The article identifies place-name etymologies as a powerful tool in constructing national spaces. Since place names derive from one language or another, often visibly so, competing nationalisms have used them to support territorial claims. This strategy may appear trivial, but it dates back no further than the Romantic period. The article traces the story of how, by the end of the nineteenth century, suggested place-name origins had become building blocks of two opposed visions of Romanian ethnogenesis. In a context of competing nation-building, these scholarly reconstructions were thinly disguised statements about whose ancestors had lived first in Transylvania—defined here in a broad sense as the eastern, Romanian- and Hungarian-speaking parts of the contemporary Kingdom of Hungary—and therefore who was entitled to political sovereignty. Place-name derivations had been little more than rhetorical ornaments until nationalist scholars seized on them following the 1848 revolutions. It was later still, in response to the questioning of Romance-speaking continuity in Dacia, that a positivist generation adjusted them to the principles of comparative linguistics and onomastics, the latter devised by German scholars for the study of national antiquities. With some refinements, the two views are still held today as the legitimate versions.

The 1925 Estonian cultural autonomy law is a rare example of the idea of nonterritorial national minority rights officially adopted in the interwar period. Scholarly interest in this legislation, however, has so far overwhelmingly concentrated on the case of the Baltic Germans. This article is intended to make a contribution toward a broader understanding of the 1925 law and the “cultural autonomy” discourse in Estonia altogether by examining the Estonian Swedish minority’s political leadership’s understanding of cultural autonomy: how it changed and developed up to 1925, and what the subsequent Swedish attitudes toward the 1925 Estonian cultural autonomy law were. I demonstrate that although the Swedish leaders had been closely involved in the long process leading up to the law’s passing in 1925, it ended up seen as being of little substantive relevance from the Swedish perspective. Furthermore, by being strongly associated with the term “cultural autonomy,” the law also deprived the Estonian Swedish national movement of an important slogan that had long functioned as the overarching goal of Estonian Swedish nationalism.

COVID-19 struck a world already suffering under a scourge – a rash of right-wing populist, exclusionary nationalisms. Whether it is Donald Trump in the USA, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Orbán in Hungary, Modi in India, the past decade the world has witnessed the rise of leaders claiming the nation for dominant ethnic groups, excluding and targeting ethnic minorities and immigrants. In this article I argue that this preexisting plague of exclusionary nationalism has made the COVID-19 pandemic more dangerous for our body politics than it might otherwise have been. Following from our evolutionary tendency to associate foreigners with disease, all epidemics hold the potential to raise boundaries between ingroups and outgroups and scapegoat the latter. Yet this noxious seed of division latent in all contagions has flourished in the case of COVID-19, as it was planted in the fertile soil of exclusionary nationalism where boundaries between countries, and majority and minority-group boundaries within countries, were already furrowed deep. I delineate how through the pandemic, right-wing, populist, exclusionary nationalist governments have further exacerbated both these types of us-them divides. In concluding, however, I point out how in line with its well-known Janus nature, nationalism has also played a more constructive role during the pandemic.

This article examines the Turkish State’s recent practice of removing pro-Kurdish mayors and appointing trustees in their place without holding new elections. By comparing previous cases of removals of pro-Kurdish mayors to post-2016 practices, it argues that the discursive shift in legitimizing recent anti-democratic governmental practices should be read in relation to authoritarian neoliberalism in Turkey. To this end, it analyzes a Twitter account dedicated to promoting public services of trustee-ran municipalities (oluyor.net) and 89 YouTube videos that feature the trustees themselves. By demonstrating the ways in which the trustees themselves promote their work in Kurdish-populated cities, it underlines the dangers of authoritarian neoliberalism in subordinating democratic mechanisms to economic development and providing better public services. However, by studying the results of the following 2019 local elections in these 89 trustee-appointed municipalities, this article shows that the local people mostly continue supporting democratic mechanisms by electing pro-Kurdish candidates even in unfair electoral conditions.

The article focuses on two sets of autonomist demands that the far-right Sudeten German Party (SdP) in Czechoslovakia put forward during 1937–38. Its central thesis being that both sets were marked by a profoundly close interplay between territorial and non-territorial approaches at accommodating national diversity, it sets to explore this relationship, highlighting the underlying dynamic. Although the 1937 Volksschutzgesetze posed as an ostensibly “pure” case of non-territorial autonomy, whereas the 1938 Skizze über Neuordnung der innerstaatlichen Verhältnisse entailed major territorial provisions, in both cases the practical end-goal implied territorial autonomy. A closer look into their inner logic and intellectual origins however, also reveals a shared, essentially non-territorial underpinning. While the SdP agenda was firmly centered on national territory, its specific völkisch and organicist understanding of nationality manifested a clear preponderance of non-territoriality. Both sets of autonomist demands may thus be treated as a potentially maximalist combination of territorial and non-territorial arrangements resting on a fundamentally non-territorial notion of Volkspersönlichkeit. Encompassing all the members of the national group, the latter was simultaneously conceived as the basic carrier of political will. Volksschutzgesetze and Skizze thus represented clear examples of illiberal (re-)conceptualization of national autonomy, informed by contemporary völkisch sociological, legal, and political thought.

