Why do left-wing substate nationalist parties increasingly prioritize welfare-centered over ethnonationalist appeals? While existing research has documented the growing prominence of socioeconomic issues in nationalist politics, the strategic advantages that welfare frames offer for nationalist mobilization remain overlooked. Drawing on scholarship on ethnic boundary-making and framing theory, this article addresses this gap through an analysis of Bloque Nacionalista Galego (BNG), one of Spain’s fastest-growing nationalist parties. Using a multi-source corpus, we employ the notion of ethnic boundary deactivation to analyze how nationalist elites strategically shift the political frontier away from ethnocultural distinctions and toward welfare-centered frames across different stages of political competition. The findings show that Galician nationalism continues to rely on a distinct ethnocultural conception of the nation, yet strategically prioritizes welfare-centered frames when seeking to mobilize support. First, welfare allows nationalist actors to articulate a positive, forward-looking national project that displaces the imagery of resistance and grievance commonly associated with ethnocultural claims. Second, welfare creates a new political frontier organized around the defense of national interests, subordinating ethnocultural markers to welfare goals. Third, it anchors mobilization in an emotional regime of hope and collective solidarity that reinforces collective action. Analyzed in their relational dimension, welfare-based framing strategies also prove more resistant to the counterframing efforts of non-nationalist political actors. By foregrounding the strategic, relational, and affective dimensions of nationalist discourse, the article offers a novel framework for understanding the welfare turn and provides new insights into how left-wing substate nationalist parties seek to broaden their electoral appeal.
This article examines the reconfiguration of diasporic engagement through everyday practices of immigrant mothers in Quebec. While previous scholarship on diaspora and diasporic philanthropy has focused on transnational flows, remittances, and formal organizations, this study highlights localized and relational forms of engagement within the host societies. Drawing on 20 qualitative interviews and 11 observations of immigrant mothers in Quebec, the analysis identifies four interconnected forms of diasporic engagement: intra-diasporic mutual aid, cultural transmission, informal community mediation, and transnational family care. Guided by feminist care theory and scholarship on social reproduction, the findings indicate that motherhood constitutes a central tenet for organizing solidarities, reproducing identities, and sustaining support networks across both local and transnational contexts. The article argues that immigrant mothers serve as micro-social infrastructures of diaspora, linking family, community, and neighbourhood lives. This perspective expands prevailing understandings of diasporic engagement as gendered, selective, and relational phenomenon embedded in everyday care practices.
From mid-July 2025, an organised nationalist movement known as Operation Raise the Colours (ORC) began saturating English residential streets with St George’s Cross and Union Jack flags. Emerging one year after the Southport riots of summer 2024, ORC has converted lampposts, roundabouts and motorway bridges into a communicative grid that addresses certain bodies as out of place. This article asks how young people read, feel, and navigate this transformation. Drawing on three gender-specific focus groups and eight follow-up interviews with twenty-two participants aged 18–25, conducted between December 2025 and February 2026, the article advances three theoretical claims that together constitute a structural reworking of Les Back’s concept of ‘neighbourhood nationalism’. Where Back’s 1996 South London ethnography found neighbourhood-scale belonging to be sometimes hybrid and inclusive, ORC’s neighbourhood nationalism is durably exclusionary, deliberately engineered, and distinctly gendered. Empirical analysis develops these claims through the strategic translation of radical-right symbolism into mainstream patriotic respectability, the relational damage of flag-saturation among proximate neighbours, and the embodied risk-calibration practices that Muslim women perform in saturated streets. The article extends Mirza’s embodied intersectionality from a narratological into a territorial register and Mondon’s mainstreaming framework from discourse into space.
This paper presents the first systematic literature review of selective acculturation, an influential theoretical perspective in migration research. Selective acculturation posits that immigrant children can achieve socioeconomic mobility by balancing heritage cultural retention with selective adaptation to the majority culture. The review draws on three decades of research to evaluate empirical findings and methodological rigor, offering a comprehensive reappraisal of selective acculturation’s impact and conditional generalizability beyond North America. The review finds that selective acculturation is conducive to socioeconomic mobility, particularly in local contexts with positive societal reception and well-established ethnic communities. This finding highlights cultural heritage preservation as a pathway to upward mobility, contributing to long-standing migration debates on the relationship between acculturation and structural integration. The review proposes directions for future research and practical recommendations for migration-receiving countries and advances our understanding of how everyday contexts can facilitate or constrain flexibility in identity formation.
