain, the majority of whites have never voted for a single party. In India, too, notwithstanding the rise of Hindu nationalism, the majority of Hindus have never voted for a single political party.

Democracy and the Construction of Ethnic Majorities

The idea that majorities are real is not only misleading, but it also blinds us to how they are constructed — and in particular to the role of democracy in efforts to construct them.

The key aspect of democracy that results in the generation of ethnic majorities is that it is a political system in which the key decision makers are chosen through competitive elections and majority rule. This is the core idea in both thick and thin definitions of democracy, and whether the elections in question are winner-take-all or proportional, or some combination of the two. A system in which decision-makers are chosen by popular majorities will invariably tend towards constructing ethnic majorities, with majoritarian nationalist leaders as the agents of this construction. Democracies may begin with popular majorities defined on a civic or other non-ethnic basis. But sooner or later, political leaders will begin to propose majorities that take an ethnic, or at least a descent-based form, because it is descent-based majorities that are most likely to persist, and so not just put politicians in power but also keep them there. For a full elaboration of this argument, I refer readers to my article on “Majoritarianism without Majorities” (Chandra Reference Chandra2024), which illustrates it with reference to the democracies of the USA, the UK, and India. In this essay, I use the examples of Russia and China to extend that argument by addressing an obvious alternative: is it democracy or simply the logic of nationalism and sovereignty that produces the push towards ethnic majorities? Might authoritarian states not also need to legitimate themselves by speaking for the so-called people, defined as ethnic majorities?

I contend that it is only democracy that has a necessary relationship with the mobilization of ethnic majorities. Non-democratic nation-states sometimes institutionalize ethnic majority categories. But they can also define the nation in other ways, based on the personified authority of the leader, or a religious ideology (based on belief or practice rather than ancestry), or institutional affiliation (membership in a party or in the military, for instance), or some other way. In many non-democratic regimes, in fact, it is minorities that are empowered rather than majorities: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, or apartheid South Africa, and most monarchical regimes are all cases in point. However, to the extent that competitive elections conducted according to a majority rule principle are the key factor that drives democracies to generate ethnic majorities, we should see some tendency towards ethnic majoritarianism in authoritarian regimes that hold such elections, as long as they are somewhat competitive.

Consider, for instance, a comparison between contemporary Russia and Russia in the Romanov and Soviet periods. It is instructive that during the Romanov empire, there was an effort to co-opt elites on the basis of a Russian identity but no effort to mobilize or ethnicize a Russian majority (Miller Reference Miller, Berger and Miller2015), and that the Soviet system that succeeded the Romanov empire actually demobilized and disadvantaged the Russian majority and defused majority mobilization (Martin Reference Martin1998; Chinn and Kaiser Reference Chinn and Kaiser1996). But once competitive elections were introduced, the incentives changed to favor Russian majoritarian mobilization. The first elections to do so were the republic-level elections, which were introduced in 1990, and “suddenly rendered Russian leaders accountable to their own population rather than to the Communist Party leadership,” and therefore pushed them towards a declaration of Russian sovereignty (Hale Reference Hale2005).

Now, even though elections in Putin’s Russia are far from free and fair, they still matter. As Kotkin puts it: “Putin styles himself as a new tsar. But a real tsar would not have to worry about a looming succession crisis and what it might do to his grip on power in the present. Putin does; that is partly why he must simulate elections” (Kotkin Reference Kotkin2024). The principal voices of opposition to Putin have so far come from political elites who are also nationalists (St. Julian-Varnon Reference St. Julian-Varnon2024). If Putin were a Tsar, top-down state categorization or some limited elite co-optation might have been enough to secure his rule. But to the extent that he has to worry at least about elite political competition during elections, he has some incentive to mobilize a popular Russian ethnic majority as a legitimizing force. Thus, we see in Putin’s most recent term a spate of measures to activate such an identity, ranging from the war in Ukraine to the designation of Russians as the “state-forming” nation. The precise boundaries and content of his definition of Russianness remain ambiguous (Blakkisrud Reference Blakkisrud2023). But it is clear that ethnicity is more important to this definition than during the Soviet period.

