B.R. Ambedkar is often held to be an uncompromising advocate of the cause of the depressed castes or Dalits. But his advocacy for Dalits was within the larger framework of his vision for an Indian nation that needed to be formed, since he believed that there could be no nation unless everyone within it was not treated as an equal—an end that could be only attained through the annihilation of the caste system. He was not unmindful also of the need to protect religious minorities, for which reason he argued in favour of their adequate representation in legislative bodies, services, etc.
The development of the Oyu Tolgoi copper-gold mine, located in Mongolia's South Gobi province, promises to rebuild the nation after two decades of economic and social instabilities following the 1990 revolution. While the company promotes the mine as the teleological solution to Mongolia's development, the state and public remain ambivalent, as concerns about a resource curse and Dutch Disease loom. In this paper, I argue that Oyu Tolgoi remains contested due to tensions between corporate and state actors as well as public concerns about the potential negative political, economic, and environmental effects of mining. Debates over the Oyu Tolgoi investment agreement negotiations and the immediate repercussions of the agreement signing reveal how the dual teleologies of building mineral nations crystallize in the neologism "Mine-golia." This paper begins to fill a gap in the literature on mineral nations which privileges the role of the state, leaving how corporations engage in nation-building underexamined.
AbstractThis paper studies the Belarusian nation as envisioned by the president in his political speeches delivered on the country's Independence Day. The theoretical framework of the paper rests upon an understanding of the discursive construction of national identity. This analysis of the presidential speeches utilizes principles of the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA). As a special genre of texts, political speeches aim to offer normative guidance and a sense of societal consensus to the public. The paper reveals that in the construction of a national community in Belarus, the presidential speeches ambiguously refer to historical memory, socio-economic development, the political system and the country's foreign relations.
Detecting the gap in the existing literature of Franjo Tudjman's political thought, this article comprehensively analyzes Tudjman's nationalist ideology prior to the 1990s. Using a morphological approach to ideology, the article presents three main clusters of concepts regarding Tudjman's ideology: the narrative on the nature of humankind as teleological struggle to achieve independent national states; the narrative of supranational ideologies - such as liberalism and communism - acting as a pure geopolitical means used by the great nations to subjugate small ones; and finally the narrative of the Croatian thousand-year long struggle to achieve an independent national state. Moreover, the article exposes how Tudjman already by the 1970s created the idea of an all-embracing national movement grounded in the synthesis of abovementioned teleological concept on Croatian history, which would eventually bring about a national reconciliation of Ustasa and the Croatian partisans in a final struggle for the independent state. Adapted from the source document.
The growing interest in migration, citizenship, and nationalism among scientists has led in the last two decades to the formation of an interdisciplinary field of critical passport studies. Initially passport scholars were following the institutionalist approach to nationalism, as well as the theories of disciplinary regime and surveillance society. Thus they were focusing on how this travel document together with the associated institutional infrastructure, administrative and social practices have been used in developing modern nation-states by forging the physical, social and cultural boundaries of the nation and disciplining the citizens. More recently, an increasing number of scholars have been investigating the grassroot forms of the perceptions and practices of passport use. Their studies reveal how passports and passes can help citizens in navigating the attempts of nation-states to "bind" their own populations, as well as in subverting a citizenship regime that looks to involve citizens into national projects and socially exclude non-citizens. The review of critical literature on the passport allows us to conclude that the multidimensional nature of this document enables different social actors to involve it in both nation-building and nation-destruction. In light of this literature we can recognize the weakening of the link between citizenship and nation-state, and the fact that citizenship and civic consciousness are currently being produced by various actors at different societal levels.
Some Taiwanese nationalists express, with alarm, the view that their country is about to be absorbed into a rising China, yet they are paradoxically optimistic that broader international trends will make it possible to secure de jure independence as early as the end of the decade. Their first and most urgent task, in the process of thoroughly de-Sinifying the culture, is to imagine a new Taiwanese nation——a radical project that, in the aftermath of President Chen Shui-bian's reelection, is certain to roil cross-strait relations in the coming months and years.
