The pivotal role played by Computer-Mediated Communications (CMCs) as mobilization tools for social movements as diverse as the ‘Arab Spring’, the Iranian ‘Green Revolution’, and the 2008 Greek ‘December Riots’, has rekindled academic interest in the internet as a field of sociological research. Drawing on new media and nationalism studies, this article approaches a particular type of CMC as a ‘virtual community’. By examining the context of post-1999 Greek-Turkish reconciliation, it is argued that these virtual communities have offered significant breathing space for individuals who are ready to revisit, discuss, and negotiate the constitutive boundaries of modernity's ‘imagined communities’, and are therefore conducive to the Greek-Turkish rapprochement.

This article explores symbolic boundaries and identity-formation of the ‘ethnonational Us’, using narrative analysis of eleven Israeli-Jewish dissidents. The hegemonic nationalist discourse in Israel – Zionism – constructs the dissidents' identities as the ‘Virtuous Us’, yet these individuals genuinely try to connect with the ‘Demonized Palestinian Other’. I suggest that the dissidents attempt to use alternative national identity discourses to overcome symbolic boundaries. I highlight inconsistencies within individual dissidents' narratives and attribute them to the employment of multiple discourses, suggesting that some discourses fail to coherently reconcile ‘national’ history with the well-being of the Other, whilst others repel dissidents by appearing to negate or destroy their identities. The dissidents, therefore, cannot use the available discourses to fully overcome symbolic boundaries. Only the hegemonic nationalist discourse can offer a self-evident and compelling enunciation of the dissidents' political reality, leading one insightful dissident to conclude that there is ‘no way out’ of his dilemma.

This article explores the question of ‘boundary-formation’ by examining the significance of historical narratives for defining the nation. Specifically, it compares the historical construction of religious or confessional identity as national boundary in the cases of Ireland and Germany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The article examines the importance of this historically constructed national identity for rendering continuity to the nation's history and delineating the national ‘Other’, thereby establishing national particularity. The historical ‘joining’ of ‘Irishness’ to Catholic identity and ‘Germanness’ to Protestant identity, as well as providing cultural ‘cement’ for the nation, also had exclusionary implications.

To be ‘politically queer’ at the beginning of the 1990s indicated opposition to the policing of identity and heteronormativity, and adherence to a politics that transcended liberal-legal claims. More recently, queer activism and scholarship have largely focused on contesting the emergence of homonormative forms of nationalism and institutionalized rights-based LGBT politics. However, to define a political intervention as queer on the condition that it explicitly adheres to one or other specific political project is possibly to overstate the case. The ‘queer signifier’ has travelled far beyond its local origins and, as a consequence, has shifted meanings in significant ways. In this essay, I consider current tensions concerning what it means to be politically queer, focusing on queer responses to the formation of sexual rights-bearing subjects, and critically analyse the notion of sexual rights on which contemporary international mainstream sexual politics is based. Through this analysis I aim to draw attention to the entanglement of the normalization of sexual identities at a national level with current sexual neocolonial projects. Since the signifier ‘queer’ has spread in many different directions, I argue that it is precisely cultural translation that makes key alliances against both universalist and nationalist queer positions possible.