In the early 20th century, Orissa, a province in British India, was marked by dismemberment and fragmentation. Nationalist leaders in colonial Orissa often portrayed the province as a disfigured mother to evoke nationalist sentiment among the Odia people and garner support for the unification of the Oriya-speaking tracts in adjacent provinces to form a separate and complete Orissa province. One painting from the period depicts a woman representing “Mother Orissa” being dissected on a table by an Englishman and surrounded by wolf-headed figures representing Bengal, Madras, and Bihar, who were opposed to the idea of Orissa’s unification. However, these leaders were careful not to create an environment of coercion and sought to allow for expressions of difference to foster a healthy national life. One way they did this was by trying to unite intrareligious groups in Orissa while also calling for the need to bring together people of different regions living in Orissa. Additionally, they balanced their allegiance and devotion among three mothers: Mother Orissa, Mother India, and Mother Victoria.

To survive over time, a diaspora must create sites of belonging and micro places in which to concentrate the main elements of its “iconography” that can consolidate social networks. This article analyzes how second-generation Greeks in Italy fit into diaspora networks by investigating the ways in which they define their sense of Greekness and use their ethnic resources. The findings of field research show a weakness of (formal and informal) social network ties and the pre-eminence of the family’s role in the process of sociocultural identification and ethnic identity construction. In fact, the second generation’s “ways of belonging” and the sense of attachment to Greece have an autonomous significance and are expressed more at a familial level and less collectively. Familial socialization plays a mediating role in the process of identification and transmission of Greekness, as well as in guiding ways of employing ethnic resources, contributing to the maintenance of the diaspora.

Tomila Lankina’s The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia, published by Cambridge University Press in 2021, is a very powerful and thought-provoking book. It contains a bold argument, exhibiting the author’s erudition across several disciplines, as well as an unusual richness of empirical evidence and an exquisite prose style. The book delves into the intricacies of social resilience in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Contrary to the notion that the Bolshevik Revolution served as “the great leveler,” Lankina demonstrates the enduring presence of Tsarist-era estates within the social fabric throughout the Soviet era and even into the post-Soviet period. The estates encompassed a system of legal classifications that stratified Russian imperial society into distinct categories: aristocracy, clergy, merchants, and meshchane (petty bourgeoisie), as well as peasants. Lankina’s primary focus lies upon the meshchane, an estate that, by the twilight of the tsarist regime, accounted for approximately 10 percent of the empire’s total population.1 Within Lankina’s narrative, the meshchane emerged as an imperial middle class – comprising individuals such as small shopkeepers, rentiers, doctors, teachers, engineers – who mostly resided in urban centers and towns. Many among this group hailed from ethnic and religious minority backgrounds, including Jewish, Polish, German, Old Believers, and others.

Between 1881 and 1914, Hungarian governments established at least 36 agricultural colonies in today’s territory of Romania (nine new villages and 25 neighborhoods attached to existing ones). After 1894, a separate government fund was created for land purchases and the venture was entrusted to a Department of Colonization within the Ministry of Agriculture. This article gives an archival-based account of the political, financial, agricultural, and logistical aspects of the settlement program and compares it with its better-researched Prussian model. Investigating it as a series of interactions between settlers, the dedicated government agency, local potentates, and the surrounding population, it identifies structural impediments to the endeavor. Although there was a broad unity across political parties behind the idea of conquering new territories for the ethnic nation, the settlement program rested on a fragile consensus within the elite. Its expansion after 1900 was mainly due to Minister Ignác Darányi, whereas the steps of other high officials give nuances to Hungarian nationalities policies. When Prime Minister István Tisza dropped the program on the eve of the First World War, it was already in a state of hibernation because the governing party had realized that the settlers posed a political liability for them.

