Exclusionary Nationalism: A New Global Dataset — APSA Annual Conference 2025

I presented my ongoing work on the Dominant Nationalist Movements (DNM) database, together with Aya Abdelrahman and Lars-Erik Cederman, at the APSA Annual Conference in 2025. This is the abstract summarizing my talk:

The post-Cold War order has been disrupted by the concurrent resurgence of exclusionary nationalism within states and militarized conflict between states. How are these phenomena linked? Shifting focus from nationalists' external territorial claims, emphasized in existing research, we instead highlight the destabilizing role of their domesticnationalizing policies. We argue that such policies put pressure on victimized minorities' kin states to intervene to protect their co-nationals, especially if these kin states are themselves controlled by exclusionary nationalists. Innovating over previous research, which has overwhelmingly relied on structural proxies, we measure nationalism using a novel actor-centered dataset identifying governing nationalist movements globally between 1816 and 2023. Our analysis, based on a state-of-the-art difference-in-differences approach, confirms the destabilizing role of exclusionary nationalism. Our findings highlight the international spillover effects of domestic nationalist policies, for militarized conflict between states and beyond.