Why do some countries fall apart, often along their ethnic fault lines, while others have held
together over decades and centuries, despite governing an equally diverse population …

What is and what makes a nation? What forces work for and against the emergence of new
nations? What does the emergence of a nation mean to its people, and what does it mean to …

This essay discusses, from a historical and contemporary perspective, the processes of state
and nation building. The difficulties of making every nation a state and every state a nation …

Scholars associated with theories of “nation-building” have tended either to ignore the
question of ethnic diversity or to treat the matter of ethnic identity superficially as merely one …

Can two or more self-differentiating culture-groups coexist within a single political structure?
The question may well seem clearly settled by the overwhelming factual evidence of …

At issue in this volume are three critical identities in Africa: nationality, ethnicity and
citizenship. In this chapter, I wish to explore them in comparative perspective, and to …

Nationalism is a secular modern ideology that has been accompanied by revolutions and it
has legitimised the rise to power of new social classes. For this reason many theorists have …

Despite many predictions made over the last two hundred years that nation-states and
nationalism are transient phenomena that will eventually fade away, the historical record …

The nation-state is a double sleight of hand, naturalizing both the nation and the state
encompassing it. No such naturalization is possible in multinational states. To explain why …

Practically and conceptually, the 'state'is again under siege. Less than two decades after its
'rediscovery'by scholars (Evans et al., 1985; Hall, 1986), the central unit of analysis in …