The case of China also illustrates the close relationship between competitive elections under the majority rule principle and the emergence of ethnic majorities or the lack thereof. The category of the “Han minzu” was first invented in the late nineteenth century as a way to mobilize the population against the non-Han Manchu dynasty. It is not clear that this category would have emerged had there not been a need to mobilize the people as a whole against monarchic rule. This Han majority was counted and codified for the first time by China’s 1953 census, along with fifty-five minorities. The purpose of this census was to prepare for China’s first elections to the Chinese National People’s Congress, which, although they were not competitive multi-party elections, did promise representation for minorities based on numbers. Had it not been for these impending elections, it is not clear that the census would have in fact been conducted or that this is the classification which would have resulted. But China has never held competitive elections, and so the statistical category of the Han majority has never been mobilized as a political community. This remains true in contemporary China under Xi. Xi’s regime is undoubtedly forcing non-Han minorities to assimilate into a common civilizational identity that privileges the symbols that the state associates with a Han identity. But this is a state-led effort to repress ethnic minorities without, at the same time, encouraging ethnic majority mobilization. In fact, Xi Jinping’s actions are intended to prevent or control the emergence of such a popular majority, keeping it confined to online channels rather than allowing it to become a popular movement (Economist 2022).

Conclusion

The everyday majoritarianism of democratic theory not only obscures the way in which democracy produces and sustains ethnic majoritarianism but also produces counter-productive institutional solutions to ethnic majoritarianism.

Once democratic theorists concede the points that majorities exist, and that they have first claim to rule, the argument about how democracy can and should accommodate ethnic differences is already lost: if democracy is a system of majority rule, and the majority in question is self-evident, then those in a numerical minority from the outset have a lesser claim upon the state. The debate is only over how to give them some voice. But it is never about equality. In fact, as long as we take both majorities and minorities to be fixed and mutually exclusive categories, there is no available method of institutional engineering that simultaneously produces political equality for both majorities and minorities (Chandra Reference Chandra, Johnson, Knight and Levi2008). What then should be done? I argue that the solution lies not in the impossible task of balancing the interests of the so-called minorities against those of the so-called majorities but in dismantling the notion of the majority — and the majoritarian understanding of democracy — altogether. This requires abolishing the distinction between majorities and minorities in our theories and our discourse — and the legal, administrative, educational, and economic systems informed by that discourse. It requires in other words the rebuilding of democratic theory on a minoritarian foundation and then considering how the scaffolding of governance might be built on that foundation, perhaps by replacing references to majority categories in that infrastructure with references to many highly differentiated minority categories, perhaps by introducing the idea of intersectionality as one of its building blocks, perhaps by designing censuses and other state statistical systems to probe for the existence of minorities and publicizing data on these mosaics of minorities without fitting an artificial majority frame around them, and so on. This proposal may well resurrect the old fear in democratic theory of the “tyranny of the minority.” But this fear rests on a conceptualization of a population as being made up of a majority and a minority, with one needing to be protected from the other.

I have suggested here that that conceptualization is unfounded. All majorities are, in truth, a collection of minorities. Democratic systems that begin from this position, and are designed to be responsive to and representative of minorities, not in order to protect them from a majority, or elevate them at the expense of a majority, but because minorities are all there are.

Everyday nationalism?

We didn’t encounter many of these committed nationalists in the years before Everyday Nationhood, but we did find some (Miller-Idriss Reference Miller-Idriss2009, 114–17; Miller-Idriss and Rothenberg Reference Miller-Idriss and Rothenberg2012, 143–7; Fox Reference Fox2004a, 378, 392). These were the nationalist junkies who were avid followers of nationalist politics, who shared and debated their emotionally charged views with like-minded friends. But in those days, their views reverberated only as far as the echo chambers of the nook in the pub, their friend’s kitchen, or the corner of the café.

People still talk to each other, but the dominance of face-to-face interaction has been dislodged by new/er forms of digital interaction. Social media provides people with virtual platforms for expressing and sharing their national views (Mihelj and Jiménez-Martínez Reference Mihelj and Jiménez-Martínez2021). Some of these DIY nationalists are the self-styled architects of their nations: purposeful agents of nationalism promoting and disseminating personalized national content (Hearn Reference Hearn2007). Others are the fellow travelers — the copycat sharers of that content, the echoes in the chamber, amplifying others’ national ideas. And most are both simultaneously, posting and reposting, producing and sharing, and blurring the boundaries between consumption and production in the process (Cowan Reference Cowan2021, 462, 465; Mihelj and Jiménez-Martínez Reference Mihelj and Jiménez-Martínez2021, 338). To be sure, most posts continue to fall on deaf ears. But in virtual space, they fall on an alluringly infinite number of deaf ears. And some might enjoy a warmer reception — a like, a share, a re-post, an emoji. This doesn’t mean people’s actual audiences for their nationalist views have expanded from the days of face-to-face interaction, but it does mean their imagined — or imaginable — audiences have grown. The boundaries of the virtual echo chamber are less apparent than those enclosing the nook in the pub.