An original, empirically rich, and analytically multilayered and provocative statement by Tomila Lankina, The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia (2022) is a meticulous work of sociology focused on the exploration and elaboration of social mechanisms of resilience in a transforming polity and society. It is also an attempt to link the past, the 19th-century reform of the estate system in Russia, to the present, Russia’s failed democratization, by arguing that the social basis for democracy in postcommunist Russia was associated with the thin stratum of the more privileged, educated, and politically engaged members of the middle class who were able to build on the intergenerational capital and became “the silent custodian of institutions and values that nurtured the democratic promise of post-communism” (391). As such, it is a passionate statement against Soviet historiography that has been influential in shaping the mainstream Western understanding about the socially transformative nature of communism. The book goes against the received wisdom about the degree to which the Soviet society has been modernized and transformed through communist experience: “the narratives of grand revolutionary rupture,” as Lankina phrases it (394). Excavating specific family histories, Lankina shines light “on the ‘tectonic’ layers of skills, values, and occupational complexity” that underlay wealth-supporting strategies along with the pursuit of better education and the acquisition of better-paid jobs in the Soviet Union. The already privileged social groups—the urban and rural meshchane—were better “connected, networked and engaged” and therefore better-equipped “with the skills, tools, and capital” (393). The Soviet regime reincorporated these privileged professional groups into an elite layer (prosloyka) of the Soviet society, commonly known as Soviet intelligentsia.

State violence against Belarusian women involved in protest activities after the fraudulent presidential election in 2020 and onward has been unprecedented in the country’s history. Women’s activism has challenged the patriarchal authoritarian regime, which was ill-prepared to deal with women. However, after a short period of adaptation by the repressive institutions, women became their “special clients.” With reference to gender-sensitive academic research, we investigate diverse forms of state violence against women and analyze how they perceive their experiences of incarceration for political reasons. This article is based on available datasets, a series of nine semi-structured interviews, and insights from participant observation. The research reveals that Belarusian women incarcerated for political reasons fall under the “demanding clients” category: they comprehensively challenge the state-sponsored brutal patriarchy and expect the repressive apparatus to meet their specific needs. These women experience multidimensional physical discomfort and psychological pressure, including targeted offensive and dehumanizing elements. At the same time, incarcerated women do not feel ostracized by society; they share the feeling that their “crimes” are supported by civil society, and they endure the pains of punishment as targeted violence from a state fighting cynically for its own survival.

The objective of the article is to establish why a financial bonus for Slovenian–Italian bilingualism was introduced in the District of Koper (comprising today’s Slovenian municipalities of Ankaran, Koper, Izola and Piran), which came under Yugoslav rule after 1954. Using Brubaker’s triadic nexus concept and analysis of newly discovered archival sources, the authors found that (a) on the federal level, Yugoslavia only focused on minority protection as much as it was required to by international agreements and treaties, (b) the Italian minority itself was not a relevant actor in the Yugoslav system of minority protection, (c) Italy had a marginal role in the process of protecting the Italian minority in Yugoslavia, and (d) the political elite in Yugoslavia introduced the bilingualism bonus to encourage the integration of the Italian minority when building a new (socialist) sociopolitical order. The Slovenian-Italian bilingualism bonus was therefore not an altruist measure directed at minority protection, but rather a self-serving measure by the authorities to reinforce their power.

The goal of this article is to show Russia’s civilizational turn in the broader context of imperial nationalism. The “turn” is a manifestation of imperial nationalism that today feeds not only on political ideas and history but also on geography. In the mass perception, geography is seen as an objective, non-ideologized scientific discipline less prone to political manipulation. Because of this, it can be employed to influence the Russian self-identification process in a much more subtle and efficient way than references to the more abstract notion of civilization. This article presents the Russian Geographical Society (RGS) as an identity entrepreneur managed by the ruling elite with a well-developed regional structure. It functions as a community of imperial practice. With its discursive and material practices, the RGS contributes to reproducing imperial nationalism, including in its civilizational version. The RGS is the keeper of the imperial body. By referring to the imperial body, I mean not just the physical territory but also the ways it is imagined in discourse and made material in numerous practices.

