‘(Re)imagining or Imagined Nation-Building

The lesson of the chapters in this book is that the road to successful nation-building is long, contested and can be riddled with disruption, regardless of whom we see as the main actors in a nation-building process and the different tools, approaches and strategies they adopt. In spite of the different disciplinary, theoretical and methodological approaches for each of the chapters in this volume, we suggest there is a great deal of common currency between them. What all the contributions portend to is the on-going dynamics of nation-building in the post-Soviet space. The analysis within each of the chapters in this volume serves to remind us of the enduring influence of feelings of belonging to particular identities, nations or states, and the ways in which such emotional attachment is used by political elites for state and regime-building purposes and how that is also challenged from below. The question which arises from how these chapters have dealt with the centrality of nation-building processes to attempts at regime-building, and how that is contested, is what is the extent to which nation-building projects imagined by political elites actually hit their target?