The event was an opportunity for scholars who work on nationalism, pluralism, citizenship and ethno-religious boundaries in the city of Barcelona to come together, share their work and offer feedback. Researchers explored how key societal transformations such as the digitalisation of social life, deepening political polarization and radicalisation, and the intensification of securitisation in diverse cultural and political contexts affect the so-called politics of identity. 

The symposium was also an occasion for members of EthnicGoods to present work related to the project’s Nation-Building Politics (NBP) Dataset, coming soon. Accordingly, post-doctoral fellow Emre Amasyali and research assistant Andrei Tarasov discussed varieties of nation-building in post-Soviet countries using the concept of fuzzy-sets. Ethnicgoods research fellow Frank-Borge Wietzke explored the usefulness of ethnic versus national identity distinction in African political studies, a debate that the project encountered continuously while coding sub-Saharan Africa for the global dataset. Finally, EthnicGoods Principal Investigator Matthias vom Hau, responsible for overseeing the Latin America part of the NBP Dataset, presented his work on threat of construction of indigenous groups in Argentina and Chile, in particular how this process relates to political processes of democratization, nation-building and securitisation.