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Racism and Nationalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2021

Peter Rutland Open the ORCID record for Peter Rutland [Opens in a new window]
Peter Rutland*
Affiliation:
Government Department, Wesleyan University, CT, USA
*
Email: prutland@wesleyan.edu
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Abstract

This article reviews the current scholarship around racism and nationalism, two of the mostly hotly debated issues in contemporary politics. Both racism and nationalism involve dividing humanity into groups and setting up some groups as innately superior to others. Until recently, racism and nationalism were both widely seen as unpleasant relics of times past, destined to disappear as the principles of equality and human rights become universally embraced. But both concepts have proved their resilience in recent years. Scholars have been devoting new attention to the “racialization” of ethnic and national identities in the former Soviet Union and East Europe, the regions that are the main focus of this journal. The article examines the prevailing approaches to understanding the terms “racism” and “nationalism,” which are distinct but overlapping categories of analysis and vehicles of political mobilization. Developments in genomics have complicated the relationship between perceptions of race as a purely social phenomenon. The essay explores the way racism and nationalism play out in two self-proclaimed “exceptional” political systems – the Soviet Union and the United States – which have played a prominent role in global debates about race and nation. It briefly discusses developments in other regions, such as the debate over multiculturalism in Europe.

Keywords

nationalismracismEastern Europepost-SovietSoviet Union
Type
State of the Field
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , July 2022 , pp. 629 - 642
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Association for the Study of Nationalities

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