Introduction: nationalism, identity and the state

In the 1990s, constructivist perspectives gained increasing popularity in political geography. One of the core concepts that was subject to this new theoretical approach was the ‘nation’, with scholars embarking on an analytical project to explain and disentangle the concept from a wide range of complimentary and competing identity narratives, and to explain its curious hegemony in the contemporary political ordering of the world around territorial states. This research therefore was just as much about language as it was material transformations guided by multiple and conflicting efforts to define the ‘nation’, crucially extending the seminal work of scholars like Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities, Michael Billig in Banal Nationalism and Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition into the field of political geography. Themes such as nation building and how state power is legitimated through the cultural and symbolic production of the nation are now crucial to the discipline.