The Nation-State 1648–2148

• Author: Loubna El Amine
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221128834
• Published date: 01 February 2023
• Date: 01 February 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221128834

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(1) 65 –73

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917221128834

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Article

The Nation-State

1648–2148

Loubna El Amine1

Abstract

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The

ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective

but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will

political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What

claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-

five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in

their future contexts? How will the consistent concerns of political theorists

evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from

now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough

equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is

one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, in that winter of 2022, it had seemed to many

a return to a world past. Tanks, maps, borders, territories, crossings, flags,

foot soldiers, liberation chants, artillery fire, underground shelters, were these

not the stuff of the twentieth century? People were now fleeing right in the

heart of Europe, commentators said in shock, right there where state boundar-

ies had long been well established. It had seemed to work so well there that

some thought history had perhaps ended—good riddance—only to rear its

1Department of Political Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Loubna El Amine, Department of Political Science, Northwestern University, 601 University

Place, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.

Email: loubna.elamine@northwestern.edu

1128834PTXXXX10.1177/00905917221128834Political TheoryAmine

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