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Does John's Apocalypse envision destruction or salvation for the nations of the world? Scholarly views on this issue range from extreme (total destruction) to extreme (universal salvation). Jon Morales maintains that the question must be reframed to highlight, not only the destiny of the nations, but also their dilemma within the drama of world history. Using narrative methodology, Morales asks four key questions concerning the nations: What is John's story of the nations? How does he tell this story? What is John's message to the nations? And what is his message to the church concerning the nations? Literary characters cannot be understood in the abstract, but must be rather discovered sequentially in the development of an entire narrative. The nations in Revelation are no exception. Understanding that previous studies have neglected to situate the nations within Revelation's larger plot, or in interaction with other narrative characters, Morales concludes that John's purpose is to show that the nations belong to God. John achieves his purpose in part by deploying a novel metaphor, virtually unexplored until now – Christ, shepherd of the nations.

Nation-state

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This book explores the last 25 years of international peacebuilding and recasts them as a growing crisis of confidence in universal ideas of peacebuilding and self-government. Since current peacebuilding interventions are abandoning domineering, top-down and linear methodologies, and experimenting with context-sensitive, self-reflexive and locally driven strategies, the book makes two suggestions. The first is that international policymakers are embracing some of the critiques of liberal peace. For more than a decade, scholarly critiques have pointed out the need to focus on everyday dynamics and local initiatives and resistances to liberal peace in order to enable hybrid and long-term practice-based strategies of peacebuilding. Now, the distance between the policy discourse and critical frameworks has narrowed. The second suggestion is that in stepping away from liberal peace, a transvaluation of peacebuilding values is occurring. Critiques are beginning to accept and valorize that international interventions will continuously fail to produce sensitive results. The earlier frustrations with unexpected setbacks, errors or contingencies are ebbing away. Instead, critiques normalize the failure to promote stability and peace.

PEACE-BUILDING --- NATION-BUILDING --- DEMOCRATIZATION

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A l'heure de la mondialisation dite heureuse, depuis la fin de l'empire soviétique, la réunification allemande, la montée en puissance de la Chine et à travers tant d'autres exemples récents, la résistance des nations est un fait indiscutable. Il n'en reste pas moins de bon ton de mépriser la nation, échelle politique d'un autre âge, porteuse de toutes les tares du nationalisme et de l'impérialisme. Or, la nation ne peut se réduire au nationalisme. Forme politique issue des révolutions égalitaires et libérales modernes, elle reste à ce jour l'espace indispensable à toute expérience démocratique. La nation est même le meilleur rempart à opposer aux nationalismes qui persistent et se recomposent dans un monde plus international que global, plus mercantile que libéral. L'histoire des nations et la redéfinition des nationalismes proposées dans ce livre par Gil Delannoi montrent que la nation démocratique n'est pas près de disparaître.

Nation --- Nationalisme --- Démocratie --- Nationalism --- Nation-state --- Democracy --- Démocratie. --- Nation. --- Nationalisme. --- Démocratie.

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Nation Building presents bold new answers to an age-old question. Why is national integration achieved in some diverse countries, while others are destabilized by political inequality between ethnic groups, contentious politics, or even separatism and ethnic war? Traversing centuries and continents from early nineteenth-century Europe and Asia to Africa from the turn of the twenty-first century to today, Andreas Wimmer delves into the slow-moving forces that encourage political alliances to stretch across ethnic divides and build national unity. Using datasets that cover the entire world and three pairs of case studies, Wimmer’s theory of nation building focuses on slow-moving, generational processes: the spread of civil society organizations, linguistic assimilation, and the states’ capacity to provide public goods. Wimmer contrasts Switzerland and Belgium to demonstrate how the early development of voluntary organizations enhanced nation building; he examines Botswana and Somalia to illustrate how providing public goods can bring diverse political constituencies together; and he shows that the differences between China and Russia indicate how a shared linguistic space may help build political alliances across ethnic boundaries. Wimmer then reveals, based on the statistical analysis of large-scale datasets, that these mechanisms are at work around the world and explain nation building better than competing arguments such as democratic governance or colonial legacies. He also shows that when political alliances crosscut ethnic divides and when most ethnic communities are represented at the highest levels of government, the general populace will identify with the nation and its symbols, further deepening national political integration. Offering a long-term historical perspective and global outlook, Nation Building sheds important new light on the challenges of political integration in diverse countries.

NATION-BUILDING --- International relations. Foreign policy

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The territorially sovereign nation-state – the globally dominant political formation of Western modernity – is in crisis. Though it is a highly heterogeneous assemblage, moulded by different histories involving myriad socio-cultural processes, its territorial integrity and sovereignty are always contingent and related to the distribution and organization of authority and power, and the state’s position within encompassing global dynamics. This volume attends to these contingencies as they are refracted by the communities and populations that are variously incorporated (in conformity or resistance) within their ordering processes. With ethnographically grounded analyses and thick description of locales as various as Russia, Lebanon and Indonesia, a vital conversation emerges about forms of state control under challenge or in transition. It is clear that the politico-social configurations of the state are still taking new directions, such as extremist populism and a general dissatisfaction with the corporatism of digital and technological revolutions. These are symptoms of the dilemmas at the peripheries of capital growth coming home to roost at their centres. Such transformations demand the new forms of conceptualization that the anthropological approaches of the essays in this volume present. A fascinating and timely collection that dwells on the unsettled nature of contemporary relationships between ‘state’ and ‘society’. Drawing on case studies from beyond the heartland of political theory, contributors refuse to treat global phenomena as generic and focus instead on the specific social relations that constitute the varied possibilities and limits of contemporary state power. Penny Harvey, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester This is political anthropology on a truly large canvas. The standing question about how ‘state’ and ‘society’ relate, and whether the distinction between them makes sense in the first place, is tackled deftly through the lenses of varying conceptions and practices of power and resistance. Martin Holbraad, Professor of Social Anthropology, University College London

nation-state --- sovreignty --- state --- power --- globalism