This article shows how everyday religious practices inform the processes of social identification, complicate presumed ethno-religious categories, and mediate local cultural differences in face of political and cultural hegemonic practices. In the context of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a de facto state recognized only by Turkey, Turkish Cypriots and Turks are considered to share an ethnicity and religion. This “overlap” has been employed to justify Turkey’s military intervention and its political, economic, and cultural domination over the island. Yet the cultural diversities and “perceived” differences between and among these groups are exacerbated by power dynamics, nationalist agendas, and mutual biases. The article explains subtle discussions around “genuine” Turkish and Muslim identities, as well as the enforced coexistence and constructed brotherhood of Cypriots and Turks on the island. The competing accounts of the “correct” interpretation of Islam at a Muslim tekke reflect intragroup power asymmetries and the conflict between institutionalized Sunni-Orthodox and “heterodox” local Islam. The article focuses on two overlooked issues in the scholarship on Northern Cyprus—the relations between Turkish Cypriots and settlers from Turkey, and the role of religion in the political processes—as well as on literature on shared sacred sites and an analysis of competitive intracommunal interactions.

The youngest generation of the Azerbaijani diaspora in Turkey was formed almost immediately after the downfall of the Soviet Union, resulting in the increased emigration of Azerbaijanis to foreign countries, in particular to Turkey, where the language barrier is minimal due to linguistic proximity. This article is an attempt to investigate the dynamics of identity production (and, consequently, senses of belonging) of the most recent generations of the Azerbaijani diaspora in Turkey in relationship to their linguistic and cultural repertoires. While language and culture are key factors in identity production, linguistic and cultural practices may be influenced by various social factors. I have therefore tried to examine the identity paradigms of Azerbaijanis living in Turkey in the frameworks of their ethno-national, socio-cultural, and socio-communicative perceptions. The survey I conducted for this purpose mostly covers post-Soviet immigrants to Turkey and, to a lesser extent, earlier generations of Azerbaijanis who settled in Turkey during Soviet times.

Existing studies on legal approaches to ethnic minority representation often highlight different systems’ strengths and weaknesses. While this scholarship provides important insights into the growing body of literature on minority representation, the topic remains largely under-theorized. Because systems of ethnic minority representation clarify the organizations and philosophies of diverse states, more theoretical analyses can enrich the descriptive literature. Building on the existing scholarship, this article assesses Romania’s particular version of proportional representation regarding designated national minorities. It applies two theoretical models: (1) institutional activism and (2) ethnic intermediation. The former clarifies the establishment of Romania’s post-communist constitutional provisions regarding minority organizations, and the latter explains how small yet influential minority populations make claims to and reallocate resources from the Romanian state. Through a unique, understudied case study – the Armenian community of Romania – this article attempts to broaden ethnic minority representation scholarship by refining the theoretical frameworks of institutional activism and ethnic intermediation.

In August 1920, the political fate of the Kurdish nation, along with its territory, Kurdistan, were on the line, after the Allies asserted their interest in national rights to self-determination following World War I. Under the Treaty of Sèvres, Kurds were acknowledged as an ethno-political entity in the Wilsonian perspective, yet the ideal of self-determination failed to crystallize as a full legal right to independent nationhood. Thus, Kurdish statehood was annulled. In contrast, the drawing of states’ boundaries in Europe took place mostly along national lines. The result has been an untenable diversity across regions affected by the War in the varieties of self-determination, arguing that some peoples’ nationhood was credited with less legitimacy than others. The departure of imperial powers and subsequently the League of Nations from self-determination for achieving territorial independence came as a result of imperialist world policies to reorder political influence. With the adoption of self-determination as one of the purposes of the UN in 1945, and with the crystallization of self-determination as a legal right in 1966 and the subsequent campaign of decolonization, it could be argued the Kurds’ status was not repositioned and in some way is invisible to the law of self-determination, as applied.

