The Roots and Achievements of the Early Proto‐Sunni Movement: A Profile and Interpretation

In recent years, the term “proto‐Sunni” has become common in scholarship on the early centuries of Islam. Drawing on categories developed by Peter Berger, this study seeks to move toward a more inclusive portrait of the early proto‐Sunni movement and a more organic understanding of the movement's success. It argues that owing to the erosion of several of the “plausibility structures” of earliest Islam, three tendencies emerged among the proto‐Sunnis between the early 8^th and mid‐9^th centuries C.E.: proto‐Sunnis as traditionist ?ulamā?, proto‐Sunnis as pious ascetics, and proto‐Sunnis as volunteer holy warriors. The prestige acquired through their activities in these areas enabled the early proto‐Sunnis to “objectify” and “legitimize” new plausibility structures which would prove decisive to an eventual Sunni consensus.     

Nationalism,ethnic conflict,and job competition: non‐Russian collective action in the USSR under perestroika†

ABSTRACT. The article examines the effects of job competition on ethnic relations within a multinational state. It argues that demographic increase leads to competition for blue‐collar jobs while an increase in the number of graduates from higher education leads to competition over elite jobs. In the first case, people risk unemployment, in the second, blocked career opportunities. Mass‐level unemployment may lead to anger‐driven mass riots, while an intelligentsia will formulate more rational strategies to eliminate threatening competitors from the labour market. One such strategy is to insist that the state ought to be a national state, in which the national elites will be in control. While questions of identity no doubt also may have an enormously mobilising power in times of national resurgence, identity issues are normally intimately intertwined with interest politics. These mechanisms are traced in the history of ethnic mobilisation in the Soviet Union and the post‐Soviet states during and after perestroika.     

All that we are – heritage inside out and upside down

Abstract

This article explores how the axis between heritage on the ‘inside’ and heritage on the ‘outside’ is imagined and produced, theoretically, politically and institutionally. It asks which outsider narratives are privileged and which are contained, and what the management of these boundaries inadvertently tells us about the politics and anxieties of the ‘inside’. It offers reasons for the pervasiveness of the border despite various initiatives to invite the outside in.     

Memories of a time forgotten: the myth of the perennial nation

ABSTRACT. This article questions the persistent view of the Balkans as a place where ethnic and national identities were sustained over centuries of Ottoman and Habsburg rule. It concentrates on the Serbian historical narrative and challenges the picture of the Serbs as an ethnic community who gathered around their bards and priests to cherish memories of their ancient kingdom. Rather, it is argued that we can speak of two competing narratives, one ecclesiastical and the other vernacular, neither of which was even remotely national or historical, and that the Serbs, as we know them today, are not the product of centuries of cultural formation but were carved out of a Slavic mass as were the Croats, relatively recently.     

Othering Pastoralists,State Violence,and the Remaking of Boundaries in Tanzania’s Militarised Wildlife Conservation Sector

This paper examines the ways in which Tanzanian conservation authorities utilise biodiversity “extinction narratives” in order to legitimise the use of violence in redrawing protected areas’ boundaries. Militarisation and violence in conservation have often been associated with the “war on poaching”. Drawing on the history of conservation and violence in Tanzania, and using an empirical case from Loliondo, the paper suggests that violence in conservation may be legitimised when based on extinction narratives and a claim that more exclusive spaces are urgently needed to protect biodiversity. It argues that the emerging militarisation and use of violence in Tanzania can be associated with both global biodiversity extinction and local neo-Malthusian narratives, which recently have regained predominance. When combined with “othering” of groups of pastoralists by portraying them as foreign “invaders”, such associations legitimise extensions of state control over contested land by any means available, including violence.     

政治认同解构：以马来西亚华人为例

政治认同不仅包括国家认同,而且包括对政府与统治者的认同,把加入国籍看作是政治认同的唯一标志是一种不完善的认识。影响政治认同的因素复杂多样,涉及到认同动机、过程,更重要的是政府的政治合法性。马来西亚华人的政治认同存在着一定的问题,关键原因在于其认同动机的复杂性和过程的艰难性,而且对华人而言,政府的合法性基础也受到一定怀疑。     

Untangling the different components of Norwegianness*

ABSTRACT. National identity is under scrutiny in Europe. A new non‐ethnic conception of the nation to replace the traditional ethnic one is needed. National identity is therefore undergoing a public reconstruction. This article is based on narratives of “Norwegianness” that emerged in a qualitative interview study of white majority Norwegians who live in multicultural suburbs in Oslo. I respond to an overlooked need to analytically untangle different components of “Norwegianness” as phenomenological knowledge, to decouple its different constituents from each other. In order to analyse qualitative data where notions of “Norwegianness” and “non‐Norwegianness” are at play, their different aspects must be clarified. I identify multiple discursive oppositions that researchers ought to keep apart, and distinguish between civic aspects (citizenship), cultural aspects, and ethnic/racial aspects. I suggest that everyday notions of the national are fruitfully studied as discursive space constituted by a series of overlapping, but sometimes mutually contradicting, oppositions.     

Where is Chinese nationalism? The political geography of a moving project

ABSTRACT. Since the rise of Chinese nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century, different political groups have sought to mobilise regional support by identifying with the national agenda of regional preferences. There have been changing contestations appealing to north, south, center, west and east. By analysing these moving identities, one can escape a misleading homogenisation of actual multi‐strandedness and better understand the nature and potential consequences of ongoing political struggles using conflicting nationalisms on behalf of diverse political agendas, some more war‐prone than others.     

In pursuit of independence: the political economy of Catalonia's secessionist movement

This article examines the fiscal dimensions of recent support for Catalan secession. Since the region is a cultural community distinct from the rest of Spain, much research has spotlighted national identity features in the calculus of Catalan political aspirations. This study supplements this work by contextualising support for Catalan independence in terms of the state's fiscal arrangements with the use of public opinion survey data. Even after controlling for self‐reported cultural identity and other relevant factors, it argues that support for independence is a function of grievances rooted in the desire for Catalonia to assume responsibility for taxation and spending policy. Meanwhile, it validates some observations about Catalonia's separatist movement, while bringing others into question, and offers support for the theoretical framework linking political economy to secessionism. The results suggest that Spain might be able to stave off Catalonia's separatist bid through some form of political and taxation policy reconfiguration, with the caveats that cultural identity factors and the existence of other separatist movements across the country complicate this strategy.