Nation-Building, Nationalism, and Wars∗

Benny Habibi

The need to call a place home is a very familiar desire. National citizenship can be thought of as a unique status which offers people unbridled access to this peace of mind. Because the nation is the source of this comfort, it is not surprising that people take pride in it. But nationalism stems from the abstract, purely ideological form of a nation. This concrete-less nationalism has been a k...

Ambiguities of Modernist Nationalism: Architectural Culture and Nation- Building in Early Republican Turkey

The Contradictions of Techno-Nationalism and Techno-Globalism: A Historical Perspective

Techno-nationalism and techno-globalism are descriptive and prescriptive categories for understanding the impact of technology on society and vice versa. They reflect the underlying assumptions made by analysts of the place of technology in the world, and denote ideologies, rather than technological policies or realities. They also help us to realize that standard accounts of the nation and glo...

'The Irrawaddy' October 2006 - Notepad

The best known nationalist projects have been those emerging in western-oriented, mostly Christian-led, S’ghaw dialect-speaking communities. For many observers and supporters, the militarized nation-building project of the Karen National Union is the only authentic expression of Karen nationalism in Burma. Indeed, international agencies have played important roles in legitimizing the KNU’s ver...

Nationalism, Territoriality and National Territorial Belonging

Most studies of nationalism are based on an understanding of the nation as a cultural collectivity that can be located in historical terms in the passage from the pre-modern to the modern era. Rather less attention is paid to spatial considerations. In this light, the paper argues that we cannot fully understand nationalism and its relationship to the nation unless we take into account territor...