ABSTRACT The opening ceremonies of sports mega-events are privileged for transmitting discourse about the past and constructing a national identity. Although it is difficult to determine how vital opening ceremonies are in the long term or how much they are ever remembered beyond the media coverage, these ceremonies project national images of the countries that organize them by reinforcing identities. Based on the theoretical assumptions of constructivism, this article contrasts the Beijing 2008 and Tokyo 2020 opening ceremonies, discussing how the creation of these narratives reflects the aspirations to build national identities linked with an idealized past. Also, this article analyses how these events illustrate how China and Japan present their identity in an international scenario. Finally, the conclusions emphasize the importance of opening ceremonies beyond the limited sports context and their profound political implications.

ABSTRACT This paper will study a recent protest in Indian football against the Citizenship Amendment Act, a law championed by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party that threatens to render millions of Indian citizens stateless. Recent scholarship on supporter activism in football tends to focus on the local conditions that drive fan-led actions. Yet, as witnessed at the Kolkata demonstration against the amendment in early 2020, the horizon of politics as imagined by fans remains much wider in its scope. Through this study, we can discern a mode of political articulation by football supporters that combines the local and the national.

ABSTRACT The article discusses the main obstacles encountered in the course of the earliest stages of supranational identity – building that took place in Socialist Yugoslavia in the 1950s, and in the European Community in the 1980s. Due to World War II legacy, both supranational identities were predominantly built on a promise of peace and prosperity that exclusively related the emotional attachment of citizens to the economic and political success of the supranational polities. Since both polities originally brought fulfillment of (single) national goals to their constituencies, any cultural component of supranational identities could be successfully challenged by the narratives on hegemony of supranational center over national constituencies.

ABSTRACT This essay examines how Taiwanese national identity was performed on social media during the postponed Tokyo Olympics 2020. Taiwan achieved its best-ever medal tally, leading to the emergence of a new form of sport nationalism. Athletes' off-field behaviors, including diverse gender expressions, distinguished them not only from their Chinese counterparts but also from previous generations of Taiwanese athletes. Badminton, weightlifting, and table tennis athletes became the “proxy warriors” of Taiwan, showcasing the democratic and diverse nature of Taiwanese society. The Tokyo Olympics, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical tensions, became a battleground for ideologies, with the complex relationships among Taiwan, China, and Japan setting the backdrop for narratives. To depart from traditional research on official national discourses, this essay employs critical discourse analysis (CDA) by examining Facebook content and comments on news reports related to Taiwanese Olympians. This essays argues that Taiwan's cyber civil society has developed a flexible strategy to counter China's aggression on the internet. Taiwanese online mobilization demonstrated self-control, creativity, and adaptability, establishing a unique Taiwanese identity during the Tokyo Olympics in the midst of the pandemic.

ABSTRACT Children’s sense of their own national identities, and knowledge of and attitudes towards other nations develops around five to seven years old. However, no work considers uses of national identities as fictional character behavioural explanations from a psychological perspective, or the role of attribution in explaining behaviours to children. By applying content and discourse analyses, and an adapted version of Kelley’s covariation model of attribution, to children’s television series Octonauts, this study shows that most behaviours were explained through internal attributions, with some dispositional behaviours reproducing national identity stereotypes as explanations for character behaviours.

ABSTRACT Through an analysis of the Israeli case, this paper explains why states add superfluous provisions that facilitate naturalization processes after military service. The Israeli Citizenship Law states that military service in Israel will confer exemptions from the list of requirements toward naturalization. Amendments in 1987 and 2004 and 35 proposed revisions also link military service with citizenship in Israel. I argue that those provisions were enacted mainly for symbolic reasons. Republicanism is not just a characteristic of a particular polity but a rhetorical trope for politicians in that state. In Israel, politicians wanted to emphasize the importance of republican participation, particularly through military service, as the ultimate sacrifice in constructing national identity.

ABSTRACT Since the coming-to-power of the Fidesz-led collation government, right-wing populism has worked to establish an illiberal democracy and to protect national sovereignty in Hungary. Building an illiberal state has been through, in part, some of the mechanics that are associated with necropolitics. Within this context, the government has deployed strategies, including the use of sport, related infrastructure development and national sporting success, to (re)establish criteria for what they imagine Hungarian citizenship to be within and outside the current geographic borders of the state. This article examines the deployment of sport relating to intersecting narratives around right-wing populism and nationhood.