Nationalist imaginaries and the COVID pandemic in inner Asia: notes towards an analytic methodology

Pandemic Nationalism in Inner Asia is an ethnographic analysis of nationalist thought, centralized power and modes of governance in (post-)pandemic Mongolian political and cultural contexts. By reframing the unity typically formed around descriptive ‘groupist’ thought in terms of claims within a wider political imaginary, this special issue provides a new conceptual framework for understanding nationalist thought beyond the strictly ideological. By approaching nationalism as a structure of ideas formed within a wider affective imaginary of human groupings and attachments, authors draw attention to the diversity such claims can take. Concerned with how affect is enacted as part of ideational processes, our approach relocates affect from ontological subconscious force to an historically-situated and authored outcome of human engagement. Drawing on ethnographic insights from across the Mongolian region, Pandemic Nationalism in Inner Asia illustrates a new methodology for theorizing nationalism that coalesces around objects of concern and is built upon ethnographic particularities.