This article examines how the reconstruction of Shanidar Z, a 75,000-year-old Neanderthal woman discovered in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, became a focal point for digital negotiations of identity, ancestry, and belonging. Drawing on 51 Facebook and YouTube posts and 17,126 associated comments in Kurdish, Arabic and English, the study combines thematic analysis with a critical discourse approach to explore how prehistoric heritage is symbolically appropriated online. The findings show that Shanidar Z was rapidly transformed from a scientific object into a culturally and politically charged symbol articulated through symbolic boundary-making, deep historical narratives, and affective framings. Although scientific, religious, and state-centred interpretations were present, nationalist framings were dominant and reinforced through everyday digital practices such as naming, interaction, and visual circulation. The article contributes to research on digital nationalism by demonstrating how deep prehistory can function as a symbolic resource in contemporary identity-making, particularly in stateless and contested contexts.
ABSTRACT This article examines the modernisation projects formulated within the Armenian press during the late nineteenth century under Russian imperial rule. The press's agency in creating modernisation projects is analysed not only in the Andersonian sense of providing the possibility of imagining a nation, but also in terms of its specific function as an institution of a stateless nation. The article examines the interpretive stances and conceptual frameworks that patrons supplied—both through direct financial influence and indirect ideological support—and explores how different forms of patronage shaped the editorial directions of various periodicals. At the same time, it investigates what the press itself patronised, functioning as an agent of institutional construction. A key finding is the ‘unequal distribution’ of cultural, economic, and political components of modernisation. Moreover, the article argues that the activation of the purely political renders the fractures within the ‘package’ of modernisation components all the more visible.
Since 1992, the proportion of citizens in Taiwan who identify exclusively as Taiwanese, rather than holding dual identities, has steadily risen. Although short‐term fluctuations in national identification have attracted scholarly attention, there has been little systematic investigation into the magnitude of these shifts or the factors that may drive them. This study draws on daily national survey data to examine how a high‐profile international baseball tournament contributed to changes in Taiwanese national identification. Our research contributes to the literature on ecstatic nationalism, which emphasises emotionally charged and collective expressions of national identity in response to high‐profile national events. The findings reaffirm baseball's longstanding cultural role in shaping nationalist sentiment in Taiwan and demonstrate that its effects vary by party affiliation. In particular, the results underscore the contested and dynamic nature of national identity and highlight the need for further research into the mechanisms driving these fluctuations.
'Bottom-up nationalism'-the belief that the nation is of the people, by the people and for the people-can serve as a powerful collective action frame for mass mobilization. We study the evolution of Tunisian dinar banknote iconography as an indicator of the institutionalization of bottom-up nationalism before and after the Jasmine Revolution of 2010-2011. We employ a mixed-methods strategy, including quantitative content analysis of the iconography of every banknote issued since the country's independence and qualitative key informant interviews to elucidate the Tunisian state's process of banknote iconography choice. The analysis reveals that Tunisian banknote iconography was increasingly espousing bottom-up nationalist sentiments long before the Jasmine Revolution commenced. Our findings in the banknotes case are suggestive of a broader institutionalization of bottom-up nationalism that could help explain the strength and resilience of Tunisians' revolutionary mobilization in the 2010s.
In multilingual countries, does the way minority group members speak the majority language hinder their chances of attaining the highest political office? Can their accent undermine their claim to represent all citizens? Is it associated with certain stereotypes? We address these questions through a randomised survey experiment conducted in Canada, a country with two official languages, English and French. Specifically, we examine how a perceptible 'Qu & eacute;b & eacute;cois' accent in English influences Anglophone Canadians' evaluations of federal party leaders; 1200 participants listened to a 30-s audio recording of a fictional leader. Although the message was identical across conditions, the leader's name and accent varied. Results indicate that accents significantly shape voter perceptions: party leaders with a 'Qu & eacute;b & eacute;cois' accent are evaluated less favourably on both personality traits and representational ability. Respondents also report a lower likelihood of supporting a party led by someone whose accent is identifiable as originating from Qu & eacute;bec.
Building on scholarship that situates nations and nationalism within colonial relations, this article examines nationalism in settler-colonial Taiwan amid China's colonial claim to sovereignty. Drawing on interviews, conservation documents and popular representations, we show how the Formosan black bear became a national symbol of resistance to Chinese irredentism across three cumulative stages: early-2000s symbolic competition with China's giant pandas; mid-2010s diffusion through branding, commodification and political advocacy; and post-2017 politicisation amid intensifying cross-strait tensions. However, Han Taiwanese often attribute bear deaths to Indigenous communities and prioritise bear conservation, whose public popularity is partly associated with the bear's national symbolism, over Indigenous communities' everyday experiences of living with bears. We show that Taiwanese nationalism has anticolonial origins and continues as antihegemonic resistance, while suggesting that this bear symbolism may subordinate Indigenous perspectives in public discussions of human-bear conflicts. The paper offers a relational account of nationalism's resistant and oppressive possibilities.
