Nation-state Research Articles

Swallowed voice: The ethnography of historical experience as method to describe fate and ethnicity as the experience of geographical boundary lines embodied in refugees

AbstractThis study collects oral histories in intersubjective methods. Grounded methods allowed for themes to emerge that revealed strategies of self‐definition expressed by survivors of ethnic cleansing. The discussion draws on interdisciplinary literature to broaden the scholarly focus from bounded wholes to historical experience. Political scientists convincingly define Silesia as ethnicity and geographical areas in Europe today, yet this anthropological study focuses on the effects of history (sensu Foucault 1972) as experienced, especially emotionally and traumatically, when geopolitical powers divided families into those who stayed and those forced to leave. The discursive field and historical experience of Silesia is vast. An innovative methodology, the ethnography of historical experience, allows for people's experiences of geopolitical boundaries and nation–states to emerge. Themes that emerge distinguish this discursive field in its polyvocality and heteroglossia as creole and multilingual people who experience the imposition of nation–states repeatedly in history. Intersubjective methods change the subjectivity and singing voice of the text author over the long period of this study, and the silent space of trauma is mutually revoiced. Theory from interdisciplinary fields contextualizes the empirical evidence after the themes emerged.

European Empires in and Beyond Europe: Charles Aylmer Macartney and Herbert Adolphus Miller on Ethnonationalism and Minority Rights in Central Europe

ABSTRACT This article considers issues of ethnonationalism and minority rights in the immediate aftermath of WW1 when a new League of Nations was set up by the Allied (Entente) Powers. This body managed the end of empire in Europe and the new nation states in territories previously under the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires, alongside protections for their new minority subjects. This regime of protection was not extended to the minority subjects of Britain, France and Italy while, for its part, the USA and the Soviet Union did not join the League. Nor did the League intervene in the European empires outside Europe, except to re-assign the territories previously held by the defeated combatants. We consider these issues in the context of Central Europe and the role of two significant commentators, Herbert Adolphus Miller and Carlisle Aylmer Macartney, and their different understandings of the role of empire and racial equality.

O fenômeno do digital, o poder das gigantes da tecnologia e os desafios regulatórios no Brasil

This article aims to critically reflect on the digital phenomenon as a manifestation of the formation of a new global and informational capitalist system, centered on the information paradigm. In this context, the presence of private actors stands out, mainly from the sector of large technology companies (big techs), who compete for spaces of power with public institutions traditionally conceived as sovereign political arms of the nation state. The general objective aims to demonstrate the power of new international actors and the harmful effects that the lack of regulation of their activities brings to society as a whole and democracy. To this end, the work is developed in two moments, the first referring to the emergence of the new informational capitalism, a fact that enables an exercise of power that is sometimes refractory and undemocratic with an ethical and moral foundation in affirmative philosophy, a circumstance that triggers strong power disputes, as well as new regulations in Brazil, a topic covered in a second moment. At the end, a conclusion will be made, where regulatory proposals will be presented as a matter of public policies specific to governments with democratic institutions. The qualitative nature of the study allows the use of a hypothetical deductive approach using a monographic procedural method, and a bibliographic and documentary research technique. The academic and social importance of research is highlighted in addressing a subject very dear to the principles of sovereign autonomy of people, especially when taking into account that such research is carried out to think about public policy strategies that allow guaranteeing the effectiveness of fundamental rights of citizens.

The better bandit: decentralised infrastructure, crypto-States, and the rematerialisation of virtual worlds

ABSTRACT This paper examines the role of hardware security as the basis for order in the decentralised metaverse. It does this by considering the infrastructural tools and governance practices at the heart of KONG Land, an example of a blockchain-based decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) and decentralised physical infrastructure network (DePIN) project. KONG Land manufactures open-source microchips to create verifiable hardware that anyone can use or integrate into their own application. KONG Land’s focus on the materiality of infrastructure led them to pursue a governance model as a digital-physical, politically decentralised polity. By foregrounding the physicality and affordances of decentralised efforts to manufacture microchips, this paper shows how rematerialising digital domains leads back to questions of statehood and its purpose and provides an explanation for emerging sovereignties. Building on Olson’s (1993. Dictatorship, democracy, and development. American Political Science Review, 87(3), 567–576) theory of the stationary bandit, the paper positions projects like KONG Land as an attempt to create a ‘better bandit’ – one that sets out to provide its citizens with a superior level of security than that offered by either nation states or the corporate metaverse, with the intention of creating the conditions for Web3 production and expansion.

