State repression of ethno-religious minorities is a widespread practice among dictatorships. Nevertheless, political science literature on the topic presents inconsistent findings regarding the causes and consequences of this phenomenon, largely due to the challenges associated with researching human rights violations in non-democratic regimes. The present systematic literature review covers theme-related articles indexed in the Web of Science database and published in English, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, or Chinese from January 1990 to December 2022 (n=169). By reviewing a wide array of theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and data collection strategies, this article identifies causes, consequences, and endogenous relationships, as well as key gaps in the literature on ethno-religious repression in non-democratic settings, providing a solid starting point for further research.

By examining various literary and visual representations of rivers, this article addresses meaning-making processes related to memory, identity, and belonging in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. Focusing on representations of the border rivers – the Drina, the Sava, and the Una – this article explores how postwar social transformations, including coming to terms with war-time loss, displacement, and destabilized meanings of homeland, are understood when the narrative focus shifts from landscapes to riverscapes. Concurrently, this article also contributes to scholarly discussions on representations of posttraumatic landscapes by redirecting attention from wounded landscapes, where the impact of violent human interventions is evident, to wounded waterscapes, which elude such identification. Generally, rivers symbolize steady and uninterrupted historical progress in nation-building narratives and the formation of national identities. In the Balkans, rivers are usually appropriated by nationalistic narratives tied to territorial claims, which resurface during times of crisis. Following the Bosnian War of the 1990s, in literature, cinema and arts rivers have become sites of multiple and overlapping meanings, suggesting a possible new emotional geography of the country beyond the exclusionary ideas of homeland and belonging.

Riga, the capital of Soviet Latvia, was the first city in the USSR where television was created outside the Slavic linguistic space. This presented Soviet television with a brand new challenge of tackling bilingualism in the only available television programme, bringing with it viewer frustration as reflected in letters addressed to the studio. To relieve the republican television studios and their only programmes from the issue of bilingualism, in 1960, the CPSU called for the creation of a second republican programme – the retransmission of Moscow’s Central Television. This article tracks the development of the issue, focusing on the case study of a western-orientated, non-Slavic Soviet republic where negotiations regarding the place of Russian in a given field of public life took fifteen years, involving stakeholders of various levels. Thus, the article offers an opportunity to study certain aspects of Soviet nationality policies in the Soviet Western periphery under Khrushchev and Brezhnev from the viewpoint of a single, specified problem.

Since 2020, the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh has intensified, culminating in a 44-day war in 2020 and an Azerbaijani military offensive in September 2023 when Azerbaijan reclaimed control over the Nagorno-Karabakh territory. This has ushered in a new phase of the Karabakh peace process amidst a transformed security landscape in the Caucasus. Against the background of a more general reconceptualization of Armenia’s role in the region, shifting away from its traditional alliance with Russia towards closer ties with the West, the article examines the role of women in Armenia in this peace process and their postwar opportunities for agency. The analysis reveals that women’s substantive inclusion in Armenia’s peace process remains limited due to (1) elite-dominated hard power negotiation structures and militarized discourses, (2) societal and economic factors, and (3) “self-exclusion” of women and the need for empowerment. Despite these challenges, the article identifies opportunities for women to assert agency in Armenia’s new security environment, contributing to a more effective, sustainable, and inclusive peace process.

The international recognition of the Armenian genocide is the most prominent issue shaping Turkish-Armenian relations today. Nevertheless, the academic literature lacks empirical analyses of people’s perceptions of the genocide in Turkey. To address the gap, the article provides an exploratory investigation into people’s online comments regarding the genocide on the most popular Turkish forum website, Eksisozluk. Guided by Cohen’s (2001) theoretical approach, the study explores online entries on the topic spanning from 2002 to 2018 (N = 2127). The findings reveal eleven attitudes that individuals adopt in the debate. The article examines the diversity in responses by utilizing Cohen’s typology, which helps to define and categorize individuals’ rationales for denial. Further, it shows that Cohen’s approach could contribute to explaining non-denying responses to the recollection of past suffering. The study concludes that people do not uniformly follow the official line concerning the Armenian genocide in Turkey.

This article describes the research on the nationalization of peasantry in Poland by the Polish sociologist Józef Chałasiński (1904–1979). He realized that the ethnicity and nation in Poland were formed with the exclusion of peasants marginalized by privileged classes. The idea of a nation was used to ensure class domination over peasants; their inclusion in the nation was tantamount to the abandonment of the peasant culture and rural lifestyle. Chałasiński described the emergence of a modern Polish nation through the popularization of the elite culture, which led to the gradual disappearance of the peasant class in Poland.

