Why is national identity associated with anti-immigrant attitudes in some countries but not others? Existing research documents cross-national heterogeneity but offers limited insight into the conditions under which national identity becomes exclusionary. Building on Social Identity Theory, I argue that ethnic diversity conditions this relationship by shaping how clearly the national prototype is ethnically defined. In less diverse countries, a clearer prototype makes citizens and immigrants more readily comparable, strengthening the exclusionary implications of national identity. By contrast, in more diverse countries, a less ethnically determinate prototype reduces comparability and weakens this link. Multilevel models using the 2003 and 2013 ISSP National Identity modules show that national identity is, on average, positively associated with anti-immigrant attitudes, but that this association weakens significantly as ethnic diversity increases and becomes statistically indistinguishable from zero at high levels of diversity. The pattern remains substantively unchanged when using alternative measures of anti-immigrant attitudes, national identity, and ethnic diversity and after accounting for rival contextual explanations. I also use Eurobarometer data to probe the proposed process, treating perceived national commonality as an indirect indicator of national prototype clarity. Greater ethnic diversity is weakly associated with lower perceived commonality, and the positive association between national identity and negative attitudes toward immigration weakens as perceived commonality declines. These findings highlight the importance of ethnic diversity for understanding the exclusionary potential of national identity.

Playing for a national football team is a source of great national pride, but the relationship between a national team and expressions of national identity is not always straightforward. Representational politics are central to national football teams; not every player in the team is deemed to embody the core essence of that particular nation. This article asks what it means to be a nation in the world of football within the post-colonial context. I explore public perceptions toward the French men’s football multiethnic team since 1998, when multicultural fever surrounded France’s first-ever World Cup win, to illustrate contestations over who is deemed an authentic citizen of a nation. I argue that national identity can transcend borders for both footballers and fans alike, even if expressions of national identity demonstrate some affinity to a former colonial empire. I also explore the phenomenon of French-born players who decide to play for another country (such as a former colony), further signifying the fluidity of national identity whereby one feels a sense of belonging to more than one country. I conclude with some optimism for how multiethnic national football teams today can serve as models for multiculturalism amid rising authoritarian populism and ethnonationalism.

This article examines the circulation, adaptation, and contestation of US mass culture in early republican Turkey through encounters between Mickey Mouse, Hollywood cinema, and the Ottoman shadow play Karagöz. Although Mickey was the first global icon to enter Turkish children’s media in the 1930s, he was soon followed by figures such as Tarzan, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, and King Kong. Their rapid diffusion coincided with Turkey’s own processes of modernization, urbanization, and emerging capitalist cultural markets. Drawing on children’s magazines, theatrical adaptations, and contemporary intellectual critiques, the study analyzes how these imported icons were vernacularized, moralized, or resisted within national pedagogical frameworks. It juxtaposes the nationalist and moralist reactions of figures like İsmail Hakkı Baltacıoğlu, Haşim Nahit, and Enver Naci with Nâzım Hikmet’s socialist anti-imperialist perspective. Ultimately, the article argues that these visual encounters reveal a contested field in which Turkish modernity was actively negotiated rather than passively imported.

National identity is usually treated as a stable driver of political behaviour, yet we know little about whether it responds to major political events. We examine how two pivotal electoral events – the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum and the 2016 EU Referendum – were associated with changes in citizens’ sense of national belonging. Using the 2014–2025 British Election Study Internet Panel, we show that both referendums precipitated significant shifts in national identification, primarily among those on the losing side. Post-referendum changes in Scotland proved temporary, but among Remain voters British identification fell substantially and remained depressed through 2025, with the gap between winners and losers widening over time. These findings suggest national identity is more event-sensitive than commonly assumed, and that divisive referendums may leave durable marks on how citizens in multinational states relate to the state by eroding shared national sentiment.

This article examines the glorification of everyday objects as a modality of nationalism, focusing on the case of the Kranjska sausage (kranjska klobasa) among Slovenian emigrants in the United States between 1919 and 1945. While existing scholarship has analyzed glorification primarily at institutional and elite levels, this study extends theories of “everyday nationalism” by highlighting how symbolic elevation of the nation also unfolds in mundane practices and material culture. Drawing on approximately 3,200 references to the Kranjska sausage in the Slovenian migrant press — retrieved from the Digital Library of Slovenia across major periodicals — the article traces how the sausage was represented, celebrated, and invested with national meaning. Methodologically, the study adopts a heuristic case study approach, treating newspapers not as transparent reflections of migrant life but as media artifacts that both represented and actively shaped collective identities. By demonstrating how the glorifying impulse permeated communal celebrations, advertising, and everyday discourse, the article argues that national imagination was reproduced not only through state rituals and elite narratives but also through the festive, humorous, and affective practices of ordinary people.

