Nation, Race, and Gender

Overview

International Relations takes the nation-state as its foundational unit of analysis. The very name of the discipline — inter-national relations — presupposes the existence of nations. But what is a nation? Who belongs to it, and on what terms? Who gets excluded, and through what mechanisms? This module turns the analytical lens inward, interrogating the identity categories that the discipline typically treats as given.

The central question is deceptively simple: who belongs? Answering it requires engaging with nationalism as ideology and practice, with the racialization of national membership, and with the gendered structures that shape how nations imagine themselves. These are not merely domestic concerns. They determine who can claim sovereignty, whose self-determination is recognized, which populations are deemed worthy of international protection, and which are rendered invisible. The boundaries of the nation — however drawn — are always also boundaries of the international system.

What Is a Nation?

There is no consensus definition of “nation” in the scholarly literature. This is not a failure of academic precision; it reflects the fact that the concept does genuinely different political work depending on how it is defined. Six commonly cited definitions illustrate the range of disagreement:

Scholar	Definition	Role of Ethnicity
Benedict Anderson (1983)	An “imagined political community” — imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. A new way of linking fraternity, power, and time.	Not definitionally necessary
Ernest Gellner (1983)	“Primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.”	Not definitionally necessary
Walker Connor (1994)	“Nation connotes a group of people who believe they are ancestrally related. Nationalism connotes identification with and loyalty to one’s nation.”	Essential
Liah Greenfeld (1992)	“A movement and a state of mind that brings together national identity, consciousness, and collectivities.”	Not definitionally necessary, but empirically often linked
Michael Hechter (2000)	“Collective action designed to render the boundaries of the nation congruent with those of its governance unit.” Nations are “territorially concentrated ethnic groups.”	Essential
Anthony Smith (1999)	“A modern ideological movement, but also the expression of aspirations by various social groups to create, defend or maintain nations — their autonomy, unity and identity — by drawing on the cultural resources of pre-existing ethnic communities.”	Essential

Source: Adapted from Mylonas & Tudor (2023, p. 7).

The key fault line runs through the role of ethnicity. For Anderson and Gellner, nationalism is primarily a political and cultural phenomenon — nations are constructed through shared symbols, print media, standardized education, and political institutions. Ethnicity may accompany nationalism, but it is not a necessary component. For Connor, Hechter, and Smith, by contrast, ethnic ties — real or believed — are constitutive. You cannot have a nation without some claim, however mythologized, to shared ancestry.

This matters enormously for IR. If nations are constructed, they can be reconstructed. If they are rooted in ethnic bonds, the boundaries of political belonging become much harder to renegotiate.

Three terms must be distinguished clearly:

Nation: A community of people bound by shared culture, history, identity, and a sense of belonging to a common political project. It has cultural, political, and psychological dimensions — common language, religion, traditions, a sense of being a “natural” political community, and feelings of loyalty or patriotism.
State: A sovereign political entity defined by government, territory, and population. States exercise a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within their borders.
Nation-state: The idealized alignment of nation and state — an autonomous political community of one predominant nation. In practice, most states are multinational or multiethnic, but nationalism asserts that each nation should have its own state.

The slippage between these terms — the ease with which “state” and “nation” are used interchangeably — is itself a political act. It naturalizes the assumption that existing state boundaries reflect coherent national communities, when in fact most borders were drawn through conquest, colonial administration, or diplomatic negotiation with little regard for the populations they enclosed.

Nationalism and International Relations

Nationalism occupies a peculiar position in IR theory. As Griffiths and Sullivan (1997) argue, the discipline has an “ambiguous relationship” with nationalism: it is simultaneously foundational and marginalized. IR scholars routinely invoke the “nation-state” as their unit of analysis, yet rarely interrogate how nations form, fracture, or compete for statehood. The discipline, as they observe, tends to take “nation-states as given” — like boats that can be careened for repair but never fundamentally questioned as vessels.

This neglect has theoretical consequences. As Griffiths and Sullivan demonstrate, the sharp distinction between politics “inside” and “outside” the state — the domestic/international divide — systematically excludes nationalism from the IR agenda. Nationalism is treated as an internal phenomenon, relevant only when it spills across borders in the form of secessionist conflict or irredentist war. The result is that IR simultaneously depends on nationalism (the entire system presupposes it) and ignores it (the discipline studies what happens between nation-states, not what constitutes them).

