The stories groups tell about who they are.
9 topics · 8 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Combahee River Collective Statement
Combahee River Collective · 1977
Argues that Black women's liberation requires organising from their own specific, interlocking experience of racial, sexual and class oppression, an…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Civil Religion in America
Robert N. Bellah · 1967
Argues the United States has its own genuine religious dimension expressed through public rituals, presidential language and founding texts, running…
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Addresses to the German Nation
Johann Gottlieb Fichte · 1808
Argues the German nation is constituted not by a state or dynasty but by a shared original language, so education must cultivate that inherited…
+3 more at this level
8 works
Combahee River Collective
Argues that Black women's liberation requires organising from their own specific, interlocking experience of racial, sexual and class oppression, an analysis that would come to be called identity politics rather than waiting on movements organised around a single axis.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Robert N. Bellah
Argues the United States has its own genuine religious dimension expressed through public rituals, presidential language and founding texts, running alongside and separate from any church, which supplies the nation's shared moral vocabulary.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Dobbins et al.
Compares seven post-1945 US-led nation-building operations to argue outcomes track the resources committed per capita — troops, money and time — far more reliably than any feature of the country being rebuilt.
link checked 17 Sept 2026International Court of Justice
Finds that international law contains no general prohibition on unilateral declarations of independence, so Kosovo's declaration did not itself violate international law even though no rule of international law affirmatively authorised it either.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Argues the German nation is constituted not by a state or dynasty but by a shared original language, so education must cultivate that inherited linguistic community into political unity when the state itself has been conquered.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John T. Jost, Jack Glaser, Arie W. Kruglanski & Frank J. Sulloway
Reviews decades of psychological research to argue political conservatism is statistically associated with a cluster of motivated cognitive and psychological needs — for order, certainty and threat-management — rather than being explained by any single trait.
link checked 17 Sept 2026James D. Fearon
Builds a list of ethnic and cultural groups for 160 countries and a fractionalisation index, showing that how diversity is measured changes which countries look most divided and complicates simple claims that fractionalisation causes conflict.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Cas Mudde
Defines populism as a thin-centred ideology that pits a pure people against a corrupt elite, arguing this minimal definition is what explains why parties as different as Chavez's and Le Pen's both count as populist.
link checked 17 Sept 2026