This paper analyses how Chinese Catholic lay believers counter the stigma of Catholicism as 'foreign religion' through a sophisticated vernacular narrative: Jesus is Asian. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a historic rural Catholic community in Hubei, China, the study reveals a three-dimensional discursive strategy of destigmatization. First, believers engage in geographical-continental reconstruction, repositioning Christianity's origins from the West to Asia through cartographic knowledge. Second, they deploy visual-racial dewhitening, challenging the dominant imagery of Jesus as a White Westerner and reclaiming him as a Middle Eastern Asian figure. Third, they perform ethical compatibility and localization practices, demonstrating alignment between Christian values and Chinese traditional ethics while showcasing everyday Sinicization through vernacular practice. This analysis demonstrates how a stigmatized religious minority appropriates the tools of banal nationalism to contest dominant narratives and assert legitimate national belonging, a process here termed vernacular counterflagging, revealing lay agency in the everyday construction of vernacular nationalism.
This study explores how esports audiences discursively construct Finnish nationality when spectating games of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive during a major international tournament. The largest esports tournament broadcasts can attract tens or hundreds of thousands of viewers, who participate in the public debate surrounding the matches. In the empirical study, over 100.000 chat messages were filtered by a language model trained by the authors. The ensuing data were analysed qualitatively, focusing on how nationality is made relevant in multimodal chat interaction. The following five key types of talk were identified: (1) defining and debating the 'Finnishness' of key stakeholders, (2) cheering for 'Finnish' players and teams, (3) referencing current affairs related to Finland, (4) aggressive and hateful content constructing 'Finnishness,' and (5) humour and stereotypes related to 'Finnishness.' The findings contribute to the discussion on the sportification of esports and the way online publics participate in discursive construction of nationality.
This article analyses the development of Albanian nationalism as a test case for assessing the explanatory reach of three major approaches to the study of nationalism: modernist, constructivist and historical-comparative. Rather than privileging a single theoretical framework, the article places these approaches in dialogue, treating them as equally relevant analytical lenses through which to examine how nationalism emerges, operates and consolidates in different structural contexts. The Albanian case is particularly instructive because nationalism developed in conditions that diverge from many of the empirical settings on which these theories were originally formulated. Limited economic modernisation, weak capitalist development and a fragmented social structure shaped a trajectory in which nationalism was constructed primarily through state-led and coercive strategies rather than through sustained bottom-up mobilisation. Focusing on the interwar and communist periods, the analysis is organised around three central domains of nation-building: the centralisation of political power, the regulation of education and communication and the management of religion through secularisation. Examining these domains allows for a systematic comparison of how modernist, constructivist and historical-comparative perspectives illuminate different dimensions of Albanian nationalism, as well as where their assumptions require contextual adjustment. In this sense, Albania functions as a critical test case for exploring the flexibility and limits of prevailing theories of nationalism, demonstrating how national identities may be produced through hybrid, nonlinear and state-centred processes in peripheral and postimperial contexts.
Scholarship on nationalism and nation-building in Kazakhstan has been dominated by a social constructivist approach that privileges the civic-ethnic dichotomy. Even when critiques of this binary have emerged, they have often substituted proxy categories that reproduce the same dualism. This article argues that such reliance constitutes a form of methodological constructivist nationalism, which not only misrepresents the complexity of lived identities but also inadvertently reinforces regime strategies of legitimation. Addressing this puzzle, the paper offers a theoretical and ontological intervention that advances methodological cosmopolitanism, rooted in Bhabha's notion of vernacular cosmopolitanism. Drawing on existing studies of everyday nationalism, sociolinguistic practices and translocal identities in Kazakhstan, it proposes an analytical framework that foregrounds hybridity, mobility and multilingual practices as constitutive of belonging. In doing so, the article provides a roadmap for moving beyond essentialised civic-ethnic categories and capturing the fluid, plural and multivocal nature of nationhood in Kazakhstan and beyond.
This article examines why Sudan has struggled to construct an inclusive national identity in the postcolonial era. Drawing on original qualitative data from interviews with Sudanese intellectuals, activists, and professionals, it explores how ethnic marginalisation, uneven development, and authoritarian governance have fragmented the national project. The findings are based on semistructured interviews conducted between September and December 2024 with Sudanese academics and intellectuals. The study identifies the following three interrelated dynamics: the lack of a cohesive postcolonial vision, the symbolic use of ethnicity without real inclusion and the suppression of cultural diversity under Arab-Islamic narratives. Participants highlighted that national belonging is shaped not only by symbolic recognition but also by access to resources and political voice. Despite resistance to Arabisation, Arabic remains embedded in religious and cultural life. The article concludes that a viable Sudanese civic identity requires a commitment to equitable development and inclusive governance and that Arabic, while historically contested, may serve as a linguistic foundation for a more inclusive national identity.
