After the political fragmentation of the “Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms” period, the Northern Song consolidated much of the lands under these regional states into a larger polity in a process often described as “reunification.” But this “reunification,” judged against the domain of the Tang dynasty, was incomplete. The “Sixteen Prefectures” to the northeast were ceded to the Liao, and this became a vexing issue for Song emperors and officials. But the northeast was not the only region once under Tang rule that did not enter the Song domain. In this article, I discuss the area to the northwest of the Song, much of which was eventually governed by the Tangut Xia state. This area, roughly the modern provinces of Ningxia and Gansu, featured prominently in Northern Song political discussions, national geographical treatises, and national and regional maps. By analyzing the treatment of the northwest in these diverse genres of representation, I demonstrate a spectrum in the perceptions of the northwest. It was sometimes seen as little different from areas under Song rule; in other cases, it was treated as “beyond the sphere of civilization” (huawai). Such ambiguity is visualized in many Song cartographers who placed this area between two segments of the Great Wall. For Song emperors and officials, the northwest sat uncomfortably in their imaginations of the world, not easily dismissed and forgotten, yet irrecoverable.

Irredentist disputes have produced distinct political ethnoterritories under the de jure sovereignty of recognised parent states, but the de facto political authority of external national homelands. This study problematises the relationship between national homeland and claimed ethnoterritory as a nested game in which, in addition to bargaining with each other, they face internal competition, outbidding, and changing costs of conflict, ultimately reducing commitment to external-facing bargains. This study contends that homelands pursuing irredentist conflict can reduce uncertainty and increase commitment from ethnoterritories by building hegemonic cross-border clientelist pyramids that link ethnoterritorial publics’ and elites’ political survival and livelihoods to supporting homelands’ preferences. Further, these structures marginalise alternative elites who may seek to contravene preferences by escalating conflict and increasing costs on homelands or bargaining across ethnic cleavages. Case studies of protracted conflicts in Cyprus, Kosovo, and Croatia support this argument and further find that public-sector distribution linked to the homeland is most effective in reducing competition and uncertainty, thereby increasing long-term commitment to preferences.

As illustrated by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the recent revival of nationalism has triggered a threatening return of revisionist conflict. While the literature on nationalism shows how nationalist narratives are socially constructed, much less is known about their real-world consequences. Taking nationalist narratives seriously, we study how past “golden ages” affect territorial claims and conflict in post-Napoleonic Europe. We expect nationalists to be more likely to mobilize and initiate conflict if they can contrast the status quo to a historical polity with supposedly greater national unity and/or independence. Using data on European state borders going back to 1100, combined with spatial data covering ethnic settlement areas during the past two centuries, we find that the availability of plausible golden ages increases the risk of both domestic and interstate conflict. These findings suggest that specific historical legacies make some modern nationalisms more consequential than others.

The article explores how cross-border heritage tourism is promoted in public schools to reimagine Hungary as an ethnically homogeneous nation by incorporating ethnic kin communities that live in neighboring countries. Cross-border heritage tourism has long served to establish strong ties to ethnic diaspora communities that live beyond the territorial borders of the nation-state. National borders in Central and Eastern Europe were repeatedly redrawn across ethnic groups over the twentieth century. Heritage tourism remains a key cultural and economic practice that symbolically questions current national borders and aims to increase the viability of ethnic enclave economies in countries where the given ethnic group is a minority. The article focuses on a large-scale student travel program that was launched by the Hungarian government in 2010, the year that marked the start of a brisk populist turn in Hungarian politics. The program provides funding to public school students for organized class trips to areas of neighboring countries (Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, and Ukraine) that belonged to the Hungarian state before World War I. It shows how the Hungarian government mobilizes the public education system to foster a narrow and exclusionary ethnic understanding of cultural membership by selectively overemphasizing Hungarian heritage in regions that have had multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multicultural histories for centuries. This project extends research on identity-based heritage tourism to show how it has become an integral part of the propaganda toolkit of populist governments.

Why do states engage in irredentism? Expanding on previous scholarship, this article advances a new theory with rationalist microfoundations that accounts for the incentives of both elites and citizens to support irredentism in democracies and dictatorships. Our model suggests irredentism is more likely when it enables political elites to provide a specific mix of private goods, public goods, and welfare transfers to citizens who desire them at the lowest tax rate. This leads to the prediction that irredentism is most likely in majoritarian democratic electoral systems and military dictatorships, and least likely in proportional electoral systems and single-party dictatorships. We test and find supportive evidence for these expectations using a comprehensive dataset covering all observed and potential irredentist cases from 1946 to 2014.

The Lezgin irredentist movement is one of the less-studied national movements in the post-Soviet space, despite affecting the strategically important Russian-Azerbaijani borderlands and the bordering process between the two post-Soviet states. This article aims to fill this gap and to examine the impact of the Lezgin national movement on the development of territorial nationalism in early post-Soviet Azerbaijan. Based on the analysis of media publications in three Azerbaijani newspapers between 1992 and 1996, I argue that the movement contributed to consolidating the territorial vision of the Azerbaijani nation as incorporating groups historically settled in this territory. While media coverage stressed friendship between ethnic Azerbaijanis and Lezgins, the responsibility for secessionist claims was placed on external forces, particularly Russia and Armenia. In the long term, this framing led to the securitization of ethnic minority activism as a major threat to Azerbaijani statehood.

This article is a short introduction for a special edition on Italian nationhood. The articles that comprise the special edition are the following: From a cosmopolitan to a fascist land: Adriatic irredentism in motion; Erecting fascism: nation, identity, and space in Trieste in the first half of the twentieth century; Building Italianità in northern Adriatic: The case of population from Pola.

Much has been made over the past few years of China'vs ambitions of regaining control of its irredentist claims in the East and South China Seas. While some of this speculation focuses on the massive amounts of money the People's Republic of China (PRC) has funneled into its naval modernization program, other analysts are more interested in the drivers behind the increasingly popular sentiment that the country must “reclaim” its lost territories. The Chinese Communist Party can ill afford to ignore the voice of an already disenchanted population if it hopes to stay in power, particularly in regard to matters of national pride. As a result, in dealing with China's irredentist claims, nationalism in particular can be a powerful ideological factor in shaping the nation's foreign policies. This is especially apparent in the case of irredentism, where nationalism can often override diplomatic and strategic imperatives. This paper addresses the question of how does the nationalist discourse vary between two territorial disputes, the East and South China Seas. It uses discourse analysis to examine developing trends among online social media and news sites. This in turn allows for the construction of a framework of how nationalism develops among both elite and grassroots audiences.