The connection between nationalism and sport seems at once both obvious and manifest, with the most lavish praise of the nation often arising at sporting events. While a sizeable body of academic literature exists on the connection between the two concepts, it remains overlapping and unstructured. This state of the field review essay accounts for the major works in this field and categorizes it according to the function it fulfills in the subfield. Specifically, it focuses on sport as a mechanism for the diffusion and creation of nationalism, sport under conditions of globalization at Sporting Mega Events (SMEs), and the connection between sport and the distinction between civic and ethnic definitions of nationality.

This article revisits the debate on the modernity of nations considering recent critical approaches to national phenomena. It proposes an alternative model that addresses the existence of empirical evidence about nations before the 19th century without erasing key changes in the history of nationhood, such as the rise of the principle of national sovereignty. The model draws on existing literature and a corpus of British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese ego-documents from the Age of Revolutions. The study of patterns of usage of national languages in these life narratives supports the abandonment of the premodern/modern antinomy and the implementation of a more complex account. The proposal distinguishes republican, genetic, nonpoliticized ethnotypical, politicized ethnotypical, liberal, romantic, biological, cultural, and democratic forms of nationhood. It then develops the genetic and the ethnotypical forms using source materials and readdresses the issue of “modernity” in the light of this evidence.

Previous research has either equated religion- and language-based group identities or asserted that their social effects are the same. This article proposes a novel differentiation between religious and ethnic self-identification that accounts for in-group income inequality and the social role of the group. The study argues that ethnicity-based identities tend to be associated with economic activities, thereby increasing the demand for income equality within such groups. Religious identities, on the contrary, are centered around noneconomic activities and have the ideological framework for reconciling material inequalities. The observable implication of this distinction is that the high-, low-, and middle-income categories of the multicultural society will display differential association with ethnic and religious identities. Ethnic groups will have lower in-group income inequality as a result of the exclusion of the poor and the departure of the rich. Religious groups, on the contrary, will have higher in-group income inequality due to the capacity of religion to accommodate both poor and rich. Relevant empirical tests from the ethnically and religiously diverse Russian North Caucasus region indicate support for the proposed theory.

The region of Khevsureti in Georgia is the historic home of a group of Kartvelian highlanders known as Khevsurs. As Khevsureti’s popularity as a mountain tourist destination has grown, so too has the popularity of an old story that asserts the Khevsurs are the descendants of a lost band of Crusaders. For 200 years, this meme has manifested itself in books about the region, newspaper articles, the work of a few scholars, and now much Internet discussion. The growing collection of cases has created the illusion of an unconsolidated quantity of evidence and many commentators have since taken the story to be a credible theory or actual legend. A systematic deconstruction and analysis of this story shows how this set of details initially formed, grew, and spread based on a few unreliable accounts in circulation beginning in the early 19th century. This article offers a case study of how such memes form and propagate; it provides an additional example of a Western tendency to romanticize and project elements of their own ethnicities into the Caucasus; and it examines this false history in terms of cultural appropriation and the relationship between ethnicity and narrative, adding to the literature on invented histories and pseudoarchaeology. Finally, this careful deconstruction and repudiation will help remove this story from serious discussions of cultural heritage in Khevsureti and show how historical memes and popular examples of pseudoarcheology spread and capture imaginations.

The collapse of the Soviet Union set Russia’s ruling elites the challenge of nation-building: while “Russians” had to be imagined as a political community on behalf of which the newly established Russian state was ruled, their national history needed to be narrated. Crucial for this enterprise was interpreting the Soviet past. Although the latter was used for political purposes by both Boris Yeltsin (who attempted to break with it) and Vladimir Putin (who established continuity with it), a politically usable interpretation of the Russian Revolutions was never found. Such is the consensus that emerged in 2017. Challenging this consensus, I argue that a specific interpretation of the Revolutions—nested within a narrative that covers Russia’s history from Kievan Rus to the contemporary Russian Federation—has been developed in Russia. Turning Russia’s politically problematic past into a politically usable one, this interpretation is (re)produced through the project Russia—My History. As Russia—My History (initially developed within the Russian Orthodox Church) is becoming a part of state-sponsored efforts to forge an “official” vision of Russian history, the interpretation of the Revolutions (re)produced through it is growing in influence in present-day Russia.

