Passport and Citizenship: Nation-Building or Nation-Destruction?

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

Citizenship and Republicanism in a Multicultural Nation

The juxtaposition of the notions of citizenship and the idea of republicanism in the context of Australia as a multicultural nation immediately raises the difficult and critical question of what we mean by a 'nation', and equally, what constitutes the sense of Australian identity. In the time allocated to me, I can hardly do justice to this challenging and most intriguing question, except to pa...

TRIBE OR NATION? Nation Building and Public Goods in Kenya versus Tanzania

T design of public policies that promote interethnic cooperation remains poorly understood nearly twenty years after the appearance of Horowitz's seminal work. Recent research suggests that ethnically diverse societies are prone to corruption, political instability, poor institutional performance, and slow economic growth and that in the United States higher levels of diversity are related to l...

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...