Towards an ethics of pronatalism in South Korea (and beyond)

East Asian countries such as South Korea have recently made headlines for experimenting with different methods to incentivise people to have (more) children, in a bid to reverse declining birth...

‘Settler’ and ‘internal’ colonialism in ‘Canada’: Reconciling competing conceptual approaches to Canadian Colonialism in the North

Geography scholarship about Indigenous politics in Canada frequently draws upon ideas from the field of settler colonial studies (SCS). Yet, criticisms of SCS and the application of its concepts to Canadian contexts are becoming increasingly common. Such criticisms include: an overly rigid distinction between settler colonialism and so-called ‘franchise’ colonialism, a tendency to rely on a small number of non-Indigenous scholars as foundational thinkers in the field and a lack of attention to the ways in which Canadian colonialism has varied across space-time. This article argues that re-engaging the concept of ‘internal colonialism’ – an older approach that focuses on identifying parallels between the imperialist domination of the third world and the colonial subjugation of peoples that are ‘internal’ to nation states – can help advance our understanding of Canadian colonialism.

Before ‘gender whisperers’: morality, teacher employment and LGBTIQ+ futures

ABSTRACT This paper responds to the contemporary backlash to LGBTIQ+ rights and its focus on queer and transgender children and teachers in schools, by returning to campaigns to exclude gay and lesbian teachers in the 1970s. It brings renewed historical context to debates surrounding teacher employment and teachers’ moral status as harbingers of the future nation state. We focus on one Australian case, when in 1976 the Queensland government refused to employ a gay teacher, Greg Weir. Drawing on archival sources including campaign newsletters, activist material, and oral histories, we show how this was a formative moment in broader teacher employment relations and the contest between queer denial and queer possibility in schooling, contoured by two enduring disputes over: the first, the control and protection of children; and the second, the moral character of teachers and their role in shaping the future of a settler nation through schooling.

Library of Congress Subject Headings, Dewey Decimal Classification and the Ambiguity of Subject Representation of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe in American Knowledge Organization Systems

The paper examines the classification and subject representation of the concepts of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe in the context of the knowledge organization, especially historical information, in American research and academic libraries during the Cold War and post-Cold War era. The author argues that classification and subject schemes such as Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) and Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) have reflected the concept of the region, generally referred to as Eastern Europe, as an intellectual and political invention, with its historical biases and ambiguous representation. As will be demonstrated, despite the emergence of new nation states and the expansion of the European Union, the concepts of Central and Eastern Europe as separate entities are still alive as if the Cold War’s East-West division had never ended. The paper concludes with the analysis of the latest changes to DDC and LCSH (or lack thereof) to reflect current conditions in the region.

LA PERSONERÍA JURÍDICA: ¿UN TRÁMITE DONDE SE VISLUMBRAN CATEGORÍAS AHISTÓRICAS? UN ANÁLISIS DESDE LA ANTROPOLOGÍA SOCIAL

In Argentina, there are still certain views on indigenous peoples that have their origins in essentialist arguments built since the formation of the nation state in the 19th century. These are supported by the media, common sense and public policies that directly affect these groups. This paper invites us to question such notions. To do so, we will review the main historical facts and policies that have affected the indigenous populations in Argentina. In order to think about the analytical categories that are still in force about the indigenous populations of the country, at present and in relation to a specific case, the application for legal status in Argentina will be analyzed. This is a procedure to obtain state recognition as an indigenous community, which is usually necessary in order to be able to make different requests. For this purpose, the experience of collaborative work with the Mapuche Kalfulafken community of Carhué, province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, which applied for its legal status in 2019 and which took more than three years to be approved, will be taken up again. The approach of this research was carried out from the perspective of social anthropology and ethnography.

