International Research Project "Comparative Historical Studies of Empire and Nationalism"

 The present day conversation about world order, religion, nationalism, ethnicity, and immigration is densely populated by metaphorical and analytical references to the history of world empires and their legacies. In current public debates empire is invoked in two opposing modes: for some empire is an illegitimate form of rule and unstable political formation bent on the road to collapse;  for others empire is a nostalgic place of cosmopolitanism and instructive lessons for world politics and management of diversity.     The present project provides an explanation for the puzzle of diametrically opposed contemporary views on empire. With the help of broad range of new methodologies for studying imperial formations and nationalism the project explores the phenomenon of imperial crises in comparative perspective and uses it as a lens to look at multiple historical legacies of empire and the origins of post-imperial political imagination that sought to accommodate, rearrange or eliminate diversity of the inherited imperial space. The primary focus of the project is on the Russian Empire/Soviet Union and Ottoman Empire/post-Ottoman space. Located in the broader comparative context of modernizing empires and post-imperial political imagination those cases provide illuminating perspectives on the range of exit strategies from the imperial crises: from unitary assimilationist nation-state to a multinational federation.