How do political leaders construct nationhood through social media in wartime? This article examines Volodymyr Zelenskyy's personal Twitter (currently X) communications alongside those of official Ukrainian government accounts during the Russo-Ukrainian War. Drawing on English-language tweets from January 2022 to January 2024, it investigates how different political actors contribute to wartime national image construction through emotional expression, self-other positioning and securitized communication. Combining sentiment analysis with a difference-in-differences design, the study compares changes in affective expression before and after the war's onset. The findings show that Zelenskyy's account displayed greater affective intensity and volatility, combining narratives of victimhood, resilience and antagonism to construct the national image and delineate self-other boundaries. By contrast, official accounts maintained a more stable and institutionally restrained communicative style. The article contributes to nationalism scholarship by demonstrating how elite communication functions in wartime nationhood.
This article advances oscillating whiteness as a conceptual framework for analysing ethno-racial privilege across geopolitical settings. The framework theorizes whiteness as a dynamic resource governed by four mechanisms: recognition (how bodies are classified as white), performativity (how whiteness is enacted through cultural scripts), conditionality (how privileges depend on favourable circumstances) and contestation (how racial boundaries are challenged and transformed). Drawing on the experiences of Polish nationals in domestic and Western European diaspora contexts, the article demonstrates how privilege oscillates through labour market hierarchies, national mythologies and political conjunctures, provincializing US-centric paradigms by embedding whiteness within contexts of postsocialist transition. It specifies the axis of oscillation-attributed recognition moving around a group's structural baseline within intra-European hierarchies-and the observable patterns the framework predicts and rules out. Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine illustrates recognition and conditionality operating at speed, as belonging is extended and rescinded under geopolitical pressure.
ABSTRACT Thirty years ago, Michael Billig's book, Banal Nationalism , recast nationalism as the force that normalises the division of the world into nations through the process of unmindful reminders serving the political project of nationalism, a project that seems ever more salient today. This article argues for the importance of childhood learning in the foundations of this ideology, understood as a process of reality‐building. Childhood is therefore seen as a period that is fundamental for the constitution of the specific characteristics of this form of nationalism—its taken‐for‐grantedness, its affective charge and its elusiveness. This article draws on two different empirical studies to explore how this normalisation of the nation might be transmitted through cultural goods for children and what its implications look like for young children and their understandings of world in national terms. It argues that in the context of increasingly visible bellicose nationalism, it is more important than ever to pay attention to the beginnings of the banal.
ABSTRACT This study examines how Mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong reproduce, adjust and unsettle nationhood in everyday life. Drawing on discourse analysis of Xiaohongshu posts and interactions, it argues that nationhood can become unsettled even when individuals remain within formal national territory. This condition is conceptualised as semi‐national experience. The findings show that identity labels mark symbolic boundaries between Mainlanders and Hong Kongers; language choices and friendship circles reproduce familiar social worlds; digital platforms and foodways make Mainland routines materially available; and national holidays expose mismatches between national temporality and Hong Kong's institutional rhythms. The concept challenges the assumed correspondence between national territory and the everyday infrastructures of nationhood. It also refines debates on transnationalism and liminality and provides an analytical framework beyond the conventional domestic/international binary in studies of student mobility.
ABSTRACT The United Arab Emirates (UAE) presents a distinctive case of nation‐building, as its citizens constitute a demographic minority. Nation‐building in the UAE involves accommodating non‐citizens while maintaining a distinct citizen‐centred national identity. This study argues that the UAE constructs national identity through a dual process of culinary nationalism, in which food serves both as a symbol of indigeneity and a marker of cosmopolitan inclusion. Drawing on theories of nationalism, including the invention of tradition, banal nationalism, imagined communities and ethnocracy, the article develops the concept of dual cuisine nationalism to explain how the Emirati state combines ethnocratic and multicultural cuisines, incorporating migrant‐derived foods while preserving citizen primacy. The first, an ethnocratic cuisine, is to reinforce citizenship‐based belonging and national unity and emphasises Bedouin heritage and pre‐oil authenticity through foods such as camel meat, dates and coffee. The second, a multicultural cuisine, incorporates migrant‐derived dishes such as karak tea and biryani, symbolically recognising expatriate contributions while reaffirming distinctions between contribution, ownership and citizenship. This study is based on analyses of heritage festivals, popular media and everyday food practices. The article suggests that while migrant‐derived foods are incorporated into representations of the UAE, their contribution is not one of ownership but lies within the realm of cultural diversity, and is recognised within a national framework in which citizens retain symbolic ownership of Emirati identity.