From Panthers to Political Dalits: Revisiting the Legacy of Dalit Panthers in India

The Panthers had created a rupture from the earlier pattern that Ambedkar has strategized to integrate the Dalits as one of the important political subjects of the modern nation state. The Panthers deviated and invested in two radical ideological traits; the Civil Right Movement in the US (including the Black Panthers’ Party) and radical Marxism (Indian Naxalite movement) to transform Ambedkar’s social theory into an aggressive brand of transformative politics. The Panthers showed open discomfort with the given liberal model of democratic politics and attempted to shift the traditional Dalit political ideology into a revolutionary force. Though the Panthers’ innovations have impressed the urban Dalit youths and intelligentsia, it failed miserably in forming a concrete political alternative at the regional or the national level. I have concluded that, with the rise of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), the Dalits were introduced to an improvised liberal political agenda, different from the earlier variants of Ambedkar’s participatory politics and the Panthers’ militant rhetoric. It shows that the Dalits are more convinced and engaged with the liberal-democratic model and consciously refute the militant and radical methods for political actions.

Neighbourly Networks:

This paper argues that currently operative approaches to the protection of Indigenous rights and capabilities cannot help but fall short of accommodating relational, co-creative dynamics of Indigenous being in the world due to insufficient engagement with the participationalist, networked understandings of Indigenous paradigms. Discussions during the preparation of the United Nations’ Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), in a necessary first step, focused on responses to shared histories of subjugation by colonial powers,(1) and on safeguarding Indigenous rights and capabilities in relation to the powers exercised by what have since become encapsulating nation states. While the respect implied in the safeguarding of such rights and capabilities constitutes a crucial first step towards fruitful forms of coexistence, its conception from within a predominantly representationalist, Newtonian, post-Enlightenment Western paradigm necessarily falls short – at least as yet – of allowing space for Indigenous forms of networked, often acausal relationships of inter-species kinship to thrive. As a corollary, it also entails limitations remaining operative with regards to any potential networking between networks: to the extent that an Indigenous network’s own ability to thrive is impeded, so is the ability of its neighbouring networks to fruitfully interact with its contribution to inter-network co-creative activity and thriving. Understandings on their own terms are going to be needed of Indigenous conceptions of agency residing in inter-species relationship, so that space can be opened up for Indigenous societies not only to exercise rights and capabilities at bounded individual or group level, but also to practise participationalist ways of dynamically centering the co-creative agency of relationships.

Tilly versus Milward: Experimental Evidence of Public Preferences for European Defense Amidst the Russian Threat

AbstractFollowing the “bellicist” school of state formation, the external threat of war is expected to spur polity formation by centralizing military capacity (Tilly, in Coercion, Capital, and European States, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1990). It has been argued that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could provide such an impetus for centralization in the EU polity (Kelemen & McNamara, Comparative Political Studies, 55(6):18–34, 2022). We adapt the Tillian argument to the era of mass democracy, where governments need citizen support. Public support is crucial because it can constrain governments in times of crisis, especially regarding salient policies. We do not yet understand what degree of centralization the European public supports and under which conditions it can increase. We conduct an experiment where we vary both the Russian (escalation from presence in Ukraine to the invasion of Moldova or Lithuania) and the American responses (continuation of support vs. withdrawal) and see how European preferences vary for polity building in defense. We field our experiment in 7 countries (Germany, France, Italy, Portugal, Finland, Poland, and Hungary) with different sensitivities and exposures to the war in Ukraine. We propose an alternative argument to the Tillian approach based on the seminal Milwardian argument according to which polity coordination of national capacities is preferred (Milward, in The European Rescue of the Nation State, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992). We show theoretically and empirically that external threats can actually hamper polity centralization, at least in the short term. Rather, they strengthen the subunits of a polity through coordination.

