Psycho-nationalism focuses on the history of the use of Iranian identity under the Shah, as well as by the governments since the 1979 Iranian revolution, to offer an exploration into the psychological and political roots of national identity and how these are often utilised by governments.

Nationalism is one of modern history’s great surprises. How is it that the nation, a relatively old form of community, has risen to such prominence in an era so strongly identified with the individual? Bernard Yack argues that it is the inadequacy of our understanding of community—and especially the moral psychology that animates it—that has made this question so difficult to answer. Yack develops a broader and more flexible theory of community and shows how to use it in the study of nations and nationalism. What makes nationalism such a powerful and morally problematic force in our lives is the interplay of old feelings of communal loyalty and relatively new beliefs about popular sovereignty. By uncovering this fraught relationship, Yack moves our understanding of nationalism beyond the oft-rehearsed debate between primordialists and modernists, those who exaggerate our loss of individuality and those who underestimate the depth of communal attachments. A brilliant and compelling book, Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community sets out a revisionist conception of nationalism that cannot be ignored.

Nationalism and other forms of group identity underlie many of the destructive conflicts the world is experiencing today. Particularly puzzling in such conflicts is their tenacity and viciousness. Why do people cling to conflicts that are damaging them? Why are the feelings involved so vehement and intense? Understanding the fragile nature of individual and group identity, and how people perceive threats to identity, can answer these questions. By analyzing nationalism in Quebec, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and Sri Lanka, this book shows that addressing the psychological dimensions of nationalism can help us understand, and perhaps to intervene successfully in, nationalist and ethnic conflicts.

This book explores the origins of nationalism and the ideal of nation/state congruency since early-modern European thought, their transformation over time and endurance in contemporary political thought and IR theory. The author deploys a Lacanian-psychoanalytical reading of nationalism and the nation/state that goes beyond methodological nationalism and state-centrism critiques. He offers a genealogical inquiry into the emergence of the nation/state congruency ideal, thus exposing and problematising the practices that render nationalism and the ideal of the nation/state necessary. Offering a new way to read the ontology and epistemology of the nation/state, this work will be of interest to students and scholars of nations and nationalism, political thought, critical international relations and critical security studies.

This volume aims to question the recent revival of neo-nationalist policies in the light of what unconscious fantasies are involved in these developments. It examines both recent movements of right-wing extremism and the way in which rearticulated neo-ethnic ideas have been adopted by mainstream politicians and in mainstream public discourse. Politicians from other than the right-wing populist parties have tended to resist specific ways of talking that are considered too extremist, rather than their underlying frame of interpretation. Governments across Europe have adopted anti-immigrant and anti-Roma policies. Xenophobia and hostility towards 'others' is on the rise, along with appeals to "Tradition and Security". 'Cultures of fear' are linked with fantasies of fusion or 'imagined sameness'. Alongside the image of the nation as a mother and/or father, Reich (1933) called attention to the fantasy of the nation as a body, echoed in Money-Kyrle's (1939) characterization of 'group hypochondria' in connection with the burning of witches and heretics.

This volume offers a new cultural and political history of the idea of the nation. Situating the history of international politics and the idea of the nation in the history of psychology, it reveals the popularity and political importance of a transnational discourse of the psychology of nations that had taken shape in the previous half-century.