This paper focuses on the bottom-up process of nation formation in multiethnic empires. The key idea is that nations emerge from a conflict over economic, political, and other resources. Under specific conditions, these conflicts give rise to coalitions based on shared ethnicity. The nation emerges if the number of ethnic-based coalitions is sufficiently large. We identify the following conditions for nations to emerge: the existence of conflict, a locally heterogeneous population, and the salience of shared ethnicity. We apply this model to account for the emergence of the Czech nation in the late Habsburg Empire and Austria-Hungary.

Since the late 1980s, post-colonial discourse based on anti-Japanese imperialism has influenced the place-making of national facilities in South Korea. This study examines the spatial transformation and post-colonial discursive shift through the changing place identity of Cheongwadae (the Blue House), analysing the 1989 master plan for its reconstruction and the contentious debate over its reuse following its public opening in 2022. The research reveals distinctive aspects of South Korea’s post-colonial discourse, showing how the 1989 master plan created a symbolic national space by reproducing traditional architectural styles and introducing new urban axes that reconnected Seoul’s historical landmarks to Cheongwadae as a project of nation-building. The 2022 opening exposed conflicting ideas about Cheongwadae’s place and identity, both as a historical site of the lost kingdom and as a national symbol of modern authority. Specifically, the naming politics surrounding Cheongwadae revealed that preserving this political site in South Korea has become more significant than restoring the rear garden of Gyeongbokgung Palace, reflecting South Korea’s shifting post-colonial discourse. This suggests that the restoration of Joseon Dynasty heritage – once driven by anti-Japanese sentiment and symbolised by the “Correcting the Past” movement – is no longer a singularly dominant strategy for representing national identity.

Why did some stateless nationalist movements at the turn of the twentieth century manage to build broad support while others remained marginal? This article’s argument is that literacy conditioned the prospects for minority nationalisms not only through its spread but also through the content of the curriculum that accompanied it. Where schooling expanded literacy without a cohesive, state-driven nationalist curriculum, it created an “open” reading public that minority-nationalist entrepreneurs could mobilize through the printed public sphere. By contrast, where schooling embedded a strong state identity, rising literacy primarily socialized readers into the state nationalism, narrowing the informational space available to rival claims. Comparing substate regions in Spain and France around 1900, the analysis shows that neither literacy nor economic development alone can account for the opportunity structure of minority nationalisms. Accounting for the type of state-sponsored education is crucial to understanding the political terrain in this formative period for nationalist ideologies.

In the years following independence, history-writing increasingly became a strategic instrument of nation-building and a means of constructing a “usable past.” Using the South African writer Bloke Modisane’s research on the Maji Maji War in Tanzania as its point of departure, this article examines how newly independent African states navigated the politics of historical production in the early postindependence period. Although deeply invested in African history, Modisane was not a formally trained historian and remained on the margins of the emerging Dar es Salaam School of History. His uneasy reception in Tanzania not only underscores the tension between Pan-African ideals and national imperatives, but the challenges faced by intellectuals working outside official or institutional structures. While he never completed his research to the point of publication, revisiting his experience reminds us that the history of African history was also shaped by incomplete, interrupted, and forgotten efforts to write the past.

The Banat, like all territories lost after the First World War, was part of Hungarian irredentist plans. On the eve of the German occupation of Serbia, Hitler promised both the Bačka and the Banat to Hungary. Romania, the other ally of Nazi Germany, also had interest in the Banat as compensation for its territorial losses and as fulfillment of its First World War goals. To avoid a possible conflict between its two allies, Germany decided to occupy the Banat and appointed an ethnic German administration to the region. This article explores how the Banat Hungarian cultural elite navigated this new situation in the shadow of the Reich German occupation and the ethnic German administration. The failed and indefinitely postponed return of the region to Hungary raised self-doubt in the Banat Hungarian minority elites, causing them to rethink their position in the region and in the Hungarian nation. In the hopes of strengthening their positions, these elites discussed their ideas in the only Hungarian-language daily in the Banat during the period. The texts published in the Torontál repositioned the historical borderland of the Banat as a core part of the Hungarian nation-state and reinforced the border only towards the Balkan peninsula.

This article examines the identities of three sub-ethnic and ethnographic groups in Georgia – Adjarians, Megrelians, and Tushetians – and their relationship to the Georgian nation in political and ethnic terms. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2023, the study explores how these groups navigate their distinct cultural markers, such as religion, language, and traditions, while engaging with the broader national identity. Using the theoretical framework of nationalization, the analysis explores four key themes: the salience of ethno-cultural differences, the transformation of sub-ethnic identities, the politicization of ethno-cultural markers, and the groups’ historical narratives emphasizing their contributions to Georgian-ness. The findings highlight the link between local identities and national integration. The findings contribute to broader theoretical debates on nationalization by demonstrating that the integration of sub-ethnic groups is not a unidirectional process of homogenization, but a dynamic negotiation of diversity and unity.

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.

Liberal and Conservative federal governments engage in nation-building within official languages governance, seeking to align social and political norms with partisan principles. This article compares the Chrétien, Harper and Justin Trudeau governments’ instrumentalization of Canadian identity in the five action plans and roadmaps for official languages developed since 2003. These documents are comprehensive five-year outlines of the governments’ approach to official languages, interspersed with priorities, funding commitments and minister statements. This analysis is facilitated by a novel interpretive framework, drawing attention to the use of a national narrative, values and affect. Our analysis reveals the Chrétien government to have translated the Liberal, civics-based depiction of Canadian identity to suit an international focus. The Harper government portrayed Canadian identity as true to settler roots, rebuking the Liberal model. Finally, the Trudeau government established a pluralist Canadian narrative to justify Liberal civics as a means for protecting and promoting equity and diversity.

How do people form durable cognitive and affective bonds to state territories? How do these place attachments become rigid? I argue that territorial attachments rest on what social epistemologists call structural ignorance — background knowledge and cognitive mechanisms that filter out discomforting narratives to preserve a dominant view. As the state structures ignorance and as people reproduce it, certain knowledges — the nation’s artificialness and the past presence/ongoing oppression of non-core groups inhabiting the state’s territory — cannot be known, lest people’s cognitive environment and sense of self be disrupted. As structured ignorance becomes entrenched, territorial attachments rigidify. I shed light on the territorializing practices-structured ignorance-rigid attachments mechanism through the case of Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh. Through discourse analysis and practice tracing, I find that as the Azerbaijani state structured ignorance during the Soviet era about the symbolic significance of Nagorno-Karabakh and the erasure of ethnic Armenians, territorial attachments grew. I then show how the 1988–1994 war over Nagorno-Karabakh and practices leading to the 2020 War entrenched the structure and rigidified attachments. Uncovering the structure of ignorance and the attachments it prescribes reveals new ramifications of nation-building and one of the facets of intractable conflicts.