This special issue aims to acquaint the readers of Nations and Nationalism with some of the central debates on gender and nationalism that have evolved over the last two decades. This field has moved from providing empirical footnotes to more general discussions of nationalism (featuring, in particular, studies of women's role in nationalist movements or national liberation struggles) to articulating a fundamental critique of mainstream theories. Critiques of gender-blind approaches to the treatment of national and ethnic phenomena are based on the premise that such approaches limit our understanding of the complex material, political and symbolic processes involved in the articulation of various national projects. The articles presented in this issue illustrate both the different positions in these debates and the varied ways in which a gender perspective illuminates our understanding of national and ethnic processes.

This article offers a gender re-reading of the international history of the post-First World War peace process, a period when nationalism is said to have reached its ‘apogee’, when national self-determination and mutual cooperation between nations in the form of a League of Nations defined liberal aspirations for a democratic new world order. It was also a period when international women's organisations emphasised female self-determination as both a national and international issue. Juxtaposed, these two aspects of the history of the peace of 1919 shed light on the importance of sex difference to the idea of national self-determination and to the overlapping constitution of the national and the international as spheres of political agency and influence in the early twentieth century.

Nations and national projects are gendered in different ways. Feminist theory has raised important questions about the conceptualisation of ‘difference’. This article develops the conceptualisation of the different ways in which nations and national projects are gendered, arguing for a mid-level conceptualisation of gender relations. It argues against, on the one hand, the excessive fragmentation of gender, and on the other, too simple dichotomies of more/less unequal gender relations. This draws on a theorisation of gender relations which connects the different dimensions into specific kinds of gender regimes, either public or domestic gender regimes. This enables us to conceptualise different national projects as having a more or less public or domestic gender project. The conflicts between different national projects and with other polities, such as states, are then conflicts between differently gendered projects. The usefulness of this mid-level conceptualisation is demonstrated through examples of the competing relations between the UK, Ireland, the EU and the Catholic Church in a global era.

This article considers how nations are imagined and characterised in relation to the national roles allocated to women, with particular reference to the early Irish state. It examines two related dichotomies, that between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalisms, and the concept of the nation itself as ‘Janus-faced’, simultaneously looking ahead to the future and back to the past. It has been suggested that women bore the burden of the nation's ‘backward look’ towards a putative traditional rural past and an organic community, while men appropriated the nation's present and future. This thesis is examined with reference to Ireland and the representation of women in visual imagery and travel writing.

Accusations of Albanian rape of Serbs in Kosovo became a highly charged political factor in the development of Serbian nationalism in the 1980s. Discussions of rape were used to link perceptions of national victimisation and a crisis of masculinity and to legitimate a militant Serbian nationalism, ultimately contributing to the violent break-up of Yugoslavia. The article argues for attention to the ways that nationalist projects have been structured with reference to ideals of masculinity, the specific political and cultural contexts that have influenced these processes, and the consequent implications for gender relations as well as for nationalist politics. Such an approach helps explain the appeal of Milosević's nationalism; at the same time it highlights the divisions and conflicts that lie behind hegemonic gender and national identities constructed around difference.

The masculinist rhetoric of the northern Italian separatist party, the Lega Nord, is an example of nationalist status affirmation. The stereotyped contrast between effeminate southerners and masculine northerners developed at the end of last century is used to affirm the superiority of the masculine North. The Lega's rhetoric parallels mainstream concerns on Italy's international status, and proposals for reforms to make Italy more ‘masculine’ and European. The use of a gendered language for the affirmation of national status reveals a belief in a normative hierarchy of nations, but also introduces a tension between a ‘masculinist’ status affirmation and a model of modernity which includes the emancipation of women as one of its principles.

Two cross-national women's organisations, one in Northern Ireland the other in Bosnia-Herzegovina, are observed here in interaction with each other. The article explores the connection between their ability to sustain such cross-community alliances and their choice to be women's projects. In so doing, it addresses the question ‘are feminism and nationalism compatible?’ Not all the women are ‘anti-nationalist’ in philosophy, but they draw distinctions between variants of nationalism, and may be described as ‘anti-essentialist’. The article distinguishes between variants of ‘feminism’, recognising it, too, as a plurality of movements. An anti-essentialist understanding of ethnicity and nation is partnered in both the Network and Medica by an anti-essentialist feminism, in which a woman's family role is minimised and value placed instead on her autonomy and agency. Certain forms of feminism and nationalism are thus compatible – but the configuration may be progressive or retrograde.

NIRA YUVAL-DAVIS, Gender & Nation. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1997. 157 pp. £12.95 (pbk.). LOIS WEST (ed.), Feminist Nationalism. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. 294 pp. £13.99 (pbk.). RICK WILFORD AND ROBERT L. MILLER (eds.), Women, Ethnicity and Nationalism: The Politics of Transition. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. 212 pp. £14.99 (pbk.). CYNTHIA COCKBURN, The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict. London and New York: Zed Books, 1998 247 pp. £14.95 (pbk.).