Belonging in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo is negotiated through everyday practices that link land, ancestry, displacement, and local authority. This article examines how ethnicized categories are produced in routine encounters and dispute arenas rather than only through elite politics or episodes of violence. Drawing on comparative ethnography in a periurban setting near Bukavu and a rural setting in Kalehe, based on 72 interviews, observation of 18 dispute and community forums, and a bounded discourse corpus of radio, public speech, and WhatsApp materials, it analyses how people assemble and contest claims to local membership. The study shows that local citizenship is produced through practical regimes of proof in which people must demonstrate credibility via relational anchors, witnesses, documents, and moral narratives about stewardship and suffering. Belonging emerges as graded and situational rather than binary: the same person may be recognized as a church member, tenant, in-law, displaced person, or stranger depending on the arena and resource at stake. Dispute resolution forums institutionalize these claims, while rumor and media infrastructures accelerate boundary hardening or enable restraint. The article contributes to scholarship on boundary making, autochthony, and everyday bordering by showing how local citizenship is assembled through ordinary evidentiary demands and partial forms of recognition.
Across Europe, Muslim leaders face a dilemma in deciding whether to seek recognition and public visibility. Recognition can offer legitimacy, funding, and stability, yet it also exposes Muslim groups to scrutiny and political contestation. While existing research has documented divergent patterns of Muslim public engagement, it has paid limited attention to the decision-making experiences of Muslim leaders themselves, particularly as localized actors navigating subnational political environments. This paper argues that the choice to seek recognition is best understood as a calculation under uncertainty: Muslim leaders weigh the expected probability of success against the perceived risk of backlash that greater visibility might provoke. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and over 70 interviews with Muslim leaders and policymakers in Belgium and Switzerland, I develop the concept of institutionally mediated inference to explain how political structures shape the informational cues through which actors form these expectations. In Belgium, recognition is governed by regional executives whose partisan alignments provide clear heuristics of state openness or hostility. In Switzerland, recognition is filtered through practices of direct democracy, where the looming possibility of referenda renders outcomes unpredictable and heightens the perceived risk of backlash. The findings highlight that what appears as disengagement does not reflect indifference toward recognition, but rather a strategic response to the risks that visibility entails. By centering the interpretive agency of Muslim actors, the paper shifts analysis from state-centric accounts of recognition to the reasoning of those navigating it, bridging debates on political opportunity, secularism, and the governance of Islam in Europe.
This article examines how linguistic racism shapes the emotional and institutional experiences of international students at a predominantly white university in the United States. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 24 students from Asia, Latin America, and Europe, the study reveals how accent policing, patronizing speech, and exclusionary listening practices reinforce whiteness as the unmarked norm of linguistic legitimacy. These encounters compel students to engage in racialized emotional labor—continuous self-monitoring, self-talk, and affective regulation to navigate racialized academic spaces. While students develop coping strategies such as selective disclosure, reframing, and community building, these efforts often intensify exhaustion and isolation. Integrating raciolinguistic and affective frameworks, this article conceptualizes linguistic racism as both a structural inequity and an affective regime that governs whose voices are recognized and whose emotions are silenced. The findings underscore the emotional costs of linguistic inequity and call for institutional reforms that confront white supremacy embedded in language norms and academic culture.
The article overviews three books about different dimensions and aspects of so-called non-territorial autonomy for ethnic groups (NTA). This umbrella term applies to a range of different practices and settings, which are not numerous and cannot be regarded as a novelty or an effective tool of government. The reviewed books consider the political contexts and origins of NTA as well as the role of autonomy arrangements in minorities’ participation in public life and the protection of cultural rights and contribute to the analysis of individual country-cases. Nevertheless, the volumes fail to scrutinize and reflect on recent developments in scholarship and practice; on the contrary, they uncritically reproduce the major established stereotypes and fallacies. In particular, the volumes’ authors tend to neglect some questions that empirical data available prompt: the reasons for and outcomes of NTA’s conceptual stretching, the practical significance of the arrangements labelled as NTA, and the added value that the very concept brings about. Building on this criticism, the author lists these and other relevant research issues related to the usage as NTA as a practical and analytical category: the reasons for the failure or marginality of most NTA endeavours, the social production of groupness under the tag of NTA, the functioning of ethnicity-based organizations, and the need to reflect on scholarly activities which that often rest on the negligence of empirics in favour of normative prescriptions or the promotion of non-issues.