The turn of the 20th century experienced an intensification of processes that strengthened Silesian identity, which became an important element of political debate in the region. This was reflected in the emergence of a growing number of entities that placed Silesian issues among their priority objectives and defined themselves as representatives of the interests of Silesia and Silesians. The aim of the study was to verify the political representative potential of groups in Upper Silesia. We accepted the hypothesis that the stronger the identity of a particular group (regional or national) the greater the probability that entities placing fundamental objectives strictly within the scope of regional issues should enjoy broad support in the region, and such entities consequently should be perceived as political representatives of the group. A study conducted using the categorized interview method (N=54) proves quite clearly that Silesians are unable to identify entities on the regional political scene that could represent them sufficiently. The determinants of this state of affairs are found not only in the negative actions of political entities but also in the absence of a clear vision of representation, which could constitute a basis for the formulated expectations of Silesians.

For three European states in particular, the Covid-19 pandemic has served to catalyze pre-existing territorial disputes. While the United Kingdom, Spain, and Belgium have all had very different responses to the pandemic, in all three cases the actions of central and regional government have put existing structures of regional autonomy under strain. In Spain, the pandemic response has become intertwined with the Catalan independence debate (especially in disputes between pro-independence parties), and elsewhere in the country it has cemented co-operative relationships between moderate nationalists and the statewide left. In Belgium, the pandemic has accentuated territorial disputes and further complicated government formation. And in the UK diverging responses to the pandemic have helped boost nationalist movements in the devolved nations; particularly the cause of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and their ambitions to create an independent Scottish state. While the year has been highly significant for secessionist movements in all three states, only in the UK does a decisive shift towards state-breakup seem to have occurred. The article argues that whether or not a secessionist movement benefits from the pandemic is highly contingent on contextual factors, including the performance of state-level governments in responding to the pandemic and the relative autonomy of regional governments during the response.

The Macedonia name dispute was resolved in 2018 with the signing of the Prespa Agreement. Ambassador Nimetz – one of the key players in the solution efforts – queried recently “Why did it take us so long?”, echoing the confusion of foreign observers about what has routinely been seen as an incomprehensible spat. This article provides more context about the past intractability of the dispute by focusing on the role of Greek public opinion. Taking stock of the literature on the relationship between foreign policy-making and public opinion, our analysis identifies key parameters for investigating the influence of Greek public opinion on policy. We test these parameters against empirical data from a comprehensive poll on the name dispute that was conducted in 2016, only a few months before the start of the negotiations that led to the Prespa Agreement. Our analysis demonstrates the extent and depth of the Greek public’s opposition to any compromise, as well as the emotional involvement in the Macedonia name dispute. The findings have implications for our understanding of the process that led to the settlement of the dispute as well as the challenges of implementing the agreement.

The Lezgin irredentist movement is one of the less-studied national movements in the post-Soviet space, despite affecting the strategically important Russian-Azerbaijani borderlands and the bordering process between the two post-Soviet states. This article aims to fill this gap and to examine the impact of the Lezgin national movement on the development of territorial nationalism in early post-Soviet Azerbaijan. Based on the analysis of media publications in three Azerbaijani newspapers between 1992 and 1996, I argue that the movement contributed to consolidating the territorial vision of the Azerbaijani nation as incorporating groups historically settled in this territory. While media coverage stressed friendship between ethnic Azerbaijanis and Lezgins, the responsibility for secessionist claims was placed on external forces, particularly Russia and Armenia. In the long term, this framing led to the securitization of ethnic minority activism as a major threat to Azerbaijani statehood.

This article seeks to analyze the project for the international convention on the protection of minority rights, which was proposed by André Mandelstam at the Institut de Droit International (IDI) in 1928. In this project, the author used the concept of non-territorial autonomy borrowed from the works of the Austro-Marxists Otto Bauer and Karl Renner. A Russian international lawyer in emigration, André Mandelstam had initially been involved in the implementation of elements of non-territorial autonomy to protect the Christian population of the Ottoman empire. Mandelstam’s proposed convention assumed that personal autonomy, reduced to the protection of minorities from cultural and linguistic assimilation, would be a compromise between protecting minorities and preventing them from undermining the unity of the state. However, the demand for international protection of minorities was not accompanied by any enforcement mechanism. The project underwent serious revisions as it was discussed by a group of international lawyers. In its final version, the text retained only those of the original articles, which referred to individual human rights. Thus, Mandelstam’s attempt to make his convention acceptable for all participating states resulted in omission of the very concept of personal autonomy in the final version of the proposed document.

How do perceived threats influence politicians’ attitudes towards religious minorities? Examining the Turkish parliamentary records between 1946 and 1960, this study suggests that perceived security threats significantly contribute to Turkish political parties’ negative descriptions of Armenians. The research analyzes speeches about Armenians via a mixed-method content analysis. The findings demonstrate that (a) debate about security threats is a reliable predictor of the political parties’ negative portrayals, and (b) members of the parliament justify their negative views by labeling Armenians as an enemy. The article concludes that perceived threats evoke negative speeches about Armenians in Turkish politics.

