Democratic and Autocratic Nation Building

Abstract

There are two main trends in the field of nation-building studies. One subset of the field focuses on democratic nation building, seeking to answer questions of how people can live together in divided societies and presenting institutional recommendations. The other subset examines autocratic nation building, or how those in power utilize nation building to maintain their position of dominance. Scholars examine both types of nation building from above, examining government policies and elite action, and from below, analyzing the practices and emotions of non-elites. While there has been much progress in the field of nation-building studies, I suggest that we focus more on the conceptual differences between democratic and autocratic nation building, address the interactions of elites and non-elites in nation-building practices, and disaggregate analyses to take into account in-country variation in nation building.

Higher education expansion in Kazakhstan and regime stability

“…Boulay and Isaacs (2019) believe that in Kazakhstan, there is a greater emphasis on building the ideology of a self-legitimizing regime through various state-building strategies associated with Nazarbayev personal rule. Other authors believe that the political regime of Kazakhstan, trying to strengthen its legitimacy, is building a nation around the narrative of the “Father of the nation” related to Nazarbayev (Stewart, 2021).…”

Guest Editor’s Introduction: “Everyday Nationalism in World Politics: Agents, Contexts, and Scale”

“…Much of the early work on everyday nationalism questioned the value of nation building and elite-oriented approaches to nationalism, focusing particularly on the failure of nationalizing projects to mobilize or even appeal to citizens and youth (Brubaker et al 2006; Fox 2004). More recently, scholars have begun examining the efforts of democratizing and autocratizing regimes to use banal nationalism as a source of legitimation (Goode 2020; Stewart 2020), for which everyday nationalism as an approach is ideally suited to examine the success or failure of such attempts.…”