The focus of the conference Nationalist Responses to Economic and Political Crises will be nationalism and ethnic conflict in Central Europe, the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and Central Eurasia. Special attention will be given to themes discussing the relationship between economic crises, nationalism and politicized ethnicity.

The year 2014 will be the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, and also the 70th anniversary of the Holocaust in Hungary. Thematic panel proposals and individual papers dealing with these events, as well as with the connections between them (both in the Hungarian context and more generally), are also welcome.

The conference invites proposals devoted to comparative perspectives on nationalism-related issues, empirical case studies as well as papers on theoretical approaches that need not be grounded in any particular geographic region. Disciplines represented include political science, philosophy, history, anthropology, sociology, international relations, economics, political geography, sociolinguistics, literature, and related fields.

The keynote lecture will be delivered by Donald L. Horowitz (Duke University).

Conference panels will be organized under five sections:

• Central and Eastern Europe
• Balkans
• Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus and the Caucasus
• Middle East and Central Eurasia
• Nationalism studies (for comparative and theoretical proposals not specifically related to any of the sub-regions).

Topics covered in the conference will include:

• “First World War Centenary,”
• on nationalist challenges to the territorial and political order;
• “Nation-building and Empires,”
• on the politics of nation-building under and after empires;
• “Populism and the Radical Right,”
• the rise of populist rhetoric after economic and political crises;
• “Nationalisms and Crises,”
• on the impact of economic and social crises on nationalist politics and discourses;
• “History, Politics and Memory,”
• on the construction and contestation of the memory of historical events in particular sites, political discourses and historical research;
• “Ethnicity and Violence,”
• on the construction of personal and group identity and its potential mobilization in violence perpetrated against culturally-defined groups;
• “Migration and Globalization,”
• on the social and political challenges related to migration and the integration of immigrant communities in modern societies.