Rick Derderian is the host of the podcast Realms of Memory. Tasked with understanding ‘how countries address their darkest chapters’, the podcast has grown to be a space where academics, campaigners, and heritage practitioners discuss how their work engages with ideas of collective memory and trauma. In an interview touching on the various case studies and themes addressed in the podcast, Derderian provides his thoughts on how memory has become an increasingly central part of political debates and how new conceptual approaches to memory studies have shaped his own ideas about the role of the past in the present.

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.

This article looks at how the Czech national identity is constructed in the print media, covering the November 17, 1989, anniversary commemorating the end of the communist rule in Czechoslovakia. It examines front-page articles published in the four most circulated nationwide dailies on November 18, 1999, and front-page articles published in the four most circulated nationwide dailies on November 18, 2019. It pays closer attention to two speeches repeatedly referred to in these articles — a speech by Václav Havel from 1999 and Andrej Babiš from 2019. The underlying research questions are whether the discourse of the 2019 coverage of the November 17 events is different and, more specifically, whether and how the construction of the Czech national identity in the media has changed. It draws theoretically on the work of Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, Pierre Bourdieu, and Norman Fairclough in relation to concepts of power, discourse, and symbolic power. It adopts the constructionist approach to national identity, which it links to modernity and industrialization and draws on the works of Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, and Eric Hobsbawm in this regard. The research uses critical discourse analysis as its methodological tool, and briefly explains its use.

This paper examines how the resilience of Ukraine’s railway system, Ukrzaliznytsia, has functioned as a source of ontological security following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Existing IR literature on ontological security has paid limited attention to the role of critical infrastructure, often treating material resilience and narrative meaning-making as analytically distinct. In contrast, I argue that critical infrastructure can ingeniously enable the generation of ontological security through the interaction of related socio-technical practices and autobiographical narratives that affirm the collective capacity to withstand major disruption. The paper identifies several interrelated mechanisms through which Ukrainian Railways has served as a platform for the production of ontological security. To trace how these mechanisms unfold across textual, visual, sonic, and material dimensions, I draw on a multi-modal narrative analysis of Ukrzaliznytsia-related media productions, art installations, social media discourse, and interviews with railway workers and passengers. The result reframes the relationship between critical infrastructure, ontological security, and resilience, demonstrating that security of the Self is found in adaptive processes rather than the consolidation of fixed identities or predefined end states.

This article explores how cultural representations of outer space in Kazakhstan reflect and shape public debates on the history and legacy of the Soviet cosmos while offering new perspectives on national cosmic imaginaries. Kazakhstan inherited much of the Soviet outer space physical infrastructure, including its most potent artefact, spaceport Baikonur. The article demonstrates that the artistic representations of the cosmic themes provide an important ground for understanding 1) how the cosmic enthusiasm and utopianism of Soviet astroculture have been moulded into a more critical interpretation of outer space and its impact on Kazakhstani society and 2) how the cosmic mythologies of the past have been used for reinventing Kazakho-futurism as an element of the nation’s future. ‘Cosmic art’ offers a unique lens for exploring how cultural representations of outer space contribute to the redefinition of societal conditions and the complexity of becoming a sovereign nation in the twenty-first century.

W. E. B. Du Bois theorized that the way Black Americans understand the racial world and their place within it shapes their connections to national identity differently from those of White Americans. This article juxtaposes Du Bois’s theory of racialized subjectivity with Identity Theory’s constructs of prominence and change to examine differences in attachment to American nationhood during a turbulent period of American politics: the Trumpism era. Using data from three waves of the American National Election Studies (2012, 2016, 2020), this study examines the extent to which White and Black Americans viewed their national identities as important before, during, and after Trump’s first presidential administration. I employ “racial identity prominence” as a nuanced measure of race to illustrate a phenomenological element of American national identity that differentially shapes attachment. The findings reveal that the Trumpism period catalyzed significant identity change between 2012 and 2020. Moreover, the degree to which White and Black Americans connected to their national identity across the three election years largely depended on the subjective importance they assigned to their racial identity—that is, their racial identity prominence. The White American archetype was reinforced, as Whites with strong attachment to their racial identity also expressed strong national identity. Interestingly, Black Americans also expressed strong ties to their national identity during this period, particularly those with a strong racial identity. Still, the question of how White and Black Americans envision the country and their place in it remains complex.

In this introduction, we briefly define Canadian philosophy and discuss its importance before introducing the authors who contributed to this special issue and their articles. The history of Canadian philosophy has been understudied, and there is a need for new philosophical work on the challenges facing Canada. Some articles collected in this special issue examine the history of philosophy in Canada, while others subject contemporary issues to philosophical analysis. The contributors to this special issue include Ian H. Angus, Robert Timko, Anna Brinkerhoff, Stefan Lukits, Charles Blattberg, Ronald A. Kuipers, Jérôme Gosselin-Tapp, Delphine T. Raymond, Frédérique Jean, Rémi Poiré, Matthew Robertson, Janet C. Wesselius, and R. Bruce Elder.