Each major IR tradition engages nationalism differently:

Realism treats the nation-state as a given unit operating under anarchy. Nationalism is not theorized; it is assumed. When nationalism does become a problem — as in secessionist movements or irredentist wars — realists approach it through the lens of “conservative containment”: managing nationalist disruption to preserve the existing distribution of power and territorial boundaries. The concern is order, not identity.
Liberalism has a more complex and contradictory relationship. On one hand, liberalism historically championed nationalism through the principle of self-determination — the Wilsonian idea that each nation has the right to its own sovereign, representative state. On the other hand, liberal internationalism seeks to “dilute” nationalism through interdependence, supranational institutions (the EU being the paradigmatic case), and cosmopolitan norms that assert rights beyond the nation. Griffiths and Sullivan describe this as “dilution from below.” The tension is real: liberalism affirms the right to national self-determination while simultaneously working to transcend it.
Constructivism treats nations as socially constructed — produced through shared narratives, symbols, institutions, and practices rather than given by nature or ancestry. National identity is not fixed but evolves with changes in identity formation, international norms, and state interactions. This perspective opens the question of how nations come to seem natural, and whose interests are served by particular constructions of national belonging.
Postcolonial theory reveals nationalism’s double character most clearly. Anticolonial nationalisms were movements of liberation — they mobilized colonized populations to resist imperial domination and claim sovereignty. But they also often internalized the colonial state’s territorial logic, its administrative structures, and its hierarchies of belonging. Nationalism in the postcolonial world simultaneously resists and replicates the colonial order, highlighting what Griffiths and Sullivan call the tension between genuine liberation and the reproduction of inherited structures.

The upshot is that nationalism is not a marginal topic for IR — it is, as Griffiths and Sullivan conclude, a central issue that the discipline has systematically avoided confronting. The principle of equating nation with state both sustains the international order and frustrates attempts to build a more peaceful one.

Race, Ethnicity, and National Belonging

The question of who belongs to the nation is never answered in purely political terms. In practice, national membership is always inflected by race and ethnicity — sometimes explicitly, sometimes through mechanisms that appear neutral but produce racialized outcomes.

The classic typology distinguishes civic nationalism from ethnic nationalism. Civic nationalism defines membership through shared citizenship, political values, and participation in public life. It is, in principle, open to anyone who adopts the nation’s beliefs and participates in its political community. Ethnic nationalism defines membership through ancestry, culture, and blood ties — common descent, language, or religion. It tends to be closed to outsiders, making it difficult or impossible for those outside the core lineage to join.

This distinction is useful as a starting point, but it has serious limits. The most important is its Eurocentric application. The civic/ethnic dichotomy maps too neatly onto a West/non-West binary: France and the United States are treated as exemplars of civic nationalism, while Germany’s historical Volkisch tradition and various Asian nationalisms (Korean minjok, Japanese minzoku) are classified as ethnic. This framing obscures the ethnic exclusions embedded within supposedly civic nations — the racial prerequisites for American citizenship that persisted until 1952, France’s colonial subject-citizen distinction, the racialized policing of national belonging in every Western democracy. As Mylonas and Tudor (2023) note, the ethnic/civic dichotomy can be “ahistorically and Eurocentrically applied.”

Racialization works through nationalism in several registers. National narratives establish who counts as a prototypical member and who is marked as an outsider. Immigration policies, citizenship laws, language requirements, and cultural expectations all function as mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. The question of assimilation versus preservation is central: host states have historically expected immigrants to adopt the language, values, and cultural norms of the majority nation. But many diaspora communities resist full assimilation in order to maintain their distinct identity. This tension — between the state’s demand for cultural conformity and minority communities’ insistence on self-preservation — recurs across national contexts, from Turkish communities in Germany to Korean communities in Japan to Latino communities in the United States.

The deeper point is that all nations, including ostensibly civic ones, construct boundaries of belonging that are racialized. The question is not whether racial and ethnic hierarchies shape national membership, but how — and whose interests those hierarchies serve.

Gender and Nationalism

Nations are not gender-neutral. As Joane Nagel (2022) argues, nationalism and masculinity are deeply entangled — the nation is constructed as a masculine project, and its defense is framed as a masculine duty.

Anderson’s concept of the nation as an “imagined community” carries an underexamined gendered dimension. He described nationalism as “a new way of linking fraternity, power, and time.” The word is precise: fraternity. The nation is imagined as a brotherhood — a horizontal community of men bound by solidarity, sacrifice, and shared purpose. Women appear in national narratives not as full political agents but in specific, constrained roles.

Women are cast as symbolic bearers of the nation’s culture and honor. They are the mothers who reproduce the nation biologically and culturally, the guardians of tradition, the embodiments of national purity. This symbolic role carries material consequences: control over women’s bodies, sexuality, and reproductive choices becomes a site of nationalist politics. Honor-based violence, restrictions on intermarriage, and policies governing women’s dress and behavior are all expressions of this gendered logic.