Time–space control: explaining subnational variation in Thailand’s guestwork regimes

Abstract How do states control labor migration? Furthering global trends, nation states increasingly seek to include foreigners in labor markets while excluding them from settling. Yet, dominant theories maintain a limited conception of migration control as primarily immigrant restriction, especially in the global North. Thailand offers a paradigmatic case for understanding labor migration control and the dual goal of inclusion–exclusion it entails. While migrants generally face rigid limits on their immigration status, the Thai state shows internal variation in how it manages their inclusion as workers: in some places, authorities more strictly regulate time limits of documents, while in others, they focus on control of boundaries around migrant spatial access. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in two sites, this article examines this regulatory variation to inform a more general understanding of guestwork control in global context. Comparing two subnational regimes, I show that the state must respond to multiple forces from above and below when controlling labor migration, requiring subnational regulatory differences, and fostering contrasting means of labor reproduction. Findings suggest that differential subnational incorporation into regional and global economies can shape differences in the time–space control of migrant workers and the conditions of noncitizenship that come with it.

Multinational Democratic Federations: Comparing India with Multi-level Systems from the Global North

In this article, we compare the Indian experience with that of some of the multinational and multi-level polities from the Global North, namely Belgium, Canada, Spain and the United Kingdom. We first summarize the essence of multinationalism. Drawing from our comparative examples of the Global North we then show how dominant narratives of state nationalism condition the extent to which the state can accommodate plurinational difference through self-rule, shared rule and ethno-symbolic recognition within these states, and then compare and contrast this with the Indian experience. Despite the stickiness of elite narratives on the meaning of the state during state formation and democratization, we highlight the ability of electoral competition to push multi-level politics into a more accommodative or majoritarian direction. We illustrate this with reference to India including the 2024 General Election Outcome.

Undocumented migrant workers as activist citizens: resisting citizenship exclusion through photovoice

ABSTRACT This article discusses the foregrounding of migrant activism through a photovoice project that emerged organically from groups of undocumented South Asian migrant men in Greece. It argues that this collective creative action against the criminalization of migrant ‘illegality’ constitutes an active act of citizenship that contests, from below, exclusionary citizenship rights and formal modes of inclusion into the body politic of a nation state. Isin’s concept of ‘activist citizen’ (2008) allows us to interpret migrant participation as a creative political mobilization that challenged their formal citizenship exclusion. The act of becoming intentionally visible through photo-taking and the multimedia installation allowed them to undertake constructive resistance against their forced invisibility and migrant abjectness. By representing themselves as empowered activist-citizens, and by using their photos, videos, and texts as evidentiary material, the undocumented migrant workers sought to destabilize dominant imaginaries and discourses that present them as fearful, deviant masculine others.

Literacy (development) in regional collateral languages of Europe – introduction to the special issue of the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development

ABSTRACT This introduction provides the theoretical context of the Special Issue on Literacy Development in Regional Collateral Languages of Europe and an overview of the papers in the collection. For this end, it first discusses contemporary perceptions of the terms ‘literacy’ and ‘literacies’. These go far beyond traditional understandings, even though expressing one's thoughts through writing texts and meaning-making through reading are still at the core of literacies. Then, readers are introduced to the concept and the ideological contexts of ‘regional collateral languages’: These are varieties which are, on the one hand, structurally and ideologically closely related, or ‘collateral’, to major languages, often the main languages of nation states. On the other hand, they are deeply rooted in their regions; the paper therefore argues that they deserve specific attention along the lines of other efforts to maintain and develop autochthonous varieties. Finally, the introduction summarises the papers which focus on Scots in Scotland, Low German in Germany, Csángo in Romania, Silesian, Masurian, and Kashubian in Poland, Võro in Estonian, and Latgalian in Latvia, before identifying common denominators of the case studies and possible topics for future research.

