HMØK00016U Nationalism and Ethnicity in Central Asia, Afghanistan and Iran

In spite of earlier scholarly predictions concerning its eventual disappearance in the 1980s, nationalism has clearly remained a dominant paradigm throughout the world. While in Central Asia nationalist ideology gained new momentum following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it had emerged as an ideology and a political force in the region long before the 1990s. In Iran, the Islamic Revolution promised an alternative to the secularism and nationalism of the Shah, but in fact produced its own religious nationalism. Although the countries of the macro-region of Central Asia, Iran and Afghanistan all have their own specific history and brand of nationalism, they also display patterns which, due to a number of common denominators, render them comparable. In this course, theories of nationalism will be discussed with reference to its roots, emergence and relationship to ethnicity, using the specific case studies of the contiguous regions of the Central Asian –stan states, Iran and Afghanistan.  Questions to be explored include:  Are nations imagined and invented, as critics claim, or ancient and enduring, as nationalists assert?  Are nationalism, communism, and religiosity necessarily in tension?  Are indigenous (ethno-)nationalisms more authentic than “official nationalisms”?