Tomila Lankina has written a pathbreaking book. Impressively combining theoretical ambition, sensitive attention to historical detail, and the skillful use of multiple quantitative and qualitative methods, The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia brings the study of Soviet history squarely back onto the agenda of contemporary comparative social science. For those of us who have spent much of our careers trying to explain to academics and policy makers alike why the story of the rise and fall of the USSR still matters for understanding our contemporary world, Lankina’s book is both welcome vindication and a reason for real optimism about the future of social-scientific inquiry. This is, simply put, the best book I’ve read about the Soviet system and its legacies in many years.

What shapes a country’s foreign policy formation in times of crisis? This article explores the factors that were behind the response of Ukrainian decision makers in their relations with Russia and the European Union during the annexation of Crimea between February 21 and March 26, 2014. I view Ukraine’s foreign policy through the lenses of an analytical framework inspired by game theory, where the decision-making process is divided into four parts—information about others’ preferences, trust in interlocutors, everyone’s payoffs, and resources. This article employs a rigorous qualitative thematic analysis of 38 elite interviews, numerous primary documents, and media reports. The core finding suggests that the uncertain times and unpreparedness of Ukrainian decision makers obstructed them from a comprehensive analysis of the environment and formation of the country’s foreign policy strategy, which, consequently, facilitated Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

Joseph Stalin and the Soviet party leadership launched a major propaganda campaign in 1931 that called for a new approach to Soviet history, not only for scholars and pedagogues but for society as a whole. A veritable “search for a usable past,” this initiative was to bolster the authority and legitimacy of the state and rally the population together in patriotic unity by connecting the prerevolutionary past to the Stalinist present. When this new historical line was finally unveiled in 1937, it challenged earlier Soviet sloganeering on subjects like nationalism, imperialism, and colonialism. This article examines how Stalin attempted to reconcile his new “usable past” with these other ideological priorities, focusing on a case study of the so-called Ukrainian question within the context of the USSR’s broader reevaluation of tsarist-era imperialism and colonial policy.

The article analyzes the role of Ukrainian associations on construction of immigrant identity in Turkey at the intersection of diaspora politics and diaspora-lived experiences. Ukrainian immigrant associations – whose numbers and members rapidly increased after Russia’s annexation of Crimea – became critical players in immigrants’ ethno-national identity construction. This aligned with the Ukrainian government’s changing diaspora policy and shaped immigrants’ relationship with the homeland. The associations, therefore, facilitated diaspora activism from above and below. These associations are mainly engaged in activities related to the teaching of Ukrainian language, history, and culture so that immigrants can distinguish themselves from Russians and discover their own uniqueness. They also consider the migrant status of Ukrainians in Turkey and develop an awareness of ethno-national identity by negotiating transnational identities.

After Putin’s return to the Russian presidency in 2012, a further turn toward authoritarianism has been coupled with attacks on Western secularism, multiculturalism, and alleged moral decay. At home, the Kremlin has been increasingly preoccupied with defining and addressing problems related to citizens’ bodies, linking “traditional values” to national security. Central to this discourse are issues relating to reproductive norms. This analysis uses the Foucauldian concept of “biopower” as an epistemic point of departure in an attempt to understand the central role of reproduction in the Kremlin’s identity project. Administering the bodies of a population simultaneously produces and delimits that population according to bodily criteria. Thus, this “bodily turn” in Russian nation-building may be understood as “bionationalism,” a depoliticizing style of nationalism that relies on biopolitical techniques. The analysis explicates the mechanisms of this style of nationalism: how and why this discourse functions, legitimates problematic practices, excludes “abnormals,” expands the state into the everyday lives of citizens, and marginalizes and even securitizes alternative notions of national identity. Putin’s bionationalism may be read as an existential nationalism and thereby as producing a specific mobilizational context.