Imaginary of Post-National European Constitutionalism: Lessons from Central European Philosophy, Sociology and Jurisprudence

Abstract The article focuses on the paradoxes of constitutional identity and the impact of constitutional sovereignty on post-sovereign European society and politics. It uses post-1989 constitutional and social transformations in Central European countries, the rise of constitutional populism and identitarian politics to argue that the nation state continues to operate through the principle of constitutional sovereignty even in the EU’s post-sovereign constitutional constellation. It thus proves that democratic politics is identity politics even in post-sovereign and post-national politics and the EU’s supranational organisation has to respond to the constitutional and political identity question through its own structures and semantics. The central argument, therefore, revisits classic notions of social and constitutional theory such as the distinctions between community and society, ethnos and demos or authenticity and alienation to outline the persistence of nationalism and its varieties in contemporary constitutional populism in Central Europe. While recognising that the nation state continues to be the only organisation to successfully combine rational efficiency and communal bonds constituted by the national identity, the EU’s response to the challenges of constitutional populism and nationalism needs to enhance its democratic legitimation and constitutionally integrate the imaginaries of European public spheres and demoicracy to promote an anti-explosive alternative to the explosive nationalist imaginaries.

Political Breakthrough in a Rural Community during the 2011 Sarawak State Election: An Ethnographic Perspective

This article draws on empirical data and ethnographic evidence as a springboard to explore issues affecting narratives and observations made during the 2011 Sarawak State Election. It throws light on ways in which communities and cultures at the periphery of the Malaysian nation state grapple with the potentials and consequences of elections in the process of economic, political and social transformation. Eschewing aspects of candidates’ selections, electoral campaign process and actual voting behaviour of individual voters, the main analysis is of the formulation of local understandings and meanings of the state elections in two rural settlements of Ba’ Kelalan and Bario located close to the border between Sarawak and Kalimantan. This article suggests that an account of their experiences is a necessity in order to understand what functions and whose interest elections serve, and most importantly what election actually does and means within particular circumstances of local history. As a political phenomenon, elections can look different from the perspective of those close to the centre of power in contrast to those with little power within a political hierarchy.

The Hungarian Minority in Slovakia in Conditions of Slovak Nation State

The Hungarian Minority in Slovakia in Conditions of Slovak Nation State

THE RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN WAR AND THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY: MAIN DIRECTIONS, PROBLEMS AND SOME LESSONS OF WESTERN SUPPORT FOR UKRAINE

Despite the heroic resistance of Ukrainians, in particular the Armed Forces of Ukraine, during the current Russian-Ukrainian war, without effective assistance, especially military, from the Western democratic world, Ukraine would hardly have withstood the Russian aggressor's more than two-year-long large-scale armed invasion and would have been able to preserve national statehood and the Ukrainian nation from genocide and destruction in the event of a protracted war of attrition. For such a war, Ukraine will need at least $150 billion a year, which can only be provided by its Western partners. And the World Bank estimates that over the next 10 years, about $500 billion will be needed to rebuild Ukraine's war-torn infrastructure, which is more than Ukraine's GDP, so without investment and financial assistance from our partners, we will not be able to find these resources in the country either. The purpose of the article is to systematise the huge amount of information available in accessible/open sources about the central, fateful event of modern international relations - Russia's war against Ukraine and the international community's attitude to it, in particular, to highlight the main directions, problems and some preliminary lessons of Western support for Ukraine in its resistance to Russian aggression, which can already be outlined in the third year of the large-scale war. Russia's unprovoked and brutal large-scale armed attack on Ukraine in February 2022 left no choice but to recognise this aggression as an attack on European and Euro-Atlantic democratic values and the fundamental principles on which the United Nations is built. This was a manifestation of the next stage of Russia's global hybrid war against the West. Unprecedented international support for Ukraine and powerful pressure on the aggressor country - Russia - is manifested in active political, financial, military, and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine from EU and NATO member states and other countries. In total, more than 50 countries provide such assistance to Ukraine during the war. However, our Western partners do not yet have a common strategic plan for the Russian-Ukrainian war and its victorious conclusion, and in the third year of the war, they are increasingly talking about different options for peace talks with the aggressor, so Ukraine must develop its own grand strategy, which should be based on the fact that war and peace coexist and that Russia poses a long-term threat to it and the entire democratic world.