Based on more than 100 interviews in European Russia, this article sheds light on the bottom-up dynamics of Russian nationalism. After offering a characterization of the post-2012 “state-civilization” discourse from above, I examine how ordinary people imagine Russia as a “state-civilization.” Interview narratives of inclusion into the nation are found to overlap with state discourse on three main lines: (1) ethno-nationalism is rejected, and Russia is imagined to be a unique, harmonious multi-ethnic space in which the Russians (russkie) lead without repressing the others; (2) Russia’s multinationalism is remembered in myths of peaceful interactions between Russians (russkie) and indigenous ethnic groups (korennyye narodi) across the imperial and Soviet past; (3) Russian culture and language are perceived as the glue that holds together a unified category of nationhood. Interview narratives on exclusion deviate from state discourse in two key areas: attitudes to the North Caucasus reveal the geopolitical-security, post-imperial aspect of the “state-civilization” identity, while stances toward non-Slavic migrants in city spaces reveal a degree of “cultural nationalism” that, while sharing characteristics with those of Western Europe, is also based on Soviet-framed notions of normality. Overall, the article contributes to debates on how Soviet legacies and Russia’s post-imperial consciousness play out in the context of the “pro-Putin consensus.”

This article leverages saliency theory to explore how regimes may use state-controlled media to intensify nationalism and gain legitimacy. I explore mainstream news coverage in Russia and Ukraine with a particular emphasis on how political leadership frames nationalist rhetoric in the two countries to emphasize certain issues over others. I focus on relevant media content that contains nationalist rhetoric before and after the invasion of Russia into Ukraine’s territory in the spring of 2014. Content analysis suggests that political leaders in both countries have focused on political issues, while largely ignoring economic issues in their nationalist rhetoric. The analysis also shows that state leaders can successfully promote nationalism by emphasizing cultural issues and concerns.

Croatia’s monumental second-place finish at the 2018 FIFA World Cup represents the highest football achievement to date for the young nation. This victory, however, masks violent internal divisions between its domestic club football teams. This article examines the most salient rivalry between Dinamo Zagreb and Hajduk Split, two teams that have evolved to represent the interests of Croatia’s north and south, respectively. Using interviews with radical football fans, I argue that the two teams act as reservoirs for regional identity-building while violence between their fans is a microcosm for political and economic tensions between Zagreb and Split. More importantly, this rivalry exposes the dividedness of the Croatian state, as it continues to grapple with the complexity of its radical regional identities in the wake of its independence from Yugoslavia. This article contributes to the existing body of literature on sports identity and regionalisms/nationalism as well as how sporting teams shape the geographies of belonging.

Following Stalin’s interpretations of the Lenin’s thesis on the merging of the nations, the Yugoslav communists first needed to “push” all nations to the same level of development. After the Tito-Stalin split in 1948, the soft Yugoslav nation-building project was accelerated. During the 1950s, national Yugoslavism was stimulated in a latent way through language, culture, censuses, and changes in the constitutional and socialist system. By the end of the 1950s, the Yugoslav socialist national idea reached its peak with the 1958 Party Congress. Nevertheless, with the economic crisis in the early 1960s, and the famous Ćosić-Pirjevec debate on Yugoslavism, the Yugoslav national idea declined. This was evident on the level of the personal, national identifications of the Party members, but also in the ideological shift of the Party’s chief ideologue Edvard Kardelj. Yet, the concept of Yugoslavism was redefined in the second half of the 1960s without ethnic or national connotations. Two Yugoslavisms were created: a socialist one propagated by the Party and a national one that lived among the population in small proportions. Although the Yugoslavs were never recognized as a nation, that did not stop them from publicly advocating for their national rights.

Popular publications produced in Russia on the events in the Balkans in 1877–78 offer a valuable opportunity to examine how the historical and political background of the Russo-Turkish War was conveyed to common readers, some of whom were potentially involved in the military action, or persuaded to support the cause by other means. The conceptions produced and distributed in these booklets were firmly based on pan-Slavistic ideas of Russians’ duty to help their “Slavic brothers.” The publications presented the reader with propagandistic images of Turkish enemies, which were compared to Islamic enemies of the Russian national narrative. The result was persuasive and simplified imagery leaning on dualistic representations of ethnic groups and graphic depictions of violence, effectively justifying Russia’s involvement in the events and taking a stand in the internal issues concerning Muslim minorities, too.

This article explains a normative political theory of asymmetrical federalism as it relates to the accommodation of national minorities within multinational states, using Cyprus as a case study. Many normative prescriptions emerging from traditional liberal and federal political theories and models rest on monist assumptions; therefore, there is a need to highlight the cultural and national limits of those theories and models in order to attain a democratic system in Cyprus that respects and promotes its bicommunal structure. It is suggested that multinational federalism in Cyprus necessitates constitutional asymmetry, which is likely to provide a basis for political accommodation. The article also demonstrates the necessity of multinational federalism to accommodate common and distinct identities by promoting a fuller understanding of the concept of “federal togetherness” and “federal separateness.” Such an understanding would better enable asymmetrical federalism to properly and feasibly adjust and regulate federal institutions in Cyprus.