Over the years, China’s nationality policy tended to imitate the Soviet Union while also retaining its uniqueness. Existing scholarship has described three deviations the CCP made vis-à-vis the Soviet model: denying national self-determination, rejecting the supra-national union of nation-states, and undertaking constructivist classification of ethnicity. These features took shape around 1949. In this article, I survey China’s observations on Soviet nationality affairs from 1949 to 1991 and provide a perspective for understanding how these deviations from the Soviet nationality model both crystallized and varied. My findings show that after 1949, Soviet studies in China lacked a coherent agenda for studying the nationality question. The experts gathered rich materials but subordinated nationality questions to themes such as revolution, a centrally planned economy, border disputes, geopolitics, and ideological indoctrination. They also tended to reduce ethnopolitics to class struggle and economic modernization. Such systematic evasion of nationality questions persisted until the collapse of the Soviet Union. The USSR’s disintegration caused China to recognize the resilience of ethnicity and nationality, while before 1991, Soviet studies in China had lacked any systematic reflection on the Soviet nationality model.

This article examines how the Turkish political elites have responded to the uneven geographical distribution of physicians. This has been a chronic problem in health care provision, with physicians concentrated in the urban areas of western Anatolia at the cost of rural areas and the east, especially the Kurdish southeast. Successive Turkish governments have employed compulsory service laws as major policy tools to tackle this distribution problem. Legislative discussions about these laws have revolved around the idea of a unitary Turkey, the Turkish nation, and how to close the gap between the idealized imaginary of these and the defective reality. Drawing on Kojin Karatani’s mode-of-exchange framework, this study examines the legislative process on the distribution problem through the history of the post-Ottoman republic to the present. It identifies Turkish nationalism centered on state and on commodity exchange as two variants giving shape to the response to the problem. This analysis also contributes to our understanding of the weakness of social citizenship in Turkey. It is argued that Turkish nationalism—specifically, its state-centered version—operates by interpellating Turkish citizens as indebted to the nation-state, thereby hindering the development of the notion of the rights-bearing citizen.

When we study the Jewish-national historiography of the last quarter of the 19th century, there is a tendency to pass directly from Smolenskin’s doctrine to the Zionist-cultural approach of Ahad Ha’am and his students, omitting the works written in between. However, even before the emergence of Ahad Ha’am as a cultural icon in the Jewish national movement, some Hibbat Zion activists engaged in Hebrew cultural activities directed at shaping national Jewish consciousness. The main figures in this trend were Saul Pinchas Rabinowitz and Avraham Shalom Friedberg. Their world view was based on education that advocated proto-nationalism: Jewish solidarity, love of the Hebrew language, promoting Hebrew newspapers, and preserving Jewish tradition. To this they added settlement in Eretz Israel as a solution for the harsh conditions of the Jews in Russia. They edited literary and scientific collections in Hebrew and Jewish historiography and wrote historical monographs and biographies. In this way, they sought to introduce national historical protagonists instead of the Hasskala’s pantheon of historical characters to vividly illuminate periods of historical “golden ages” suited to the national ideology and teach the lesson of historical history—that Hibbat Zion is the solution to the plight of Jews and Judaism.

This article asks how, in early post-World War II Canada, Syrian, Armenian, and Lebanese communities claimed whiteness in the context of Canada’s racially restrictive immigration regulations that defined them as “Asiatics,” and hence inadmissible. But, it also examines how Canadian politicians and immigration bureaucrats responded to those claims. Using so-far untapped archival records, this article shows that immigration authorities were unwilling to redefine the racial status of these groups out of fear that doing so would provide a wedge for other groups of “Asiatics” to press for the ability to migrate to Canada. In this case, Syrians, Armenians, and Lebanese could be regarded as experiencing collateral damage in the politics of whiteness. While Canadian immigration authorities seemed to privately accept the white/European identity claims of these groups, they were nonetheless unwilling to publicly grant them one of the privileges of whiteness – namely the ability to migrate to Canada on a basis equal to that of other white immigrants. Instead, the government used “merit-based” orders-in-council as an under the radar administrative mechanism to admit members of these groups. This allowed the government and the immigration department to avoid a larger public debate about racial discrimination against “Asiatic” immigrants.