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by Liah Greenfeld (Editor)
Organised as an experiment testing the hypothesis that behind the hottest political issues of the quarter-century after the Cold War lies globalisation of national consciousness, this collection of essays unites authors from the four corners of the world. They focus on democratisation and its failure in Russia, transformations of identity in Eastern and Western Europe, Africa, North and South America, and South-East Asia, the rise of militant and political Islam, and the eruption of China onto the world stage. The volume makes the argument that globalisation we are witnessing is, for the most part, the globalisation of competitive and antagonistic nationalism, which spreads to areas where it was not known earlier and into the sphere of religion, ostensibly indifferent to it. Collectively, these essays prove that nationalism remains the organising principle of politics inside nations as well as at transnational and international levels.
Author Biography
A leading scholar on the subject of nationalism since 1992, Liah Greenfeld is best known for illuminating it as the cultural framework of modernity, the foundation of modern society, politics, and the economy. In her numerous publications, including the trilogy consisting of Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth, and Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience (Harvard University Press, 1992, 2001, and 2013, respectively) she has probed into nationalism's connections with the most public as well as the most private spheres of modern experience. She teaches at Boston University, holding the position of University Professor and Professor of Sociology, Political Science, and Anthropology. Between 2010 and 2016, she served as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Social Sciences at Lingnan University, Hong Kong.
