Adapting Nations

Nations adapt. Nations are resilient both within and outside the boundaries of statehood. Yet scholarship tends to downplay nationhood, as it focuses on the polity. As a consequence, the investigation of modern societies, though usually articulated around the nation-state model, falls into state-centrism, whilst neglecting the other side of the medal. This book initiates an interdisciplinary debate that encourages research in a field that has largely been overlooked in European social and political sciences. The analysis, offered by the authors, reinstates the concept of the 'nation' beyond the traditional, and somewhat dichotomous, schools of thought, hence neither judging the nation as a mere invention nor as a deterministic product of history. The book provides those interested in nationalism with new approaches to exploring national identity and its connection to statehood. By using concepts inspired by political science and sociology, namely habitus, survival unit, polity, hysteresis, and so forth, the different chapters of the volume revitalise the inquiry of the dimensions and features in which the nation and the identification they engender become tools of adaptation in relation to the transformative reality of our own contemporaneity. The authors thus contextualise the latter via the mid-range concept of national resilience at both meso- and macro-levels. 

Alon Helled is a postdoctoral fellow and adjunct lecturer in the History of International Relations at the University of Turin, Italy. He is also a teaching assistant on the History of Modern Israel and History of the Middle East courses at the University of Florence.

Carlo Pala is a political scientist who has taught Political Science and Science of Public Administration at the University of Sassari, section of Nuoro, Department of Law, Italy. He is also an associate fellow of  the indisciplinary laboratory  Arènes at Institut d’Études Politiques (IEP), Rennes, France.