Militarized masculinity is the other side of the coin. The defense of the nation is coded as masculine — the soldier-citizen is the paradigmatic national subject. Military service is framed as the highest expression of patriotic duty, and the capacity for organized violence is treated as the foundation of sovereignty. This gendering of national defense marginalizes not only women but also men who do not conform to militarized ideals, while naturalizing the association between statehood, violence, and masculine authority.

The gendered structure of nationalism has direct implications for IR. It shapes who is recognized as a legitimate political actor, whose security concerns are taken seriously, and how concepts like sovereignty, protection, and sacrifice are understood. When IR theory treats the state as a unitary actor pursuing “national interests,” it obscures the gendered processes through which those interests are defined — processes that systematically privilege male perspectives, militarized responses, and patriarchal institutional forms.

Comparative Cases

European Nationalisms: Civic Ideals and Ethnic Realities

The civic/ethnic distinction is most often illustrated through European cases. France represents the civic ideal — membership through shared political values, *laicite*, and republican citizenship. Germany's historical tradition of *Volkisch* nationalism, rooted in blood and soil (*Blut und Boden*), represents the ethnic counterpart. But the contrast is less clean than the typology suggests. France's civic nationalism coexisted with a colonial empire built on racial hierarchy. Germany's postwar civic transformation demonstrates that ethnic nationalisms can evolve. The contemporary resurgence of right-wing nationalism across Europe — from the Rassemblement National in France to the Alternative for Germany (AfD) to Viktor Orban's Hungary — complicates the typology further. These movements deploy the language of cultural preservation and civilizational defense in ways that blur the civic/ethnic boundary, defining national belonging through cultural criteria (religion, language, "values") that function as proxies for ethnic exclusion.

Postcolonial Nation-Building: Korea's March First Movement

Korea's March First Movement (1919) illustrates nationalism as a force of liberation. Under Japanese colonial rule, Koreans mobilized in a mass independence movement that drew on Wilsonian principles of self-determination. The movement was a genuine expression of popular sovereignty — a colonized people asserting their right to self-governance. But Korean nationalism also illustrates the complexities that postcolonial theory highlights. The concept of *minjok* (ethnic nation) that animated Korean nationalism was itself shaped by colonial-era intellectual exchanges. The emphasis on ethnic homogeneity that became central to Korean national identity served the project of anticolonial resistance, but it also produced exclusionary pressures that persist in contemporary South Korean debates over immigration and multiculturalism.

Contemporary Populist Nationalism

The post-Cold War era has seen a global resurgence of populist nationalism, defying predictions that globalization would weaken national attachments. Griffiths and Sullivan's observation about the "Janus-faced" nature of nationalism — simultaneously constituting and destabilizing the international order — finds new expression in contemporary politics. Russian nationalism under Putin illustrates how national pride and grievance can be mobilized for expansionist purposes. South Korea's 2024 martial law declaration by President Yoon Suk Yeol invoked the language of national protection against internal enemies. In the United States, debates over immigration, assimilation, and dual loyalty reveal ongoing contestation over who truly "belongs" to the nation and what obligations membership entails. Each case demonstrates that nationalism remains a potent force in world politics — not a relic of the nineteenth century but an active, evolving element of the contemporary international order.

Connecting the Threads

This module builds directly on the foundations laid in earlier parts of the course.

Module 1 (IR Theories) introduced constructivism — the insight that the structures of international politics are socially produced rather than given by nature. This module applies that insight to the nation itself. If anarchy is “what states make of it” (Wendt), then nations are what their members — and their excluded non-members — make of them. The definitions table above demonstrates that even scholars who study nationalism disagree fundamentally about whether nations are constructed or primordial.

Module 3 (Non-Western IR) asked: whose theories structure the discipline? This module asks the parallel question: whose nations structure the international system? The Eurocentric application of the civic/ethnic distinction, the marginalization of postcolonial nationalisms in IR theory, and the assumption that Western state-formation represents the universal template — all of these are extensions of the epistemic hierarchies Module 3 identified.

Module 5 (Society in a Global Age) will pick up where this module leaves off. If globalization is dissolving or weakening national boundaries — through migration, digital connectivity, transnational economic flows — then nationalism can be understood as one response to that dissolution. The resurgence of populist nationalism is, in part, a reaction against the dislocations of globalization, a reassertion of national boundaries in the face of forces that threaten to render them irrelevant. The question that carries forward: can the nation-state adapt to a globalizing world, or will the tension between national belonging and global interdependence define the politics of the coming decades?