Throughout the Cold War, Yugoslavia was the only socialist country that participated in the Western-led international refugee regime and acted as a transit zone for refugees hoping to reach the Western Bloc. Those transiting were mainly, but not exclusively, escapees from various countries in the Soviet bloc. A few refugee groups also settled in Yugoslavia against the backdrop of shifts in international constellations, tense relationships with neighboring countries, and transnational mobilizations. This article will first investigate the dichotomy between transit and the few instances of refugees integrating into socialist Yugoslavia. Next, it will investigate the ease of the resettlement process by exploring how the length of time spent in the country was influenced by hierarchies among different refugee groups based on ethnic origin, political allegiances, class, and which opportunities for resettlement were available to whom. Finally, it will reflect on how the changing role of temporary refuge or permanent haven that Yugoslavia ascribed to itself was constructed and challenged by the host society, potential countries of resettlement, and the refugees themselves.

This article explores the socio-political landscape of Donbas through a lens of post-colonial studies, revealing the Russian colonial past and neo-colonial ambition. By uncovering the interplay of cultural, political, and economic challenges the author identifies the key elements of the region’s identity and draws on historical analysis and personal reflections on the Russo-Ukrainian war. The article explores how Russia managed to dominate the discourse in Donbas, as well as the reasons why a significant part of the Donbas people accepted Russian dominance over the region and the creation of self-proclaimed states without great resistance. The study underscores the necessity to work on the decolonization of Donbas’ identity as the pivotal point for fostering reconciliation processes in the long-term occupied territories of Ukraine.

This article compares late Imperial Russia (1850-1917) and its successor states — post-revolutionary independent Ukraine (1918-1919) and early Soviet Russia and the USSR (1918-1923) — focusing on the conception and implementation of state policy toward the Jews. It argues that Russian Imperial, Ukrainian nationalist and Soviet socialist policies treated the Jews essentially as a distinct ethno-confessional or ethnic collective entitled to state protection and group rights, thus anticipating (in Imperial Russia) and de-facto realizing (in independent Ukraine and Soviet Russia) the rights of minorities stipulated in the 1919 Paris Peace Treaty and implemented by the Versailles system in interwar Europe. The article shows how by establishing and maintaining separate Jewish institutions (sophisticated state apparatuses staffed by qualified, dedicated Jewish bureaucrats), the states developed and even promoted a collective Jewish identity and collective Jewish rights, starting with state protection and official recognition of Judaism and the Jewish way of life in the late Russian empire, to state-sponsored Jewish national and cultural autonomy in the Ukrainian National Republic, to official recognition as a Soviet nationality, and territorial and semi-political autonomy in the USSR.

Migrant protest activity has been often analyzed from the perspectives of the protest nature and issues it addressed. A comparison of protest behaviour before and after migration is largely missing. It remains unclear whether people who were actively protesting in their home country continue to be engaged in protests after migration and why. This article addresses this gap in the literature and aims to explain what made the Ukrainian migrants protest before leaving their home country and in Turkey as a host country. The analysis uses individual data from an original survey conducted in May 2023 among 935 Ukrainian migrants living in Turkey. The findings show that there are different migrants who participate in the protests organized in the two countries, and the strongest predictor for political protest is civic engagement. Protest in Ukraine is rooted in the orientation towards domestic politics, while protests abroad are driven by identitarian dimensions.

Since 2019, Ethiopia has embarked on a new “national project of peace and unity”. The government’s official discourse has been characterised by an uptake in the use of Pan-African and Pan-Ethiopian rhetoric. Strategically invoking visions of a united Africa and shared continental prosperity, the Abiy administration seeks to enhance its international reputation and rally African support for its domestic agenda. To overcome the pervasive ethnofractionalist tendencies in Ethiopia’s political landscape and consolidate the Ethiopian state within its present boundaries, the current government is selectively borrowing political strategies from previous administrations. This has produced a unique, new form of Pan-Ethiopian governance ideals. So far, the repercussions of this government discourse on political tensions in Ethiopia and the Ethiopian diaspora has received no scholarly attention. This academic article analyses the implications of the current Ethiopian government’s deployment of Pan-Africanist and Pan-Ethiopianist rhetoric on Ethiopia’s current political crises. This article argues that these Pan-Africanist and Pan-Ethiopianist rhetoric and ideals are paradoxically perpetuating divisive identity politics in Ethiopia’s domestic and diasporic political realm. This, in turn, exacerbates the most serious threat to Ethiopia’s national unity.

The eruption of protests within consolidated authoritarian regimes is an infrequent event seen by many scholars as resulting from the separatist intentions of a regional elite enabled by autonomy. In this article, by analysing the July 2022 protest events in Karakalpakstan we challenge this assumed link and instead propose that the emergence of large-scale protests formed as a grassroots reaction to the symbolic loss of the region’s nominal autonomy, state repression, and the detention of popular activists. Based on semi-structured interviews in Karakalpakstan, research findings reveal a moderate and mostly non-separatist approach to the Karakalpak question and a high interconnection with Uzbekistan. The existence of an authoritarian regime in Uzbekistan and its repression mechanisms can provide a straightforward explanation of non-resistant character of Karakalpak population. However, the research showed the strong notion of Karakalpak identity, not being transformed into political demands if Uzbekistan does not harm it.

