Soft power draws attention to the way governments, and other actors, create a positive image of themselves so that they can attract others and influence them. In this article, we examine how Russia and China use education to implement soft power in Tajikistan and the differences between the two approaches. This article examines academic diplomacy and the role of educational programs and research collaboration in the projection of China and Russia’s soft power in Tajikistan. We conclude that a latent geopolitical rivalry exists between the two great powers that is manifesting itself in a number of ways. Russia is in a stronger position to project soft power in Tajikistan, and, although the escalation of the war in Ukraine in February 2022 will undermine this influence, China will not displace Russia’s soft power in the near future.

The article explores how gendered relations of power and masculinity are articulated in the Hungarian illiberal government’s rhetorical, legal, and spatial marking of borders and surrounding right-wing discourses in relation to categories of “East”/“West.” After the Hungarian government declared and gradually normalized its illiberal regime, particularly in response to the European refugee crisis in 2015, it passed various anti-migration, anti-gender, and anti-minority laws and policies in the name of defending Hungarians against both the influence of the “feminine” West and the “hyper-masculine” Eastern Other seeking refuge in Hungary. This article examines how the Hungarian government constructs the illiberal state, negotiates its geopolitical position, and propagates illiberal values as “masculine” to articulate and assert its sovereignty against spheres of the “feminized” international, particularly against the West. In parallel with these processes, subnational competing discourses of masculinized sovereignty emerged between the Hungarian government and the mayor of Ásotthalom. By utilizing an intersectional analytical framework, this article maps how these competing discourses of masculinized sovereignty operate at the national and local levels, against the unfolding of the 2015 humanitarian crisis and its aftermath.

Political objects, like national flags, arouse emotions even when they are subliminal stimuli. Through two experiments that show subliminal stimuli to the subjects, this article analyzes if those emotions are positive or negative ones—that is to say, if they enhance an inclusive reaction or an excluding one. Besides, the article compares the intensity of the flag’s emotional effect with that of the emoticons, which are figures intended to represent emotional reactions or states. Findings confirm that the Spanish flag, as a subliminal stimulus, influences the opinions of the participants. However, it has had a lower effect than that obtained in previous, similar experiments. Emoticons produce a much more intense type of response than flags. The experiments (n = 85; n = 126) enlarge the knowledge about the emotional effects of political objects of nonconscious perception. Besides, we present an original methodological contribution: the use of emoticons to alter political views.

Several watershed events preceded the dissolution of Yugoslavia. One of these was the toppling of the Vojvodina autonomist leadership in October 1988. This was preceded by a series of rallies throughout Vojvodina in the summer of 1988, which may have seemed like a spontaneous affair and the work of “ordinary citizens.” It was called “the antibureaucratic revolution.” However, these rallies, including a standing group of demonstrators, continually and always referring to the grievances of Kosovo Serbs, turned out to be supported by the Serbian political elite centered in Belgrade. The elite, still headed by the Serbian Communist Chief Slobodan Milošević, gave thrust and coordination to efforts to organize the rallies. The Vojvodina leadership was toppled for their alleged “failing to understand the plight of Kosovo Serbs.” The overthrow was, further, with a view to achieve the Serbian elite’s pet project, the “united Serbia”—that is, doing away with Vojvodina’s and Kosovo’s autonomy. Written sources (including recollections by Yugoslav leaders of the time) and written sources are considered in research on the events.

This article is dedicated to the absent presence and mnemonic remains of the socialist-era monuments in eastern Europe. Mnemonic remains is a metaphor I employ in this paper to direct our attention to the physical absence of monuments after their removal. But it also speaks of a monument’s role in absentia, its continued existence in and its effects on the collective memory beyond its physical presence. The phenomenon, sporadically acknowledged but rarely subject of investigation in academic literature, is explored and illustrated through the lens of the removed V.I. Lenin monument in Riga. The absent monument, I contend, performs the function of a phantom monument, exerting mnemonic agency beyond its physical presence through its representational value for other memory projects. This is highlighted through the study of the proposed and completed, but never unveiled, monument to Konstantīns Čakste on the site of the former Lenin monument in Riga.

This article analyzes the trauma of war present in the collective memory of the inhabitants of the village of Bojszowy. It may transform into a cultural trauma that significantly determines the community’s identity. Combining four strands of literature—memory studies, nationalist studies, historical studies, and psychological studies—the authors argue that in the community under study, the trauma connected with Upper Silesians’ service in the Wehrmacht during World War II constitutes such a collective cultural trauma. Based on the study of the collective memory of the Silesian community and interviews with the Silesian intellectual elite, the article analyzes in detail how the memory of these events has changed the identity of the Upper Silesian community in recent years. This does not mean that we underestimate the importance of the other elements that make up the Upper Silesian tragedy. A combination of local circumstances meant that the service of Silesians in the Wehrmacht was crucial to the occurrence of cultural trauma (in J. Alexander’s terms).

In 1989, after few decades of Soviet disinformation, a fourth investigation by the state commission finally recognized Bykivnia, located on the outskirt of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, as being a burial place for victims of the Soviet regime. Later in 1994, the Historical and Cultural Reserve “Bykivnians’ky Graves” was launched at the site, marking the initial point of the state remembrance of victims of Soviet political repressions and consequently indicating the importance of the victimhood narrative when portraying the Soviet past. This article examines the historical recognition of Bykivnia and the development of a martyrological landscape on the site in context with the establishment of state legislative actions and commemorative policies regarding victims of Soviet political repressions. The case study of Bykivnia should provide a basic understanding of domestic and international contradictions when creating a victimhood narrative and will question approaches taken for adapting this narrative in building a national identity.

