Emre Amasyalı

@emreamasyali.bsky.social & Andrei Tarasov identify 3 types of nation-building in the post-Soviet space in today's #earlyview article, 'Nation-Building in the Wake of Empire: Identifying Patterns of Minority Policies in the Aftermath of Soviet Collapse' #openaccess @ onlinelibrary.wiley....

Nation‐Building in the Wake of Empire: Identifying Patterns of Minority Policies in the Aftermath of Soviet Collapse The collapse of the USSR forced newly independent states to forge national identities while grappling with imperial legacies. This study investigates nation-building strategies in post-Soviet states ...

🚨 New open-access article out in Nations and Nationalism!

With Andrei Tarasov, I examine how post-Soviet states governed 67 minority groups in the 1990s using the @ethnicgoods.bsky.social NBP dataset.

Read the full open-access article here: doi.org/10.1111/nana...

Excited to be organizing this workshop with the ETHNICGOODS project:

📚 Textbooks, Identity & Conflict
🗓️ Nov 2025 | 📍 Sarajevo

We'll explore how textbooks shape identity, memory & reconciliation in divided societies.

Got a relevant project? Apply!

🔗 lnkd.in/d5EsSpe7
📩 ethnicgoods@ibei.org

Thank you for your constructive message. The original post was written by a junior researcher and does not accurately reflect our work; we apologize for the frustration it caused. We will update it soon. We are happy to correct any inaccuracies in light of new evidence. You are welcome to DM me here

When we use data from the past to describe the present, the figures we record are marked as unreliable in the dataset so researchers can filter according to the level of reliability

The 2001 Census is the only official Ukrainian census of the 21st century. It is less than ideal but still the best quality data we have on ethnic identification. We subtract Crimea in 2014 because the state doesn’t administer education here after this date

No, because our dataset ends in 2020

Because the territory is occupied by Russia and Ukraine does not administer public services here. We consider it part of Ukraine prior to 2014.

My point is that two research projects arrived at the same number independently

We subtracted the Russian population living in Crimea to arrive at this number. You can find a very similar figures in other datasets such as the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) dataset

Based on respondents’ self-identified ethnic origin in the 2001 Ukrainian census

The 2012 legislation enabled regional languages to function, in practice, similar to state languages at the local level. Our coding is still based on Ukrainian law.

This refers to the 2012 Law on the Principles of State Language Policy in Ukraine, which allowed regional languages—spoken by at least 10% of a locality’s population—to be granted a status that enables their use in administration, education, and public services.

We base this figure on the nationality question in the 2001 Ukrainian Census, which asked respondents to self-identify their ethnic origin. The question about native language was asked separately in the same census.

We will detail all this information in our codebook and introductory article, but you are right to point out that we should provide more clarity at this stage and format

We base our coding on the 1989 Law on Languages of the Ukrainian SSR, which declared Ukrainian the primary language of instruction. The fact that it was compulsory should not be taken to mean that it was taught in every school, either in law or in practice.

You are pointing to the de jure vs. de facto distinction. We chose de jure for global comparability; tracking on-the-ground realities would make such a dataset impossible. It's a trade-off. If you're focused on the lived experience in Ukraine, a quantitative research design is not the right choice

No data—qualitative or quantitative— can claim to capture the totality of lived experience. This is why we limit ourselves to de jure language policies. If you believe we have made a factual error, we are happy to revise our coding in light of new evidence

To clarify, this is a cross-national dataset recording state language policies across 163 countries. It is a public good that researchers can adapt to their research interests. Your critique is akin to asking, "Why doesn't the World Bank data track the sources of global inequality?"

Anachronism in Political Science: Value-Based, Conceptual, and Methodological by Emre Amasyali & Harris Mylonas Scholars frequently impose contemporary concepts, moral judgments, and analytical frameworks onto historical contexts, leading to distorted interpretations of political identity, sovereignty, and state formation. This study demonstrates how anachronistic assumptions about group boundaries, identity salience, and ethnic diversity maps undermine empirical accuracy and theoretical validity. By critically engaging with recent scholarship, it argues that mitigating anachronism requires greater historical contextualization, methodological reflexivity, and a reconsideration of how political concepts evolve over time.

📄 This week our lead postdoc @emreamasyali.bsky.social presented an insightful paper on "Anachronism in Political Science: Value-Based, Conceptual, and Methodological", co-authored with Harris Mylonas, at @ibei.org's Methods and Inference research cluster. Looking forward to seeing it in print soon!

👋 #AcademicSky 🙂
We are building the FIRST group-level dataset on Nation-Building! Our dataset tracks #NationBuilding policies across ethnic & national lines since 1945.

It covers 5 key areas:
– education
– citizenship
– public identity
– constitutional law
– state violence

#Introduction #EduSky

The Future of Agency Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Vol 41 EthnicGoods researcher, Emre Amasyalı, has published a series of articles co-authored with Axel van den Berg (McGill University), where they have critically examined the concept of “agency”—commonly used to describe actions perceived as independent of structural constraints. Their work questions both the theoretical foundations and empirical usage of agency in sociological analysis. (Sketch of a little puppet)

We’re delighted to announce that EthnicGoods researcher, @emreamasyali.bsky.social, is featured in the latest edition of “Current Perspectives in Social Theory”, published by Emerald Global.

Find out more: www.emerald.com/insight/publ...
#Agency #SociologicalTheory #SocialTheory #FutureOfAgency