Essential reading for anyone interested in problems associated with ethnicity and nationalism - it offers a guide to understanding the ethnonational forces that underpin much of recent terrorist activity.

According to most social scientists, the advent of a global media village and the rise of liberal democratic government would diminish ethnic and national identity as a source of political action. Yet the contemporary world is in the midst of an explosion of identity politics and often violent ethnonationalism. This volume examines cases ranging from the well-publicized ethnonationalism of Bosnia and post-Apartheid South Africa to ethnic conflicts in Belgium and Sri Lanka. Distinguished international scholars including John Comaroff, Stanley J. Tambiah, and Ernesto Laclau argue that continued acceptance of imposed ethnic terms as the most appropriate vehicle for collective self-identification and social action legitimizes the conditions of inequality that give rise to them in the first place. This ambitious attempt to explain the inadequacies of current approaches to power and ethnicity forges more realistic alternatives to the volatile realities of social difference.

A new perspective on how the nation-state emerged and proliferated across the globe, accompanied by a wave of wars. Andreas Wimmer explores these historical developments using social science techniques of analysis and datasets that cover the entire modern world.

Nationalism remains one of the key political, societal, and sociopsychological phenomena in contemporary Europe. Its significance for the justification of state policies and the stability of political systems, particularly in the context of advanced democracies, and its significance for people's basic needs for a political and cultural identity and a sense of national pride continue to challenge scholars. The international scholars assembled in this edited collection suggest that the use of three perspectives--supranationalism, boundary-making nationalism, and regional nationalism--may be promising as an explanatory framework for the analysis of nationalism in Europe. The book's contributors distance themselves from older dichotomies such as civic and ethnic nationalism and questions the one-sided normativity of nationalism, in particular in the concept of liberal nationalism. It argues that a promising approach to contemporary nationalism should reflect the multiplicity of nationalism. The volume is a collection of studies by a multinational group of authors with backgrounds in Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Germany, Latvia, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, Ukraine and the United States.

Nationalist movements have become a force in contemporary American politics regardless of the political party. As social issues plague America, civilian participation in activism is experiencing a resurgence. Nationalism, Social Movements, and Activism in Contemporary Society: Emerging Research and Opportunities provides vital information on the most current issues facing the American public and political system while also exploring nationalist ideology and its application in modern politics. While highlighting the challenges facing America’s democracy and social structure, this book explores how civilians and movements are working to make progress in the current political climate. This book is an important resource for researchers, activists, political scientists, journalists, professors, students, and professionals seeking current research on nationalism, social activism, civilian protest, and the current American political climate.

What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these debates on the nature of the nation state are even more urgent. As new nations rise, vying for influence, and old empires decline, we must understand who we are as a community in the face of history, and change.

This volume makes a unique contribution to the literature on nations and nationalism by examining why nations remain a vibrant and strong social cohesive despite the threat of globalization. Regardless of predictions forecasting the demise of the nation-state in the global era, the nation persists as an important source of identity, community, and collective memory for most of the world's population. More than simply a corrective to the many scholarly but premature epitaphs for the nation-state, this book explains the continued health of nations in the face of looming threats. The contributors include leading experts in the field, such as Anthony D. Smith, William Safran, Edward Tiryakian as well as younger scholars, whom adopt a variety of approaches ranging from theoretical to empirical and historical to sociological, in order to uncover both the reasons that nations continue to remain vital and the mechanisms that help perpetuate them. The book includes case studies on Ireland, Thailand, Poland, the Baltic States, Croatia and Jordan. Nationalism in a Global Era will be of great interest to students and researchers of international politics, sociology, nationalism and ethnicity.