While national identity results in either positive or negative opinions towards immigrants, strong identification with a minority nation has been associated with ethnic- and language-based nationalism, thus being linked to negative views. We examine citizens who identify with both a minority nation and a nation state. How do simultaneous multilevel identities explain immigration attitudes? We analyse representative survey data from Qu & eacute;bec in 2019 (N = 1450) and Catalunya in 2023 (N = 1932)-minority nations with immigrant populations of 15% and 23%, respectively-comparing nation-state identity (Canada, Spain) to minority-nation identity (Qu & eacute;bec, Catalunya). Our study explores the extent to which these dual identifications correlate with views on immigration entry and integration expectations.
This paper examines Nora, a traditional dance-drama from southern Thailand, through its designation as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage (2021) and the Thai government's recognition of its performers as National Artists (2018, 2021). It situates these actions within Thailand's cultural nationalisation. Drawing on ethnographic research among Nora performers, I argue that these recognitions reproduce and legitimise a hierarchy that privileges national arts over local ones, revealing ambiguity-at once a mechanism of governance and political strategy-as central to relations between state institutions and local artists. This ambiguity is evident in how the Thai state remains vague about Nora's origins and unresponsive to criticism over the selection process. It leaves performers little choice but to participate in evaluative systems whose criteria they cannot fully contest, enabling the state to retain interpretive authority while allowing peripheral performers to foreground their Buddhist-Muslim identity, secure recognition and revisit traumatic memories in the Deep South.
Why does secessionism become politically salient at some times but recede at others? Existing work highlights how cultural and economic grievances can shape secessionism, but it explains less well when these claims elevate the salience of secessionism and why similar grievances matter in some contexts but not others. I develop a typology of regions with secessionist movements based on the cultural distinctiveness of the titular population and the region's relative economic position. Applying this framework to Catalonia, Montenegro, Quebec, and Scotland, I draw on 194 interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and process tracing to examine how grievances shape the salience of secessionism. I show that economic grievances heighten salience more than cultural grievances in relatively wealthy/culturally similar regions, whereas cultural grievances dominate over economic grievances in relatively poor/culturally distinct regions. In relatively wealthy/culturally distinct regions, both sets of grievances reinforce salience. In relatively poor/culturally similar regions, idiosyncratic factors, rather than cultural or economic grievances, drive the salience of secessionism. By distinguishing regions along cultural and economic dimensions, I offer a pilot comparative framework that can be extended to other regions and to additional types of grievance.
This article explores the relationship between insularity and territorial demands, focusing on whether island territories are more likely to support regionalist and secessionist parties. To address this question, we compare electoral support for such parties across island and mainland territories using a large-N dataset. Our findings indicate that island regions consistently display higher levels of support for regionalist and secessionist platforms, and a more salient regional identity compared to their counterparts in continental territories. Additionally, we consider different explanations grounded in the literature on nationalism to better understand this pattern. By examining how insularity interacts with territorial demands, this study offers new insights into the political relevance of islandness and contributes to the broader literature on territorial politics and nationalism.
During the 1960s and 1970s, anticolonial liberation narratives transcended the geopolitical boundaries of the Global South and profoundly shaped nationalist movements in Europe. Although the anticolonial frame gained momentum during this period, its overtly confrontational rhetoric was gradually supplanted by moderate frames that aligned with popular demands. Through 20 in-depth interviews with key Galician nationalists, we explore the tension between the movement's public-facing frames and its hidden interpretative frames that are rooted in anticolonial thought. The findings reveal that, although explicit references to colonialism have largely disappeared from official discourse, the movement's internal cohesion relies on an unspoken grammar of resistance. The conclusions highlight the need to complement the study of a movement's externally resonant public discourse with an investigation of its internally inherited interpretative frames. Only through this combined approach can scholars identify the hidden frames whose internal resonance sustains both long-term group cohesion and strategic alignment.
This article introduces the concept of nationalist-feminine bifurcation to analyse how nationalist-populist regimes construct moral orders through gendered representations. It explores how women are simultaneously portrayed as the idealized 'national woman' and the excluded 'moral threat'. Through a comparative discourse analysis of four cases-Poland (PiS), India (BJP), Brazil (Bolsonaro era) and Hungary (Fidesz)-the study reveals how female bodies are coded as carriers of national purity, while alternative femininities are marginalized. It also highlights how feminist movements challenge these symbolic orders by articulating alternative national subjectivities. The article contributes to the theoretical understanding of nationalism's gendered foundations.
