John Stuart Mill claims that free institutions are next to impossible in a multinational state. According to Will Kymlicka, this leads him to embrace policies kindred to those of Friedrich Engels, aimed at promoting mononational states in Europe through coercive assimilation. Given Mill’s harm principle, such coercive assimilation would have to be justified either paternalistically, in terms of its civilizing effects upon the would-be assimilated, or non-paternalistically, with reference to the danger that their non-assimilation would pose to others. However, neither possible interpretation is plausible; Mill takes Europe’s civilized status to shield Europeans from paternalistic coercion, and he opposes coercive assimilation where it could conceivably be justified in the name of defense. Although this much suggests that Kymlicka misinterprets Mill by ignoring his definition of nationality, it leaves scope for Kymlicka to argue that Mill favors policies that promote mononationality through neglecting the languages and cultures of national minorities.

This article explains how the Turkish nation’s composition has changed under Justice and Development Party rule. Turkish nationalism and Turkish national identity have dramatically changed since 2010, when the Kurdish Opening process was started by former prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The Syrian refugee crisis and the influx of Syrian refugees into Turkey created another change in Turkish national identity. Increasing religiosity in Turkey and the use of Islam by the Justice and Development Party created a flexible nation, where all Sunni Muslims can be considered members even though they are not ethnically Turkish. The author uses primary sources, such as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s speeches since 2010, to show how his discourse became more embracing of non-Turkish Muslim groups and created a dynastic understanding of nationalism based on religion rather than the idea of an ethnically homogenous, secular Turkish nation.

This study represents an application of the concept of national indifference in the Post-Ottoman Balkans. It addresses the question of why two minority communities in Northwest Bulgaria in the first half of 20th century – the Protestant Voyvodovo community and the Catholic community of Bărdarski Geran, both marked by a strong principle of religious endogamy, intermarried. The author maintains that the main reason why these two communities intermarried was – despite all the differences between them – their national indifference, a parameter that both communities shared. These marriages did not cross the ethno-national boundary (the communities were nationally indifferent and thus ethno-national borders did not divide them). Contrary to standard understandings of the concept of national indifference, the author emphasizes that national indifference can be said to have two sides. On the one hand, nationally indifferent groups represent those in which the “we-they” opposition does not follow national lines, while on the other hand these groups identify and organize themselves on the basis of principles other than national ones. In the example of the inhabitants of Voyvodovo and Bărdarski Geran, this principle was religion. The appreciation of the “positive” side of national indifference enables us to grasp “the native’s point of view,” how people themselves perceived and understood their reality, their identities, and loyalties.

How does a newly formed state and its newly created nation present itself at world’s fairs? This article focuses on the interwar period and the impact of the political restructuring of Central Europe in order to examine the strategies and motivations of Czechoslovakia for participation in exhibitions around the globe. It takes Czechoslovakia as an example of a country, created in 1918, that constructed and displayed its image in a comprehensible and uncomplicated way to international audiences. World’s fairs that were primarily organized to promote trade relationships thus gave the opportunity to countries like Czechoslovakia to validate its existence, internal composition, and domestic politics through carefully crafted narratives that were showcased. The article primarily addresses the question of who creates these narratives and why, while scrutinizing the transfer of domestic politics into international displays.

Situated at the interplay between ethnic politics, migration, border, and security studies, this contribution analyzes processes of securitization of borders in South Tyrol, an Italian province bordering Austria and Switzerland with a German- and Ladin-speaking population and a past of ethnic tensions. South Tyrol is considered a model for fostering peaceful interethnic relations thanks to a complex power-sharing system. However, the arrival of migrants from foreign countries and the more recent influx of asylum seekers have revitalized debates around the borders between South Tyrol/Italy and Austria and among South Tyrolean linguistic groups. The current COVID-19 pandemic has brought further complexity to the issue. I use the concept of securitization—the process through which an issue is considered as an existential threat requiring exceptional measures—in order to understand why and how borders become exclusionary and restrictive, shaping dynamics of othering. With this framework, the article explores how South Tyrolean borders have been subjected to (de)securitizing and resecuritizing moves in discourses and practices. In this way, I shed new light on debates on the articulation of borders and interethnic relations that are occurring due to recent international migration, consolidation of nationalist agendas, and the current pandemic.

