The Importance of Sexuality for Research on Ethnicity and Nationalism

By Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer

Volume 17, Issue 1, pages 44 – 56.

This article argues for a more systematic inclusion of human sexuality in studies of ethnicity and nationalism. Reviewing key extant social science research on sexuality, it highlights how scholars can leverage its theories, methods, and findings to enhance our understanding of the ways people build imagined ethnic and national communities and draw symbolic boundaries around them. This research reveals that sexuality is not tangential to those activities. Rather, policymakers, religious institutions, local communities, families, and other organizations all participate in more or less obvious ways to define what kinds of sexual desires, behaviours, and identities are acceptable for legitimate citizenship and group belonging. Those decisions have ramifications on both the global scale of international relations and the local scale of personal self-understanding. For these reasons, this article argues that scholarship that elides sexuality may run the risk of painting an incomplete picture of social processes related to ethnicity and nationalism.

Read the full article here.

On Revolutionary Waves and the Dynamics of Landslides

By Sebastian Ille

Volume 20, Issue 3, pages 223 – 243

This paper argues that revolutionary waves and social movements share similar dynamics to sand sliding down the edges of a pile. On this basis, the paper develops a theoretical model in which contention arises endogenously through discontent and social imitation as the social system self‐organizes into a state of criticality over time. Revolts and collective actions are thus understood as subsequent reorganizing cascades once the system has reached such a critical state. Although taken by themselves the properties and timings of these cascades are entirely chaotic, at the aggregate level the cascades’ properties follow regularities that are impervious to the individual characteristics of individuals but are affected by the intrinsic structure of social networks.

Read the full article here.

The Symbiosis of Sectarianism, Authoritarianism, and Rentierism in the Saudi State

By Courtney Freer

Volume 19, Issue 1, pages 88 – 108

Saudi Arabia provides a compelling example of how sectarianism sustains the dynamics of authoritarianism, especially when bolstered by a rentier political economy. In this paper, I investigate three claims about the link between Saudi authoritarianism and sectarianism, as follows: (1) Governing with a sectarian ideology impedes political reform, since it disrupts cross‐sectarian reform coalitions by attacking the sectarian outgroup. (2) The presence of multiple sects, as well as hydrocarbon wealth, allows regimes like that of al‐Saʿud to use divide‐and‐rule tactics to maintain control; it also enables the funding of media and education outlets with the purpose of perpetuating authoritarianism, especially when the authoritarian dynamics are underpinned by a rentier political economy. (3) Despite the authoritarian and rentier dynamics in play, the Saudi government has at times sought at least a degree of inclusion of the Shia minority, depending on the political economy and the relative influence of Shia and Sunni Islamists. Using the existing literature on the Saudi state and historical examples, I aim to clarify the link between sectarianism and authoritarianism in a state in which the Sunni/Shia division, bolstered by a rentier political economy, has emerged as a powerful means of maintaining the political status quo.

Read the full article here.

We in Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism (SEN) are actively celebrating International Women’s Day this year by showcasing the research carried out by female colleagues in the field of nationalism studies. Led by two female editors-in-chief, SEN’s editorial board reflects the journal’s commitment to diversity and equality. We have put together a special collection, available free access for 1 month, of all full-length articles authored by one or more female colleagues, published in SEN since 2018. The large collection of articles we showcase in this special issue include articles focused on the intersection between identity, gender, ethnicity and nationalism.

Myth, History, and the Idea of the Nation in Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul
Author: Catherine Brown
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Refugees, Patriotism, and Hogarth’s The Gate of Calais (1748)
Author: Kate Grandjouan
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Nationalism and Ethnicity in the Humanities

Volume 20, Issue 3

The geographies implied in ideas of ethnicity and nationality are not coterminous. National boundaries are historical artifacts, many of them drawn in the blood of wars, rather few a matter of landscape or physical geography alone. Nationhood and nationality, in the chief senses of these terms, have therefore been protean matters, subject to forces that require human beings to assume and celebrate identities that have their roots in political and military soils rather than in the claimed metaphysical bases of ‘blood’, ‘race’ or ‘Volk’; that is, an imposed ethnic inclusivity belied by the mingling of many ethnicities over time, given the fluidity of human populations.

Ethnicity (or ‘nationhood’ in a different, strictly ethnic sense), however, is another matter entirely, and some Heimat attitudes are specifically linked to the shared history, language, and cultural traditions – including beliefs – which are the principal themes of ethnic identity. Both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish communities maintained a powerful sense of ethnic identity for many centuries without a physical homeland, although a notional one existed until the founding of Israel. The latter event recapitulates the trope that a people has to have a land – that a nation must have a place of nationality; it must be defined by physical borders as well as by the other properties of membership. A trope sharply contradicted by the fact that ethnicities overflow lines on maps everywhere.

The landscape for considerations about nations, nationality, and ethnicity is a confusing one. It cannot be mapped without the kind of engagement exemplified by the papers presented in this Special Issue: examination of specific matters and illumination of the individual jigsaw puzzle pieces out of which the bigger and far more complicated picture will develop. Particularity produces clarity, and it is only through careful examination of each piece in the puzzle, one by one, that it becomes possible to discern the true contours of these concepts.

Read the editor’s introduction here.

Read the full issue here.