Migrant residential concentration areas have been a significant focus for research, but academic attention has primarily centered on their effects rather than how they form. There is some research considering the discrete factors of such areas’ emergence, but these factors are rarely fused into a comprehensive explanation with a description of specific mechanisms in operation. Even less is known about the formation of migrant residential concentration areas in postsocialist cities. The few studies in existence leave the impression that such areas emerge around bazaars by default. In this article, based on a multicase study (N = 37) conducted in the 15 largest Russian cities, we argue that although there is a pattern of migrant residential concentration areas’ emergence in postsocialist cities, this process takes place only in the presence of a combination of seven factors. The article presents these factors and describes an ideal type of a migrant residential concentration area in a Russian city and mechanisms of its emergence. The article concludes with the comparison of the postsocialist pattern with other types of migrant residential concentration and hypothesizing on how the Russian case differs from the other postsocialist cases in Central and Eastern Europe.

The article analyses how Russian state-controlled media adapt narratives across their language versions to speak to specific national audiences. These media support the Kremlin by echoing its strategic narratives in the international arena. Our article stems from the assumption that the media tailor the narratives and do not deliver homogenous news. Texts published since the initial days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine were analyzed from Sputnik Czech Republic, Germany, and Sputnik World, known to spread the Russian regime’s propaganda. The central question was how the Russian regime depicted and explained the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 in the chosen languages. Qualitative coding based on a predefined codebook, modified with codes inductively acquired during the analysis, was used to deeply understand strategic narratives and identify key differences among the Russian regime’s influence campaigns in various national contexts. Some narratives were found to differ based on the national contexts, strengthening the initial assumption. However, analyzed texts also consistently depict Russia as a victim and the West as a threat across the language versions.

Critical approaches to research on war-affected societies emphasize the necessity for a more empirically grounded approach to the production of knowledge. Presently, research on war-affected societies is undergoing a shift toward localization with a call for more “voices” with local knowledge and expertise. This research is an attempt to analyze the challenges of reliable knowledge production in war-affected societies and their circulation in academia, the policy-making community, and feeding media discourse. The research focuses on the Russian war against Ukraine since 2014 as a prism through which to examine the main challenges for localized knowledge production. We consider several aspects of knowledge production including the problems and issues of framing and wording that define the character of the conflict, challenges of research design and data collection, researchers’ positioning dilemmas, participants’ responses, differences between policy and academic research, and the role of the media. The purpose of this study is to engage with and attempts to advance the literature on knowledge localization. We argue that a move toward the localization of fieldwork requires a more sensitive and transdisciplinary approach to knowledge production. Based on our own experience of fieldwork during wartime, we point out possible ethical and methodological challenges and offer workable responses to them.

There is tension between manipulation of national identity construction and agency in the literature on ingroup identification, especially in authoritarian contexts. In China, the past is very relevant with regards to legitimacy of the Communist Party. Yet, we cannot just assume that what the state propagates is what can also be found at the bottom-up level. This article analyses social representations of history in China combining the top-down perspective of state education policies and curated historical narratives to the bottom-up perspective formed through analyzing two student surveys, collected first in 2007 and again in 2011-2012, and 11 interviews. Earlier research indicates that in most countries representations of history concentrate on negative issues and their time span is short. Chinese representations of history are divided into narratives of glory and humiliation, and respondents have a much longer perspective to national history than typical participants in international surveys. Finally, although problematic periods such as the Cultural Revolution get less coverage in political speeches and school textbooks, they are not forgotten among students. Furthermore, the view that people should have their own ideas about history and China rather than having to adopt the government promoted narrative was visible in multiple student interviews.

Anthony D. Smith, in one of his earlier, less debated, works – Nationalism in the 20th Century (1979) – examines phases of nationalism in the modern era, suggesting that nationalism has taken various forms before and during the 20th century. He argues that nationalism’s adaptability is at the core of its persistence, adapting to changing situations such as fascism and communism. As a result of this adaptability, nationalism still flourishes today. This article applies Smith’s theory to explore the interplay between cultural and material factors in the evolution of nationalism in Ireland. It identifies five ideological phases – revolutionary nationalist, protectionist, liberalising, neoliberal, and ecological – to which nationalism has adapted, and within which nationalism has influenced various aspects of Irish society. These phases are situated within a broader ideological and material context, analysing obliquely the Irish language (a core element of Irish nationalism), and related to changing processes of individualization.