This essay conceptualizes five recipes to solve secession conflicts that have taken place in postcommunist territories—federalization, land-for-peace, protectorate policy, reconquest, and the destruction of the parent state by the patron state—and investigates their merits and demerits. This essay provides case studies of the South Ossetian War in 2008 and its aftermath (as an example of the protectorate policy), the Second Karabakh War in 2020 (reconquest), and the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2022 (destruction of the parent state by the patron state). We observe the tendency that the ineffectiveness of federalization and land-for-peace induces parties of conflict to move on to unilateral or even coercive recipes.

This article analyzes Hungary’s kin-state policy starting from the premise that the concept of collective narcissism most succinctly captures its emotional foundations. I look to substantiate this claim by examining at a wide range of sources on how Hungary feels toward neighboring states and show the preponderance of emotions connected to collective narcissism. The real-life consequences of collective narcissism are demonstrated through a case study of the relationship between Hungary and Ukraine before and after the Russian attack of 2022. Overall, I find that anger is the master emotion of Hungary’s kin-state policy, resulting in a lack of solidarity and characteristic self-centeredness in Hungary’s foreign policy, which cannot be explained by rational factors alone.

Scholars frequently portray the end of the Habsburg Monarchy as driven by nationalist revolutions in the provinces. The experience of the Jiu Valley, Transylvania’s largest coal basin, demonstrates that nationalism was neither the only basis for revolution nor the most popular in all parts of the province. The multiethnic working class of Jiu embraced revolution as a response to state failures to provide basic services in a worsening wartime economy, even as state demand for coal rose. The miners created the Black Diamond Republic in October 1918 as Austro-Hungarian armies collapsed in an effort to actively negotiate their status after the war. The miners embraced revolution not as a bid for independence or ethnic secession but as a means to maintain local union power and negotiate the conditions of their inclusion in either Romania or Hungary. While “Romanian” and “Hungarian” councils were formed, such identities in Jiu were also linked to occupation (worker, peasant, or intellectual) rather than clear definitions of ethnicity.

The emergence of Italian nationalism in general, and in Habsburg Dalmatia in particular, has escaped any systematic theorizing in the field of nationalism studies. In the 1860s, changing geopolitical scenarios, resulting from the process of Italian unification, triggered a heated debate among Italian- and Slavic-speaking Dalmatian politicians and intellectuals over the introduction of equal status for the Italian language and Slavic-Dalmatian. Although Italian-speaking Dalmatians constituted a very tiny minority of the population of the Austrian province, the Italian language had a dominant role in public life as a legacy of previous Venetian colonial rule. While the majority of the Slavic-Dalmatian intelligentsia and political elites sought rights for the local Slavic language in public life without undermining the existence of Italian, Italian-speaking elites opposed measures aimed at language equality in their attempt to maintain their privileged position within Dalmatian society. In the same period, Niccolò Tommaseo emerged as the leading figure against any concessions to Slavs, thus distancing himself from his previous “multinational” ideas and igniting anti-Slavic Italian nationalism in the region. And the nationalist tropes used by Italian-speaking Dalmatians, Tommaseo included, mirrored the very same primordialist rhetoric of modern-day nationalist leaders, from Russia to China.

This article explores the socio-emotional dimension of national belonging in post-Soviet neoliberal Latvia from the perspective of national pride. I propose this perspective since national pride shapes the character of national belonging. Studies show that national pride in socioeconomic and political attainment is low in post-Soviet countries and Latvia particularly. Influenced by social bond and commitment theories, this study explores why this might be the case by establishing national pride as a relational emotion of national belonging. For understanding national pride it is not enough to explore how people relate to their states. It is also necessary to understand how the states relate to their people, whether they recognize their state constituents, their needs and feel pride in them, and whether they shape social bonds among people. This study explores this question: how does the character of state-society relationship accounts for the low national pride in post-Soviet neoliberal Latvia? To answer, I combine the analysis of the post-Soviet civil discourse and an in-depth exploration of the narratives of 59 emigrants that have left Latvia toward the West in the post-Soviet era. The bonds formed between the Latvian political elite and Western countries during the post-Soviet transformations brought into Latvia neoliberal ideas and policies that, I argue, formed an insecure state-society bond, eroding an opportunity for national pride to flourish and weakening national belonging.

This article focuses on the role of textbooks in the construction of national identity by analyzing state-approved versions of national identity and history in Kazakhstan. By doing so, this project seeks to highlight what understanding of identity prevails in the history textbooks of Kazakhstan, what narratives regarding the key historic events are promoted, particularly with respect to the Dzhungar wars, annexation of Kazakh Khanate by the Russian Empire, and the Soviet era. Finally, this article compares the main narratives in the textbooks published in Kazakh and Russian languages to illustrate differences and various understandings of identity in the two linguistic realms of Kazakhstan. The article argues that Kazakhstan’s textbooks combine new, independence-focused narratives with the old approaches and partial reproduction of the Soviet symbolic discourse.