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Nationalism, Peace and Organised Violence (NPOV)

This research group brings together scholars with diverse theoretical and empirical backgrounds that share common scholarly interests: the analysis of social, political, judicial and cultural phenomena related to dynamics of nationalism, peace and violence. The focus is on understanding violence from the sociological, historical and socio-legal perspectives.  Some of the topics this research group explores include: war, violence and democracy; nationalism, organised violence and modernity, military dictatorships; memory politics and commemorations; the state violence against minority groups, human rights; Holocaust; genocide and ethnic conflicts; revolutions, clandestine political violence, the role of language in uniting the people of a nation or dividing them. The researchers in this group use qualitative, quantitative, historical and mixed methods for research, and collect data from qualitative interviews, surveys, archives, case studies, experiments, policy analyses, and ethnographic work.

Kondakov A. (2021) The influence of the ‘gay-propaganda’ law on violence against LGBTIQ people in Russia: Evidence from criminal court rulings. European Journal of Criminology, 18(6): 940-959.

Acosta, L. & Braun, R. (2021). “War Commemoration and Nationalism in Belgium, 1914-1945: The Role of Military Networks”, Social Forces. (Online First, at https://academic.oup.com/sf/advance-article/doi/10.1093/sf/soab050/6272878).

Acosta, L. (2021). “Victimhood dissociation and conflict resolution: evidence from the Colombian peace plebiscite”, Theory and Society, 50(4), pp. 679–714.

David, L. (2020) The Past Can't Heal Us. The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Posocco, L. (2022) Nationalism and Museums in Croatia, Hungary, and Turkey. Routledge, London and New York.

Malešević, S. (2022). Why Humans Fight: The Social Dynamics of Close-Range Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (in press).

Malešević, S. and S. Loyal (2021) Contemporary Sociological Theory. London: Sage. 

Malešević, S. (2019) Grounded Nationalisms: A Sociological Analysis. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Malešević, S. (2022). Imagined Communities and Imaginary Plots: Nationalisms, Conspiracies, and Pandemics in the Longue Durée. Nationalities papers 50(1), 45-60.

Malešević, S. (2021). Forging the Nation-Centric World: Imperial Rule and the Homogenisation of Discontent in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1878-1918). Journal of Historical Sociology 34(3): 549-687.

Malešević, S. (2021). The Act of Killing: Understanding the Emotional Dynamics of Violence on the Battlefield. Critical Military Studies 7(3): 313-334.

  • Laura Acosta Gonzalez
  • Lorenzo Posocco
  • Michael Breslin
  • Paula O'Donohoe
  • Samuel Scanlon
  • Yuliang Lu

UCD School of Sociology

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