Reconsidering nationalism and feminism: the Kurdish political movement in Turkey

Feminist scholars have documented with reference to multiple empirical contexts that feminist claims within nationalist movements are often side‐lined, constructed as ‘inauthentic’ and frequently discredited for imitating supposedly western notions of gender‐based equality. Despite these historical precedents, some feminist scholars have pointed to the positive aspects of nationalist movements, which frequently open up spaces for gender‐based claims. Our research is based on the recognition that we cannot discuss and evaluate the fraught relationship in the abstract but that we need to look at the specific historical and empirical contexts and articulations of nationalism and feminism. The specific case study we draw from is the relationship between the Kurdish women's movement and the wider Kurdish political movement in Turkey. We are exploring the ways that the Kurdish movement in Turkey has politicised Kurdish women's rights activists and examine how Kurdish women activists have reacted to patriarchal tendencies within the Kurdish movement.     

Remaking Sarajevo: Bosnian nationalism after the Dayton Accord

The task of rebuilding a city after war-time destruction can take many forms. In addition to the obvious signs of refurbishment and new buildings, there are more subtle forms of renewal involving a re-creation of the city’s identity and changes to its inhabitants’ views of the world. For Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia and Hercegovina, the cessation of the struggle for control of the city, involving various ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia, has brought about several forms of renewal, many of which have been closely related to the altered political status of Bosnia. This paper investigates ways in which the changing face of Sarajevo is associated with attempts to establish the state of Bosnia and Hercegovina subsequent to the signing of the Dayton Accord that guaranteed some measure of security to Sarajevo and to Bosnia itself. In particular, manifestations of a growing Bosnian nationalism are analysed in the context of the new state’s attempts to establish a clear identity within the deeply disturbed geopolitical setting of the former Yugoslavia. Special attention is given to the renaming of many streets within Sarajevo and to the symbolism on the newly-issued banknotes. Consideration is given to theories of nationalism and to the manifestations of nationalism in the specific context of the former Yugoslavia. There is particular focus upon the position of the Bosnian Muslims in the newly-established state and the emergence of a Bosnian nationalist agenda.     

Argentine territorial nationalism revisited: The Malvinas/Falklands dispute and geographies of everyday nationalism

This paper is concerned with expressions of Argentine territorial nationalism with a specific focus on the Malvinas/Falklands dispute. Billig’s (1995) notion of banal nationalism has been widely applied as a means to understanding the ways in which national identities are learnt and reproduced by the populace, through a multitude of ‘mundane’ representations. More recently Billig’s (1995) thesis has been critiqued (Jones & Merriman, 2009) for its rigidity and inability to take account of the different ways these nationalisms are produced and received (Müller, 2008) within and outside of the nation-state. We build on these interventions by arguing that research into territorial nationalism should not ignore the wider temporal, spatial, political and everyday contexts in which such discourses emerge and are consumed. To illustrate this diversity we contend that territorial nationalism and, more specifically, the attention placed on the Malvinas dispute by the Argentine government has varied in its intensity, depending on wider political events and agendas in the South West Atlantic and Latin American regions. Secondly, through the use of interview extracts from a pilot study conducted with 20 young people in Buenos Aires, we suggest that Argentine territorial nationalism is not received uniformly across the nation-state and, rather, should be explored in its everyday contexts. These contexts take into consideration things like respondent’s geographical location, personal/familial relationships and generation, amongst other variables, in order to more sensitively appreciate Argentine territorial nationalism’s multifarious reception.     

Religion and nationalism: four approaches*

ABSTRACT. Building on recent literature, this article discusses four ways of studying the relationship between religion and nationalism. The first is to treat religion and nationalism, along with ethnicity and race, as analogous phenomena. The second is to specify ways in which religion helps explain things about nationalism – its origin, its power or its distinctive character in particular cases. The third is to treat religion as part of nationalism, and to specify modes of interpenetration and intertwining. The fourth is to posit a distinctively religious form of nationalism. The article concludes by reconsidering the much‐criticised understanding of nationalism as a distinctively secular phenomenon.     

Defining the nation: Recent historiography and Irish nationalism

This article considers problems raised in recent historical scholarship concerning the definition of Irish national identity. Catholicism's growing importance in this identity is shown by comparing the eighteenth century United Irishmen, who combined secular and sectarian republicanism, the romantic nationalism of the nineteenth century Young Ireland movement, and the almost exclusively Catholic Irish Republican Army of this century. However, this Catholic, Gaelic, separatist identity excluded Protestant, non‐Gaelic and unionist Irish people. The author concludes by rejecting the notion of ‘an immemorial Irish nation, unfolding holistically through the centuries’, to stress discontinuities over time and the wider geographical setting of the British Isles.     

Consuming icons: nationalism and advertising in Australia*

ABSTRACT. In extension of Billig's (1995) and Edensor's (2002) contribution to the literature, this paper examines an often overlooked element in ‘mundane’ nationalism, company advertising. Through the development of a typology of advertising strategies, it examines the role of companies as nationalist actors, and highlights how advertisements can engage with and impact on wider national discourses. Nationalist company advertising is classified into types, depending on how associated the company is with nationalism in popular discourse, and whether the advertising campaign involves the company's participation in broader nationalistic political projects. The types developed in this typology include (1) ‘ordinary marketing/achieving nationalist credentials’, (2) ‘ordinary marketing/established nationalist credentials’ and (3) ‘activist marketing/achieving nationalist credentials’. Case studies from the Australian context are used to illustrate these types, how the different types use nationalism, and their varying impact on shaping wider nationalistic discourses.     

Regionalising resource security in the Asia-Pacific: the challenge of economic nationalism

In recent years, efforts to institutionalise resource security cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region have intensified. Soaring world prices for minerals and energy have seen a range of resource security strategies launched—through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), ASEAN Plus Three, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and the East Asia Summit—all of which aim to promote intergovernmental dialogue, policy coordination and the integration of regional resource markets. However, the practical achievements of these regional efforts have been limited, as none have advanced beyond dialogue activities to more formalised types of resource security cooperation. This article examines the dynamics of these abortive attempts to regionalise resource cooperation in the Asia-Pacific, arguing that economic nationalist resource policy preferences held by governments have acted as a major obstacle to cooperation. Through an analysis of national resource policy regimes and the outputs of recent cooperative efforts, it demonstrates how economic nationalism has encouraged inward-looking and sovereignty-conscious actions on the part of major resource players in the Asia-Pacific. As a result, intergovernmental resource cooperation has been limited to informal and voluntary ‘soft-law’ initiatives, which have not made a substantive contribution to the resource security of economies in the region.