The promulgation of Nepal’s 2015 Constitution was widely hailed as a milestone in the attempt to institutionalise inclusive democracy after a decade of conflict and protracted transition. Its elaborate quota provisions—guaranteeing seats for Dalits, Janajatis, Madhesis, Tharus, Muslims and women across all three tiers of government—represent one of the most ambitious experiments in state-led recognition in the region. This article examines whether these quotas have produced merely strategic inclusion, designed to stabilise the polity and contain demands for federal autonomy, or whether they have fostered genuine democratic transformation. Drawing on electoral and legislative data, as well as interviews and fieldwork in selected provinces, the analysis distinguishes between descriptive and substantive representation. It explores how far quota representatives have been able to articulate community-specific claims, shape distributive outcomes, and challenge entrenched party hierarchies. The evidence points to a paradox: while quotas have succeeded in diversifying political assemblies, their transformative potential is often blunted by the centralised structures of party control and the depoliticisation of ethnicity under the rhetoric of “inclusive federalism.” Yet, at the local level, especially in Madhesh and Lumbini, there are signs of incremental change in areas such as health provision, education, and the recognition of minority languages. Situating Nepal in comparative perspective with other post-conflict federations, the article argues that quotas function less as instruments of empowerment than as negotiated bargains that preserve cohesion while opening limited spaces for voice.
Since its emergence in the late 1990s, the Bristol School of Multiculturalism (BSM) has developed a complex, coherent and influential set of conceptual tools to critically and comparatively apprehend the politics of cultural and religious diversity. Animated by commitments to deep diversity, national belonging and equal citizenship, as well as to ‘contextual’ forms of moral reasoning, its founding figures have made significant interventions in a series of public debates around Islamophobia, anti-racism, free speech, national identity, equality law, religion, counter-terrorism, segregation and political polarisation, among others. By bringing together emerging scholars who have substantially engaged with, added to and challenged BSM ideas, this special issue sheds new light on long-standing concerns and some underexplored issues. In so doing, it underscores the enduring and wide relevance of the BSM and brings it into conversation with adjacent bodies of research in politics, sociology, philosophy and law.
The refugee construct is multidimensional, encompassing legal, administrative, political, and social layers. On one hand, being granted refugee status can be a matter of life or death; on the other, classifying people as refugees can be a violent act of naming as it may become a tool of categorization. Grounded in Refugee Critical Race Theory (RefugeeCrit) and informed by humanizing and arts-based methods, this qualitative study examines how four Chechen refugee-background students (RBSs) in Poland construct understandings of the term refugee . Data for this paper derive from a larger study conducted in Poland, and include semi-structured interviews, field notes, multilingual self-portraits, and I Am From poems, as well as related multimodal and multilingual artifacts. The study’s findings demonstrate that RBSs construct several understandings of the term refugee : a) refugee versus foreigner versus stranger distinction, (b) being unaware of the refugee term, (c) unquestioned internalization of the refugee term, and (d) neutral or/and positive positionality toward the refugee term. These four responses are captured in the Refugee-background Students’ Response to Refugee Term (RRR) model , which foregrounds the dynamic tensions between circulating majoritarian narratives in school and community contexts, and students’ counter-stories. The RRR model reveals the complex, fluid, and context-sensitive nature of the refugee label while centering RBSs’ perspectives as a means to amplify their agency in research. The paper advocates for refugee-centered, arts-based, humanizing, and participatory research, as well as for contextualized uses of the refugee label that enable self-positioning and foregrounding RBSs’ agency.
This paper develops the prototype of a new composite index, one that is based on the tenets of and contributions to the Bristol School of Multiculturalism (BSM), to assess multiculturalism’s trajectory in the third decade of the 21st century and beyond. The ‘BSM Index’ builds on the BSM’s study of multiculturalism in the UK and western Europe, its discussion on religious identities and post-migration communities, and its expansive notion of the integration process. The BSM Index is applied to the Canadian case, a country that consistently receives high scores on the Multicultural Policy Index (MCP Index) and that is held, by academics and public commentators, as the example of successful and enduring immigrant-centered multiculturalism. The Canadian case’s BSM Index score shows that while the country’s commitment to multiculturalism is indeed solid it still has more room to develop. The paper concludes that obtaining a more accurate picture of national level commitments to multiculturalism in and across immigrant-receiving countries will require developing a final product BSM Index that can operate in combination with the MCP Index.
African immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa may look very much alike "Black" Americans. But do they identify themselves as "Blacks"? Do they find a sense of home in America like other African Americans? This paper utilizes interview data with 27 African older immigrants to illustrate the process of home-making for immigrant Africans. Findings reveal that the process of finding a sense of home in America involves the journey of socially constructing a racial identity different from African Americans with double consciousness. Home for African immigrants means a sense of belonging to both the communities in America and in their country of origin. For immigrant Africans, the sense of home may be transient and transnational. With their complicated racial and ethnic relations in the U.S., the immigrant Africans negotiate and adapt their relationships with their families and communities in both the host and original countries in their journey to find a sense of home and belonging. Study findings have policy and social implications because not all Blacks are African Americans. Recognizing the differences among African Americans and ethnic African immigrants will allow the delivery of social and medical services with targeted cultural sensitivities.
