Introduction: Challenges of State Building, State Reconstruction and National Identity Reconfiguration

2017 ◽  
pp. 3-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Redie Bereketeab
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
State Building ◽  
State Reconstruction

The Rise of Majorities and Emerging Existential Threats to India and China

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Castellino
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Affirmative Action ◽  
State Building ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Citizenship Rights ◽  
China And India ◽  
Unity In Diversity ◽  
Potential Impact ◽  
Action Measures ◽  
India And China

Abstract China and India are comparable in size, complexity, and their relatively recent State-building histories. Commencing in 1947 and 1949 respectively, the relatively recent foundations of India and China highlighted a ‘unity in diversity’ message. The significance of this lay as much in ideology as in a pragmatism that was both central and relatively successful in bringing what could be argued as many civilizations into singular modern States. While the messages about diversity have always been contested in some quarters by rival ethno-nationalists, they remained significant in laying the foundations for a strong ‘national’ identity. To the majority populations, Hindu in India and Han in China this called for restraint to any triumphalism or chauvinism; to the minorities, they called for unshakeable loyalty in return for full citizenship rights. In both cases, these messages were backed by constructive affirmative action measures that, irrespective of their efficacy, served to emphasize the ‘unity in diversity’ message, sowing a degree of fealty towards the State over what may have been more prominent and compelling ethno-religious or ethno-linguistic cleavages. In recent years, however, this message has been significantly altered, as political majoritarianism has begun to oust legally or administratively determined minority protections. This article seeks to offer an assessment of the potential impact on this phenomenon on each country, arguing that it has contributed to instability, sowing seeds for the rise of opposing sub-national identities that the founding parents of each State actively sought to counter in their statecraft.

scholarly journals STATE BUILDING AND THE LIMITS OF LEGIBILITY: KINSHIP NETWORKS AND KURDISH RESISTANCE IN TURKEY

2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ceren Belge
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
State Power ◽  
State Building ◽  
Turkish Republic ◽  
Disciplinary Practices ◽  
Nationalist Movements ◽  
Kinship Networks ◽  
Considerable Resistance

AbstractFollowing the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the twin goals of centralizing state power and inscribing a uniform national identity on all citizens resulted in the proliferation of disciplinary practices that required changes in habits and everyday life as well as in the locus of faith, allegiance, and obedience. Nowhere were the repercussions felt as deeply as in the Kurdish regions, where the urge to create a new citizen sparked considerable resistance. This article suggests that alongside Kurdish nationalist movements, kinship networks and morality constituted an alternative reservoir of resistance to the new disciplinary practices that followed state building. By subverting state practices to make citizens legible, kinship networks, I argue, undermined the state's attempts to establish bureaucratic authority and create an exclusive identity.

scholarly journals Symbiosis of Modernisation and National Identity in the Legacy of the “Baltars” (Baltic Art) Porcelain Painting Workshop, 1924–1930

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-55
Author(s):  
Dace Ļaviņa
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Baltic Sea ◽  
State Building ◽  
The Baltic Sea ◽  
Graphic Artist ◽  
Baltic Sea Region ◽  
The Baltic

Summary This article is dedicated to the “Baltars” collective porcelain painting workshop (1924–1930), founded in Riga, Latvia by three modernist artists: painters Romans Suta (1896–1944) and Aleksandra Beļcova (1892–1981) and graphic artist Sigismunds Vidbergs (1890–1970).The “Baltars” phenomenon is significant because of the innovations that the artists brought to the landscape of Latvian porcelain manufacturing and its exhibition activities in the 1920s and the early 1930s, both local and in the Baltic Sea region—Lithuania, Estonia, and Sweden. The article investigates “Baltars” foundation and closure, artistic activities of the company, its attempts to enter the international art and trade scene, and its accomplishments. Special attention is paid to the amalgamation of modernisation, nationalism, and state-building manifested in their paintings on porcelain. Due to the present growing interest in porcelain art in Latvia, triggered by numerous exhibitions and publications, discourse on the “Baltars” phenomenon has become topical.

scholarly journals The process of weakening of nation-state in the era of NEO-liberalism and the crisis of democracy

2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-55
Author(s):  
Svetlana Stamenova
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
State Building ◽  
The State ◽  
Nation State ◽  
National State

The article aims to show that as a result of globalization and NEO-liberal form of governance and ideology, the state was weakened through a complex system of economic, financial, technological and social relations on a global scale. The withdrawal of the state from regulative functions on its territory is a refusal of the state for ideological mobilization of its populace based on nationalism and national identity. During the decline of national identity, the national state moves its role from imposing of cultural and national homogeneity, a characteristic of the earlier stage of nation-state building, to supporting cultural diversity. Crisis of democracy and emergence of post-democracy are considered and the question about possibility of having democracy beyond the nation-state borders.