Scholars have long grappled with the puzzle as to why some regions become peaceful and resilient while others crumble into perpetual insecurity. Much of the scholarship that they produced viewed regional formations as extensions of the state system. This work argues that state-centric tools to study regionalism have precluded us from uncovering regional forms of engagement under hierarchical relations of empires. They have privileged great power politics, at the expense of the political agency of non-state actors, such as minority communities, constitutional assemblies, and political parties, among others. This work highlights the lack of conceptual tools to capture historical continuity in the regional fabric of world politics. The bulk of the article engages in the methodology of concept development for regional fracture, in an effort to advance comparative regional studies historically and systematically. The concept development is then applied in the context of the Eastern Anatolian region of the late Ottoman Empire.

This article deals with Sarah Wambaugh’s life and work concerning global territorial questions of border disputes and nationalities as well as minorities issues. Trained at Radcliffe College in the disciplines of international law and political science, Wambaugh engineered a somewhat unprecedented career for herself in diplomatic circles after the First World War, achieving a worldwide reputation as the foremost expert on plebiscites, especially in areas of post-war conflicts. By looking at three case studies, this contribution particularly emphasizes Wambaugh’s role as an extra-governmental analyst of these referenda at the intersections of gender and universal suffrage. Within the context of geographic demarcations, aspects of citizenship, national belonging or affiliation, and minority rights, palpably, were paramount. While integrating these parameters into her theoretical discourses, Wambaugh went a step further by also adding the element of the franchise for women as an imperative coefficient regarding the drawing of borderlines. Hence, the female voting corpus – in most cases of quantitative significance during the aftermaths of wars, due to the substantial decimation of the male population on battle fields – attained a pertinent part in referenda-based rights to self-determination, and Wambaugh paid credit to this fact in her activism and writings.

This article examines the nexus between art and its ideological function, both discursively and in practice, in the Soviet socialist republics. Scrutinizing the case of visual monumental art in Soviet Tajikistan in the 1970s and 1980s, it can be seen that the geographical and cultural distance from Moscow, in addition to complex multi-actor and multi-level policy implementation channels, allowed for non-conventional artistic practices to develop in the Soviet periphery. The article highlights the role of local officials and, in particular, artists in re-appropriating the official identity formation process with specific ideas of “nationhood,” religion, and gender relations, while at the same time aspiring to comply with the dominant socialist realism doctrine. It is argued that, contrary to the prominent slogan “socialist in content, national in form,” artworks produced in the Soviet periphery were often socialist in form and “national” in content. While the artists skillfully worked within the monumental art tradition promoted by the state, thus relying on a socialist form, not infrequently the meaning of their works distorted, or even contradicted, the official ideology. Often this subversion was non-deliberate. Ultimately, however, the artworks ended up strengthening an autonomous local agency that policy-makers in Moscow sought to eradicate.

The article asks whether the divided town Cieszyn-Český Těšín can be considered a joint “living space” in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic. It evaluates the impact of the pandemic on various aspects of the daily lives of the inhabitants and institutions of both parts of this divided town. Three main dimensions of cross-border integration were studied: cross-border flows, cross-border structures/institutions, and the feeling of togetherness, which represents an ideational dimension of cross-border integration. The research was based on studying narratives covering border closures in the divided town, the analysis of cross-borderness of existing Facebook groups acting in both parts of the divided town, and the results of an extensive questionnaire-based survey among its inhabitants. The border closures restricted cross-border flows, which hit cross-border commuters and damaged the quality of this divided town as a living place because it introduced uncertainty. However, the health crisis also showed the high level of mutual interconnections between the local inhabitants and a functional cross-border civic society. The local people and politicians tend to perceive the divided town as a joint living space. The level of cross-border integration highly exceeds the one usual in the “new EU.”

The aim of this article is to shed light on the process of nation-building and the formation of national identity in post-Soviet Azerbaijan. The peculiarity of Azerbaijani nation-building is that the debates on how to build a nation and define national identity were nourished by two discourses: Azerbaijanism (Azerbaycançılıq) and Turkism (Tűrkçűlűk). The article focuses firstly on the discourses on national identity and nation-building in the pre-independence period while elaborating on the roots and premises of the nationalist independence movement. Secondly, it highlights the discourses of nation-building in the post-independence period while discussing the meanings attributed to national identity and nationhood. It shows how these two discourses shaped the existing identity formation in Azerbaijan with a particular emphasis on citizenship identity, marked by multiculturalism, hospitality, tolerance, and patriotism. Yet one can still categorize the country as having an incomplete nation-building process, due the violation of territorial integrity as a result of the Karabakh conflict.