Nationalism and Territorial Politics

Nationalism and territorial politics remain among the most powerful forces shaping contemporary democracies. Across the world, conflicts over sovereignty, self-government, constitutional authority, language, political representation, and national identity continue to redefine the relationship between states, territories, and citizens. While these dynamics are especially visible in plurinational states, they increasingly resonate across a much wider range of democratic contexts.
This panel explores the multiple intersections between nationalism and territorial politics. We welcome papers on secession and independence movements, autonomy and federalism, majority and minority nationalism, constitutional and judicial politics, territorial governance, language policy, migration and citizenship, indigenous claims, border-making, political representation, and the governance of territorial diversity.
The panel is particularly interested in how competing projects of nationhood shape democratic politics. How do majority and minority actors define the political community on whose behalf they claim to speak? How are territorial conflicts mediated through constitutions, courts, elections, public policies, and social movements? How do states respond to challenges to territorial authority, and how do these responses reshape the claims, strategies, and identities of territorial movements? Under what conditions do competing national projects accommodate diversity, and when do they instead reinforce political boundaries? How do contemporary communication dynamics shape, amplify, or polarise the discursive construction of national identities? Through which markers—including language, residence, ancestry, religion, race, gender, and political loyalty—is membership in the political community recognised, contested, or denied?
We also encourage contributions examining the consequences of territorial conflicts for democratic governance, political polarisation, party competition, institutional change, and intergovernmental relations. Comparative, theoretical, historical, qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods contributions are all welcome. By bringing together scholarship on nationalism and territorial politics, the panel seeks to advance comparative understanding of how territorial conflicts reshape democratic politics in the twenty-first century.