Published On: June 25, 20211.7 min read

The kick-off event for ETHNICGOODS took place on June 17 and 18, 2021. The two-day event was a workshop entitled “From the Origins to the Consequences of Nationalism”, organized by Matthias vom Hau (IBEI, ETHNICGOODS), Marc Helbling (University of Mannheim and WZB) and Maya Tudor (University of Oxford). It brought together scholars who have worked on the consequences of nationalism from different perspectives.

This will be the first in a series of workshops aimed at creating a new dialogue between different strands of scholarship around what we know and do not know about the consequences of nationalism. The organisers’ aim is to instigate a new interdisciplinary research agenda that brings into conversation students of state formation and nation-building at the macro-level, scholars working on national identities at the individual level, and specialists on migration studies. This broad dialogue will target three goals:

  1. To discuss the most prominent variations of nationalism and explore how relevant they are for our agenda.
  2. To explore plausible mechanisms and scope conditions in order to identify how and when variations of nationalism might impact on substantive outcomes of interest.
  3. To identify appropriate methodological tools and empirical strategies for studying the consequences of nationalism.

The “Barcelona workshop” discussions were meant to generate debate around how to conceptualize and measure key variations of nationalism. Against this backdrop, the workshop deliberated what a global, cross-national dataset on nationalism should capture, and what plausible strategies of putting such a dataset together could be. An equally important objective of the workshop was to work towards a shared analytical framework for studying the consequences of nationalism. One initial step in this regard was to explore the most relevant—and potentially crosscutting—causal processes by which nationalism might affect different substantive outcomes (e.g., political regimes and public goods provision). Another step was to sketch out some methodological guidelines for how to empirically disentangle the effects of nationalism.

The opening conference was delivered by Andreas Wimmer, Lieber Professor of Sociology and Political Philosophy at Columbia University. You can download the presentation here.