This one–day graduate symposium seeks to bring together interdisciplinary scholars in the humanities and social sciences in order to reflect on the complicated, often tortuous, relationship between conflict and the development of new states and national identities. It seeks new perspectives on questions of how the language, logic, tactics, and politics of violence and conflict have historically shaped conceptualizations of nationhood; whether nations must necessarily emerge from a baptism of fire, either physical or intellectual; and whether, in the twenty–first century, we have really moved beyond the ‘blood and soil’ response to that fundamental nineteenth–century question, ‘What is a Nation?’

We welcome papers on a wide range of topics, including, but not limited to:

• Ethno–linguistic nationalism and the dissolution of multi–ethnic empires
• The intellectual legitimacy of violence as a foundation for statehood
• Violence as a tool of political enfranchisement for the disenfranchised
• Anti–colonial insurgencies
• Violence in the language, symbolism, and aesthetics of the Nation
• Reflections on contemporary nationalist/secessionist movements in places such as India (Khalistan, Kashmir, Assam), Pakistan (Balochistan, Sindhudesh), Spain (Basque Country, Catalonia), Canada (Québec), South Sudan, eastern Congo UK (Scotland), and France (Brittany, Corsica)
• Displaced/destroyed peoples, and aboriginal resistance movements
• Minorities and the Nation
• Revolution and nationhood
• Disruption and destruction as the foundation for nations
• Nationalism, militarism, and jingoism

The deadline for submitting paper proposals is 15 March 2013. Proposals should include a title and an abstract of no more than 300 words, as well as the author’s name, address, telephone number, email address, and institutional affiliation, and should be emailed to violence.conflict@gmail.com.

For more information and updates, please visit us at http://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/research/conferences/savage-state