Populism, Territories, Name Disputes, and HyperReality: Greek Nationalism and the Macedonian Case

In Populism, Territories, Name Disputes, and Hyperreality: Greek Nationalism and the Macedonian Case, Minos-Athanasios Karyotakis examines how and why societal actors may use different names to refer to the same territory. Karyotakis demonstrates the enormous symbolic power that the names of places can hold through a study of the Macedonian name dispute (MND), arguing that territorial names can be symbolic and crucial for constructing nation-states through imbued influential meanings affecting citizens’ hearts and minds. These symbolic name disputes (SNDs), he posits, offer societal elites the opportunity to further their own personal ambitions, which can include winning electoral power and spreading hatred against non-supporters. Karyotakis then delineates how some disputes have maintained a seemingly improved version of reality that strongly attaches the conflict to a dogmatized dominant narrative which exploits the nationalistic ideas of the nation-state and blurs territorial borders (hyperreal symbolic name disputes), while other disputes are firmly attached to actual territorial claims that arise from a disagreement over control of a well-defined physical territory (referential symbolic name disputes). Pointing to several persistent territorial name disputes -- such as the Arabian/Persian Gulf, Kurdistan, the Kuril Islands/Northern Territories, Macedonia, Navasa Island/La Navase, and Western Sahara, among others -- this book provides a model for a novel categorization that broadens our understanding of these conflicts.

Minos-Athanasios Karyotakis is post-doctoral research fellow at the David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies (LEWI) at Hong Kong Baptist University.