Nationalism and the Transformation of the State: Border Change and Political Violence in the Modern World

Following Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, the recent conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East signals the return of geopolitics. This book challenges conventional approaches that ignore border change, arguing that geopolitics is driven by nationalism and focusing on how nationalism transforms the state. Using geocoded historical maps covering state borders and ethnic groups in Europe, the authors' spatial approach shows how, since the French Revolution, nationalism has caused increasing congruence between state and national borders and how a lack of congruence increased the risk of armed conflict. This macroprocess is traced from early modern Europe and widens the geographic scope to the entire world in the mid-twentieth century. The analysis shows that the risk of conflict may be increased by how nationalists seeking to revive past golden ages and restore their nations' prestige respond to incongruent borders. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Lars-Erik Cederman is Professor of International Conflict Research at ETH Zürich: He is the author of Emergent Actors in World Politics (1997), co-author of Inequality, Grievances and Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and Sharing Power, Securing Peace? (Cambridge University Press, 2022), as well as numerous articles in scientific journals.

Luc Girardin is a project leader at ETH Zürich and CTO at Macrofocus. He is a trained computer and data scientist with a foot in the social sciences. He co-created the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) dataset, led the GROWup federated data platform, and developed the GROWLab agent-based simulator.

Carl Müller-Crepon is an Assistant Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science and received his Ph.D. from ETH Zürich in 2019. Published across leading journals, his research focuses on state building and ethnic politics in relation to local development and conflict.

Yannick I. Pengl received his PhD from ETH Zürich in 2018 and served as Senior Scientist there until 2023. His research focuses on political economy in sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and beyond and has been published in leading journals.