La jornada

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC)

Keynote Speech

Matthias vom Hau - 14:40-16:00 Aula U0.3   

Who Belongs, and on What Terms?  Nation-Building Policies and the Politics of Identity

Scholars of political behavior routinely measure national and ethnic identification, attitudes towards minorities, and identity-based voting, but rarely the state policies that define who belongs to the nation and on what terms. This keynote brings those policies into view. From ethnic cleansing to multicultural recognition, states pursue strikingly different strategies towards the groups within their borders, and often treat groups within a single country in contrasting ways. Building on a typology that distinguishes whether a group is included in the national community and whether its cultural differences are institutionalized, the lecture introduces the Nation-Building Policies (NBP) dataset, a new resource tracing accommodation, assimilation, segregation, and eradication for 1,323 ethnic groups in 163 countries from 1945 to 2020. The data reveal a global shift towards accommodation, but also sharp inequalities across groups: racialized and migrant groups face more assimilation and less accommodation, and indigenous and racialized groups more eradication. The keynote concludes with a comparative research agenda connecting these macro-level policies to micro-level dynamics. How do shifts in the accommodation of group-related identity markers such as language or religion reshape the balance between national and ethnic identification? And do they affect support for ethnic or nationalist parties? Because nation-building policies change over time and vary across groups within countries, NBP offers new leverage for answering such questions in combination with existing survey data.

Matthias vom Hau is an associate professor at the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI). His research explores the intersections of identity politics, institutions, and development. He led a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant on global variation in nation-building and its causes and consequences. His work has appeared in leading journals including Comparative Political Studies, the American Journal of Sociology, Theory and Society, and Nations and Nationalism. He received his PhD from Brown University, was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Manchester, and has been a visiting professor at Princeton University and the Free University of Berlin.

Cafès i dinar

Coffee break: Tindrà lloc a les 10:50 h a l'Aula U1.14.

Dinar: Als voltants del campus de la UOC hi ha disponible una gran varietat de restaurants i cafès.

Contacta amb nosaltres

  Pots contactar amb nosaltres a través del correu d'algun dels organitzadors:

Macarena Ares

Lesley-Ann Daniels

Sergi Ferrer

Marc Guinjoan

Alba Huidobro

Andreu Paneque

Roberto Pannico

Toni Rodon