Discourse of Nationalism Revisited: Some Considerations on a Social Constructionist Approach

Studies of nationalism came of age over three decades ago as a response to the eruption of violence caused by ethno-religious or racial discrimination and the waves of political struggles for autonomy or self-determination within nation-states.Political unrest or ethnic conflicts largely stem from the aggravated fractures within modern nation-states caused by state-seeking nationalist projects: the establishment of a homogenous nation welded by aesthetic national discourses on modernity.The nationalist drive to establish a political system in which all people are awarded citizenship is the primary cause of post-national fractures.While theories of nations and nationalism have largely been established chiefly through the endeavours of prominent generations of social scientists, nationalistic phenomena in the post-national world have still remained relatively unexplored.The recent development of theorising nations and nationalism from ordinary perspectives is critical in reconsidering the state-centred modes of nation building.This is because a question may have been raised about how people can become national, or