When I cracked open Marlene Laruelle’s new book, Is Russia Fascist?, I immediately wondered, who really thinks Russia is fascist? I was aware of Timothy Snyder’s study of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s glorification of the debatably fascist political theorist Ivan Ilyin, but fascist? Really? But Laruelle quickly shows in the introduction that this is not a canard or a straw man. Many reputable scholars and public intellectuals have drawn parallels between the Putin regime, its actions, and European fascism, including Snyder, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Alexander Motyl, Vladimir Inozemtsev, Gary Kasparov, Anna Politkovskaya, Madeline Albright, and Hillary Clinton. The term “fascism” has become part of the Western discussion on the nature of the Putin regime, even more so since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

This article explores diversity, belonging and representation in the city of Ulan-Ude, Buryatia (Russian Federation). In particular, it looks at their discourses and practices as they take spatial forms in the fast-changing post-Soviet urban environment. Through case studies of two central locations in the city – a statue of Lenin and a Buddhist prayer wheel – the article reveals recent tendencies of “indigenization” (Szmyt 2014) in Ulan-Ude’s material and discoursive space, exploring them as instances that would suggest an image of a “contested city” (Low 1996). However, this article aims at complicating the latter concept, demonstrating that seeming contestations should be read in their particular context, taking into consideration local ideas and practices of accommodating diversity.

The book The Red Mirror: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s Insecure Identity by Gulnaz Sharafutdinova is a valuable contribution to the literature on post-Soviet Russian politics, as well as to identity studies. Scholars of international relations largely succeeded in demonstrating the relevance of national identities for foreign affairs. However, there are not so many works exploring their effects for domestic political regimes. Sharafutdinova explains Putin’s lasting popular support by his contribution to the “sense of national identity and collective purpose that Russian citizens relate and value” (19–20). She relies on the social identity theory that posits a sense of belonging, pride, and self-esteem, provided to individuals by their respective groups, as an important driver of social behavior. According to Sharafutdinova, Putin’s leadership rested upon a crafty exploitation of group emotions associated with “two central pillars of the Soviet collective identity, including a sense of exceptionalism … and a sense of a foreign threat to the state and its people” (18). Such manipulations were facilitated by using the state-controlled media to broadcast the proper messages, on the one hand, and “the contextual variables” that made the Russian population sensitive to them, on the other (35). Among such variables, the author particularly emphasizes “the Russian citizen’s collective experience of the Soviet collapse and the ensuing transition” (35). Of course, this is not the first work exploring the political outcomes of the national identity construction in Russia (e.g., Morozov 2009) or pointing to the contrast between the hardships of the early years of Russia’s

We are living in a time of increasing authoritarianism around the world, with populism and illiberalism growing not only in states that traditionally have not been very democratic but also in established democracies. These troubling trends have led to alarms being sounded and much labeling of threats, including the use of the term fascist for some countries, as well as parties, movements, and individuals, within both democratic and nondemocratic countries. But who is actually a fascist? What does the term mean? And more specifically, is Russia fascist?

In the wake of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, US president Barack Obama infamously called Putin’s Russia “a regional power […] threatening some of its immediate neighbours, not out of strength but out of weakness. […] The fact that Russia felt it had to go in militarily and lay bare these violations of international law indicate[d] less influence, not more.” Obama’s words reportedly angered Putin, who had long striven to convince the West, and primarily the USA, to treat Russia as a geopolitical equal. Being considered a regional power fundamentally denied equality with superpowers such as the USA.