Steampunk Nationalism

Steve the Steampunk Robot

I didn’t intend for this month’s column to be another update on the 21st Century Robot Project, but I couldn’t resist. The project encourages everyone to imagine, design, 3D print, build, and program their own robot. Robots should be easy to build and as customizable as your smartphone. I’ve been chronicling the project in this column because science fiction prototyping (SFP) plays a big part i...

Précis of implicit nationalism.

While the study of nationalism has received much attention throughout the social sciences and humanities, the experimental investigation of it lags behind. In this paper we review recent advances in the examination of implicit nationalism. In the first set of experiments we survey, the Palestinian, Israeli, Italian, and Russian flags were primed (or not, in the control conditions) and their eff...

Arabesk: Music and nationalism

New Approaches to Nationalism

Whatever nationalism is, whether ideology, civic religion, popular sentiment, or mass psychosis, its influence on modern society, politics, and art has been profound, perhaps more influential than the political movements of liberalism, fascism, and communism, all of which it underlay, interacted with, and powerfully defined. Whether analysts view nationalism as a beneficial or detrimental histo...

Nationalism and Separatism

Th e historical era following World War II is often referred to as the era of decolonization, the time when the former European powers, as well as America and Japan, gave up their overseas empires and dozens of new sovereign countries came into being. However, it could just as easily be called the era of nationalist separatism, as the sheer number of ethnic and pan-ethnic movements seeking inde...