Conceptual Debates in Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to review some of the basic conceptual debates in nationalism studies under the broad and interrelated categories of ethnicity, nations and nationalism, and classification of nations and nationalism. The sheer volume of literature produced on these subjects, particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, poses a major challenge, but the present selective focus using key and influential texts as examples should provide the reader with a solid foundation for further research. The essay has three sections, organized as follows. The first, on ethnicity, provides a brief history of the term and an overview of what is usually described as the debate between primordialist and instrumentalist accounts of ethnicity, but suggests that this characterization is misleading. Section two, on nations and nationalism, begins with a similar etymology before surveying the debate between modernist, perennialist, and ethno-symbolist conceptions of the nature of and relations between those two phenomena. Finally, the third section reviews the range of ways that nations and nationalism have been classified, including the now dominant distinction between civic and ethnic types.