Assignment 1
The process of nation-building has many factors and can vary significantly across different continents. This project aims to find differences and commonalities between the nation-building process that unfolded in European countries after World War I and the experiences of African nations in the 1990s. Both of these examples took place in the aftermath of major geopolitical events. The post-World War period was transformative, with borders being withdrawn, empires collapsing, and a new experience of mass tragedy. Also, in the process of nation-building in Africa, the dissolution of Cold War power dynamics brought geopolitical interests to the African continent, which led to the USA playing a major role in shaping the trajectories of nation-states in Africa. I would like to focus on outside interventions in conflicts (military interventions) and procedures (political/humanitarian interventions), as well as on the languages and identities of the population that were considered for the nation-building process. By comparing these historical periods, my main objective will be to explore the impact of external interventions in the process and the influence of global powers on the shaping of national identities.
- Stephenson, Carolyn. "Nation Building." Beyond Intractability. Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess. Conflict Information Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted: Jan, 2005. http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/nation-building
- Rohner, D., Zhuravskaya E. (eds) "Nation Building: Big Lessons from Successes and Failures. CERP Press: Feb, 2023. https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/nation-building-new-ebook
- Querubin, P and M Dell (2016), “More bombs, more shells, more napalm: Nation building through foreign intervention”, VoxEU.org, 16 August.
- Reinhard Bendix, Nation-building and Citizenship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
- Karl Deutsch, "Nation-Building and National Development: Some Issues for Political Research," in Karl Deutsch and William Foltz, eds., Nation-building (New York: Atherton, 1963).
- Can we identify commonalities and divergences in the nation-building experiences of these two distinct historical contexts and continents?
- Can we identify the role of global powers, socio-cultural factors and external influences in the shaping of national identities?
The project will involve collecting data (datasets with military conflicts, population and language usage datasets, political speeches, and historical documents), as well as academic literature related to nation-building. Through a combination of quantitative analysis of some data (statistics), natural language processing, and comparative text analysis I will try to provide answers to my research questions.
- datasets: battles, population, actors_in_conflicts, political_speeches, treatys, language, papers(maybe)
- Academic Literature
- Python for Data Analysis: libraries such as Pandas, Numpy for data manipulation and analysis.
- NLP and NLTK: for language processing, sentiment analysis, and comparative textual analysis.
- Data Visualization: Libraries such as Matplotlib and Seaborn for visualizing comparative trends and patterns.