Nationalities Papers

• 1. Introduction

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  Nationalities Papers arrived in 1972, at a moment when the study of ethnic conflict, minority rights, and nationalism had no single academic home. It filled that gap by gathering scholars who rarely shared the same departmental corridors: historians, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars. The questions it planted are still live ones. What drives ethnic conflict? How do minorities survive or disappear inside larger states? Who gets to define a nation? The journal set out to answer those questions through peer-reviewed research anchored in a region where the answers have never been settled: Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, Turkey, and Central Asia. Half a century after its founding, it publishes six issues a year under the Cambridge University Press imprint, edited from George Washington University by Harris Mylonas.

• 2. A Region in Focus

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  Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union share a particular intensity when it comes to questions of national identity. Borders there have moved, empires have collapsed, and populations have been displaced across the span of a single lifetime. Nationalities Papers has trained its lens on exactly this terrain, along with Turkey and Central Asia, two regions where minority politics and nationalist movements have generated recurring crises. The journal's regional focus is not an accident of geography. It reflects the founding concerns of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, the scholarly body that sponsors the publication. By concentrating expertise, the journal has built a record that tracks these regions across decades of political change.

• 3. Interdisciplinary Foundations

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  Harris Mylonas, the current editor-in-chief, leads a journal whose contributors resist easy disciplinary categorisation. History, political science, sociology, anthropology, and literature all feed into the same pages. That breadth is deliberate. Nationalism and ethnic conflict do not behave neatly within a single academic tradition: they require the historian's archival depth, the sociologist's structural analysis, the political scientist's attention to power, and the literary scholar's ear for how identity is narrated. Bringing those approaches together in one peer-reviewed venue allows authors to speak across disciplines, and allows readers trained in one field to encounter the methods and questions of another.

• 4. Standing in the Field

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  The 2024 Journal Citation Reports gave Nationalities Papers an impact factor of 1.6. That number places it sixth out of 538 journals in the History category. In Ethnic Studies it ranked fifteenth out of 39, in Area Studies twenty-second out of 182, and in Political Science one hundred and thirty-fourth out of 322. Ranking highly across four distinct categories is unusual; it signals that the journal's interdisciplinary reach produces real scholarly influence rather than diluted coverage. The journal is also abstracted and indexed in the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, in Scopus, and in the Social Sciences Citation Index, ensuring that its articles surface across the major scholarly databases researchers use to map a field.