scholarly journals Nomads under arrest: The nation-building and nation-destroying of Kalmyk nomads in Russia

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 375-385
Author(s):  
Saglar Bougdaeva ◽  
Rico Isaacs
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Hierarchical Model ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Narrative Construction ◽  
Dalai Lama ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
National Imagination ◽  
Cultural Strategies ◽  
National Imaginary ◽  
Intellectual Milieu

Nomads are positioned outside of the modern conception of nations, which is based on a traditional or modern hierarchical model (Kuzio, 2001) which tends to “dehistoricize and essentialize tradition” (Chatterjee, 2010: 169). Using an analysis of the narrative construction of nomadic Kalmyk nationhood, particularly through historiography and culture, this article demonstrates that in spite of nation-destroying efforts from the Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union, the Kalmyk nation has been flexible with reinventing cultural strategies in charting the nomadic national imaginary from Chinggis Khan to the Dalai Lama. It argues that nomadic nationhood contains a deeply imaginary response to nomads’ cultural and intellectual milieu which provided a way of freeing itself from Tsarist and Soviet modular narratives of national imagination, demonstrating how nomadic nationhood exists as a non-modular form of nationhood.

Kto Kovo? Tribes and jihad in Pushtun Lands

2018 ◽  
pp. 33-58
Author(s):  
Mike Martin
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Interview Data ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
The Relationship

Based on interview data from Helmand Province, Afghanistan, this chapter explores the relationship between tribalism and jihadism from 1978-2015. The authors argue that local actors, predominantly tribal, have taken on the mantles of different jihadi organizations in order to gain funding as a way of increasing their leverage in local conflicts with other actors. This relationship holds true in Helmand through the ‘jihad’ against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the civil war, the Taliban era, and the post-2001 US-led nation-building period. The author concludes that jihadi organizations, or other external organizations, need to understand and work with tribal dynamics in order to achieve their aims in tribal territories.

The Tibetan Rebellion of 1959 and China's Changing Relations with India and the Soviet Union

2006 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 54-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chen Jian
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Political Pressure ◽  
People's Liberation Army ◽  
Dalai Lama ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
People’S Liberation Army

Tibet, which had enjoyed de facto independence from 1911 to 1950, was resubordinated to China in late 1950 and 1951 through a combination of political pressure and military force. On 10 March 1959 a mass revolt broke out in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. Amid growing turmoil, the 14th Dalai Lama fled the capital. After Chinese troops moved into Lhasa on 20 March to crush the rebellion, the Tibetan leader took refuge in neighboring India. The Chinese People's Liberation Army quelled the unrest and disbanded the local government. This article looks back at those events in order to determine how the rebellion was perceived in China and what effect it had on relations with India.

The Cry of National Liberation: Recent Soviet Attitudes Toward National Self-Determination

1960 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-106
Author(s):  
Elliot R. Goodman
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
National Liberation ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Western Idea ◽  
National Question ◽  
East And West ◽  
The Right

“You know,” Khrushchev characteristically proclaimed in a message to the African People's Conference meeting in Accra in December 1958, “that on the national question the Soviet Union is invariably guided by the principle of the right of nations to self-determination, and that it has always supported and still supports the struggle of peoples to obtain or strengthen their national independence and freedom.” The idea of national self-determination, fathered by political theorists like Mazzini and Wilson, is, of course, Western in origin. But in an age of nation-building in the Afro-Asian world, skillful Soviet use of this concept presents Western diplomacy with a formidable and continuing challenge in the East. The purpose of the present inquiry is to examine briefly how Soviet spokesmen have attempted to manipulate this Western idea, particularly in the great assembly halls of the UN where representatives of East and West constantly intermingle.

Īrān-o Tūran: On Iranian (and Quasi-Iranian) in the Ruhnama

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-278
Author(s):  
Dan Shapira
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
English Text ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Cultural Inheritance ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Former Soviet Republics ◽  
National Mythology

AbstractAfter the disintegration of the Soviet Union, political élites of some of the former Soviet republics, especially the Turkic-speaking ones, found themselves in ideological limbo. The first President of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov (Saparmyrat Nyýazow), has trodden his way out from the vacuum of legitimacy in the most original and interesting manner. In 2001, Niyazov, known also as Turkmenbashi (Türkmenbaşy), made public his book, Ruhnama, which later has been translated into about fifty languages. The book, appealing to the Oğuz Turkic heritage of the Turkmen nation, to her remote Parthian past, and to vague Islamic cultural inheritance, was supposed to provide guidelines for nation-building and cohesiveness. Atatürk's Nutuk was one of the literary models of Niyazov's book. Having fixed the newly-invented national mythology in writing, Niyazov was not only shaping his society in the desirable manner, but also legitimising his own rule. This paper analyses fragments of different—and not identical—versions of the first part of the work in several languages, mostly in Turkmen, Turkish, Russian, and English. The author suggests that the text of the Ruhnama was updated several times, with different translations reflecting different stages of fixing the original; the English text was translated faithfully from the elaborated Turkish translation, not from the Turkmen.

The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism

Slavic Review ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 414-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuri Slezkine
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Conceptual Foundation ◽  
Nationality Policy ◽  
Socialist State ◽  
Successful Attempt ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet Nationality Policy

Soviet nationality policy was devised and carried out by nationalists. Lenin's acceptance of the reality of nations and "national rights" was one of the most uncompromising positions he ever took, his theory of good ("oppressed-nation") nationalism formed the conceptual foundation of the Soviet Union and his NEP-time policy of compensatory "nation-building" (natsional'noe stroitel'stvo) was a spectacularly successful attempt at a state-sponsored conflation of language, "culture," territory and quota-fed bureaucracy.

Disjuncture in Ethnicity: Negotiating Circassian Identity in Jordan, Turkey and the Caucasus

1995 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 79-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seteney Shami
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Break Up ◽  
Post Colonialism ◽  
Political Economic

Theorizing about nationalism must now incorporate phenomena brought about by the break-up of the Soviet Union, the disintegration of formerly socialist states and the emergence of so-called “ethno-nationalisms”. Previously, nationalism was mostly addressed in terms of modernization, nation-building and post-colonialism. In these interpretations, the presence of a modernizing state was a given, although the success or failure of these states in mobilizing the loyalties of their populations was seen to vary. What is now troubling to the older paradigms is how to interpret the phenomenon of nationalism sans state, or at least in the absence of the political, economic, ideological construct of the nation-state.

Belarus in the 1920s: Ambiguities of National Formation

1997 ◽  
Vol 25 (02) ◽  
pp. 243-254
Author(s):  
Jakub Zejmis
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
State University ◽  
Socialist Republic ◽  
Soviet Socialist Republic ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
National Formation

In 1920 the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic emerged upon the ruins of German and Polish occupation. It replaced the short-lived Belarusian Democratic Republic as the embodiment of national statehood. The ensuing decade came to be an important but ambiguous period in Belarusian history. New state institutions such as the Commissariat of Public Enlightenment, the Institute of Belarusian Culture, and the Belarusian State University carried out unprecedented “nation-building” policies designed to reverse the effects of tsarist Russification and foster the development of Belarusian national culture. Parodoxically, many of the same institutions also implemented various aspects of “Sovietization.” A myriad of measures under the label “socialist construction” served to integrate ever more closely Belarus into the Soviet Union.

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