Building Local Communities: Place-Shaping as Nation-Building

Nation - building

Nations stay together when citizens share enough values and preferences. Homogeneity amongst people can be built with education, teaching a common language to facilitate communication, but also by brute force such as prohibiting local cultures. Democracies and dictators have different incentives when it comes to choosing how much and by what means to homogenize the population. We study and we c...

Modernism and Nation Building

NAtION BUILDING IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA: A LOCAL ALtERNAtIVE

Nation building is a multifaceted and never ending process. It can be about national identity (Shore and Wright 1997:24-29; May 2003:1) and common symbols and rituals (Hansen and Stepputat 2001; Comaroff and Comaroff 2001:37-40) or, on the contrary, it can be about the official recognition of diversity (Van Cott 2000). It is about a shared history, but also about the invention of tradition and ...

The Challenges Facing State-Nation-Building in Israel

Completing the nation-building process for survival is one of the challenges that the Zionist regime has always faced. This regime has based its existence on a specific and complex identity that, at first glance, can be a strong point for the survival and formation of a society, but the specific characteristics of this identity based on race and population inequality, for This has posed some ch...

Nation-Building, Nationalism, and Wars∗

This paper explores how the increase in army size observed in early modern times changed the way states conducted wars. Starting in the late 18th century, states switched from mercenaries to a mass army by conscription. We model the incentives of soldiers to exert effort in war and show that as army size increases paying mercenaries is no longer optimal. In order for the population to accept fi...