Today’s everyday nationalists are the new co-owners of the means of national production, creatively manipulating content and adding their own ideas to bespoke versions of the nation (Shahin Reference Shahin2021, 1858–9; Skey Reference Skey2022, 839–41; Cowan Reference Cowan2021, 190–2). It’s no longer just the voices of the privileged few, whose wealth and power buy them their blue-tick audiences — though they of course are still dominant (Schertzer and Woods Reference Schertzer and Woods2022, 44–8; Mihelj and Jiménez-Martínez Reference Mihelj and Jiménez-Martínez2021, 338–9). It’s also regular people who meet and post, and, if they’re lucky, maybe even get reposted, who fancy themselves as national influencers. And even when old-fashioned elites still rule the digital world, ordinary people can stand shoulder-to-virtual-shoulder with them, resharing their dear leaders’ content without the degrees of separation that stand between them in the offline world (see, eg, Mudde Reference Mudde2021, 588–9; Schertzer and Woods Reference Schertzer and Woods2022, 7). The masses become, or at least can see themselves as becoming, agents of everyday nationalism. And since everyone is an agent of nationalism, the nations they’re constructing are becoming more personalized (what Shahin Reference Shahin2021, 1858–9 calls “user-generated nationalism”; and Mendelovich Reference Mendelovich2026, 2 refers to as “tailormade nationalism” both contributing to what Cowan Reference Cowan2021, 192–93 describes as “tribal bubbles” of nationalism, on personal forms of nationalism more generally, see Cohen Reference Cohen1996; Hearn Reference Hearn2007; Mann and Fenton Reference Mann and Fenton2009).

In 2008, we discussed the role of schools in conditioning people’s experiences of everyday nationhood (Fox and Miller-Idriss Reference Fox and Miller-Idriss2008a 542–4; see also Throssell Reference Throssell2015; Pavasović Trošt Reference Pavasović Trošt2018). Now that much of our lives are spent staring at our phones, we also need to consider how the infrastructural architectures and algorithmic mechanisms of social media help shape national imaginaries. The opportunity structures of the digital world are calibrated to allow for new forms of global content, but transnational digital ecosystems can also be used in the service of nationalism (Mihelj and Jiménez-Martínez Reference Mihelj and Jiménez-Martínez2021, 335–40; Eriksen Reference Eriksen, Malešević and Haugaard2007, 5–7; Skey Reference Skey2022, 845–6; see also Goode Reference Goode2021a, 364, 367). This isn’t a backhanded endorsement of technological determinism but an acknowledgement of evolving opportunity structures that don’t explain, but contextualize this shift toward a reinvigorated and more personalized everyday nationalism.

Much of this content features variations on familiar, mainstream notions of nationalism (see, for example, Shahin Reference Shahin2021). But digital infrastructures also accommodate their fair share of wacko-nationalism: radical and extremist views (from both sides of what remains of the political spectrum), truth-defying, reality-denying conspiratorial fantasies, and plenty of unhinged, perverse, bizarre content spilling out of this digital cupboard of curiosities (see, for example, Cowan Reference Cowan2021, 189–92; Schertzer and Woods Reference Schertzer and Woods2022, 45; Mihelj and Jiménez-Martínez Reference Mihelj and Jiménez-Martínez2021, 333, 339).

Taken together, this fragmentation of nationalism into multiple personalized forms can be understood as a kind of craft nationalism, where DIY nationalists, sometimes in cahoots with business interests, contribute to the national means of production with their own custom-made versions of the nation (see Cowan Reference Cowan2021; Shahin Reference Shahin2021; on the pluralization of nationalisms more generally, see Antonsich Reference Antonsich2020). Nationalist junkies, previously consigned to dog-eared manifestos circulated in unmarked brown envelopes, now shift their content more effortlessly to the masses online. This doesn’t democratize political discourse or exchange, but it does fuel the illusion of democratization and the sense of empowerment that accompanies it (Mudde Reference Mudde2021, 588–9; Gerbaudo Reference Gerbaudo2018, 747–50).