The Politics of Monumentalizing Trauma: Visual Use of Martyrdom in the Memorialization of the Iraq-Iran War

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-132
Author(s):  
Nina Zietlow
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Iraq War ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
State Building ◽  
The Political ◽  
Collective Trauma ◽  
Islamic Republic ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
National Trauma ◽  
Self Image

This poster focuses on three mediums of commemoration: the monument, the memorial, and the museum as tools of state-sanctioned memory creation, and thereby spaces for politicized rituals of memory which further state-building projects. Specifically, during and after The Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) the al-Shaheed Monument (1983), and the Victory Arch (1989) in Baghdad and the Martyrs’ Museum (1996) in Tehran functioned as politically strategic representations of collective trauma. Both the Ba'ath party in Iraq and the emerging Islamic Republic in Iran used these sites to render and politicize memories of violence and loss. Despite obvious differences, the projects in Baghdad and Tehran appealed to a need to address national trauma while bolstering idealized images of statehood. The Ba'athist party under Saddam Hussein capitalized on the collective trauma of the Iraq-Iran war to further a hegemonic Sunni identity, which was both religious and political. The use of immense scale, vulgar displays of power, and Islamic imagery in both the al-Shaheed Monument and Victory Arch linked Sunni and Ba'athist causes and allowed Hussein to characterize the Iran-Iraq War as a sacred project of national and religious vindication. Similarly, the Martyrs’ Museum in Tehran constructs a specific version of history using motifs of the Battle of Karbala, Imam Husayn, martyr and civilian deaths, and blood to tie Iranian national identity to ritualized Shia martyrdom. The Martyrs’ Museum parallels the religification of national identity as seen in Iraq, and configures death as a public, religiopolitical act. Despite Ba'athist Iraq's secular self-image, the strategic harnessing of trauma both Iraq and Iran demonstrates a constructed connection between political state hegemony, religious practice, and rituals of grief. In these ways, state propagated imagery through physical commemorations of the Iran-Iraq War furthered the political – and resulting religious – sectarian divide in the official positions of the two nations.

Maps and Spaces

2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-145
Author(s):  
Christine Noelle-Karimi
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Middle East ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
State Building ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Inquiry ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
The Past

Students of Afghan history come up against two sets of academic demarcations and appropriations. First, as Nile Green points out in his introduction to this roundtable, Afghanistan as a field of study tends to fall off the edge of the scholarly traditions associated with the regional denominations of the Middle East, South Asia, and Central Asia. Second, the tendency to view history through the lens of present-day national entities presents an impediment to historical inquiry and not only in Afghanistan. The attempt to streamline the past to fit a consistent narrative of state-building may serve to foster a national identity, yet it is of little use in gaining a deeper understanding of the political, social, and economic processes at work in a given period.

scholarly journals NATIONAL IDENTITY AND THE NATIONAL IDEA AS A FACTOR OF STATE-BUILDING

2020 ◽  
pp. 174-189
Author(s):  
Maiia Moser
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
State Building ◽  
Functional Approach ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Clear Understanding ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
Adequate Account ◽  
False Information ◽  
Ukrainian Society

Although it is obvious that an adequate account of the notion of national identity requires a certain understanding of national consciousness, there is still no generally accepted theory regarding the latter. The article considers the connection of state-building and nation-building. The most important tool of nation-building is the dissemination of national consciousness and national identity. The article analyzes the creation of a national idea and considers the major reasons for the incompleteness of Ukrainian nation-building, which results from a lack of political consensus and a comparatively low level of the cultural development of Ukrainian society. For this purpose, we have researched various political materials from web resources using the tools of a structural-functional approach, discourse analysis and content analysis. The study opens deeper insights into the genuine values, interests, motives, stereotypes, attitudes, strategies and tactics of some politicians. No aspect of national idea is more more puzzling than nation consciousness and national identity. Despite the lack of any agreed upon theory of national consciousness, there is a widespread, if less than universal, understand that an adequate account of national identity requires a clear understanding of it. We need to understand both what nation consciousness, national identity, national idea, nation and state-building. Therefore the problem of Ukrainian nation and state building results from contradictory ideas od Ukrainian politicians, the lack of a common national idea as such, and the dissemination of false information among the electorate.

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