At the same time, however, some of the work of these craft nationalists falls prey to algorithms that privilege salacious, outrageous, and even “disliked” content, some of it explicitly designed to incite anger or extreme views (Miller-Idriss Reference Miller-Idriss2025). And because political profiteers exploit these platforms so effectively — in ways wannabee influencers and authoritarian leaders alike also see — craft nationalist content gets reworked into playbooks that can be used and reused globally. These playbooks offer users off-the-shelf content for attacking immigration, gendered social changes, and diversity as a derivative of liberal decadence, while promising the restoration of stability, national purity, masculine strength, and Christian traditions in return (Miller-Idriss Reference Miller-Idriss2025). Craft nationalism heralds the fragmentation of nationalism, but at least some of that content is being channeled into tried-and-true playbooks that homogenize and standardize nationalist messaging.

Both craft nationalism and its more scripted forms have helped free up nations from the states that heretofore anchored them (see Stroup 2026: 2 in this collection; see also Mihelj and Jiménez-Martínez Reference Mihelj and Jiménez-Martínez2021, 338). Today’s everyday nationalists are not trying to capture the state, nor are they proselytizing nationalists bent on turning peasants into Frenchmen or performing the alchemy required to create unity out of post-immigration diversity. Rather, they proffer idealized versions of their nations that can be readily realized in virtual space. In these virtual nations, the hard-and-fast territorial boundaries of the state are supplanted by the shapeshifting, deterritorialized, and transnational properties of virtual space (Soffer Reference Soffer2013, 49; Cowan Reference Cowan2021, 190–3). These nations are realized not through expulsions or assimilations, genocides or ethnic cleansings, but through texts, posts, memes, and emojis that index, infer, and incite customized — and routinized — versions of expulsions and assimilations, genocides and ethnic cleansing.

We also see parallels offline (Zubrzycki Reference Zubrzycki2017; Edensor Reference Edensor2002; Feischmidt and Pulay Reference Feischmidt and Pulay2017; Molnár Reference Molnár2021). Sometimes, this entails appropriating the favored symbols of the nation for personal use. In England today, everyday nationalists are hanging the flag from lampposts in a display of majoritarian nationalism (see, inter alia, Chandra Reference Chandra2024). Their frustrations with the official neglect of (and perceived indifference to) these cherished national symbols have pushed them into taking matters into their own hands.

Other times, standard national symbols are reworked in more creative ways. The national symbols curated by states now compete alongside homemade, artisan-made (and probably, via Amazon marketplace, foreign-made) flags, T-shirts, and other merchandise emblazoned with a mishmash of the wavers’ and wearers’ favorite symbols (on flags, see Miller-Idriss Reference Miller-Idriss, Fielitz and Thurston2019, 127, 131; on clothing, see Miller-Idriss Reference Miller-Idriss2018; Miller-Idriss and Gräfe-Geusch Reference Miller-Idriss, Gräfe-Geusch and Weisskircher2023, 78–81; Molnár Reference Molnár and Geneviève2017, 160–7; on maps and other sundry bric-a-brac, see Molnár Reference Molnár2021, 960–6; Feischmidt Reference Feischmidt2020, 139–40). Sometimes this involves reworking discredited symbols of old to convey an affinity for (and genealogy with) the darker, mythologized moments from nationalism’s past (Miller-Idriss Reference Miller-Idriss2018, chapters 2-3; Feischmidt Reference Feischmidt2020, 137–8; Molnár Reference Molnár2021, 954–8). Other times, familiar symbols are shunted together with other symbols that, to the untrained eye, have nothing to do with nationalism (Miller-Idriss Reference Miller-Idriss, Fielitz and Thurston2019; Miller-Idriss Reference Miller-Idriss2018). Everyday nationalists are supported in these endeavors by niche businesses ready to meet their market demands (Molnár Reference Molnár and Geneviève2017, 149–54; Miller-Idriss Reference Miller-Idriss2018, 183–6; Feischmidt Reference Feischmidt2020, 130–2). In Germany, trendy far-right shops cater to both the politics and fashion sensibilities of their far-right clientele with cleverly reworked symbols manipulated just beyond the reach of the censors (Miller-Idriss and Gräfe-Geusch Reference Miller-Idriss, Gräfe-Geusch and Weisskircher2023, 84–87; Miller-Idriss Reference Miller-Idriss2018, Chapter 2; on far-right bookshops in Hungary, see Molnár Reference Molnár and Geneviève2017, 154–67). This is not a nationalism for everyone, but a club-like nationalism, a secret handshake, for the initiate (Miller-Idriss and Gräfe-Geusch Reference Miller-Idriss, Gräfe-Geusch and Weisskircher2023, 83–4).