The Nation-Building Policies Research Platform

Who we are

The Nation-Building Policies Research Platform is a multidisciplinary team of social scientists concerned with how governments define national membership and manage the expression of ethnic differences. It was initially based on ETHNICGOODS, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and led by Prof. Matthias vom Hau at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals.

What we do

Our research maps variations in nation-building policies, identifies their likely causes, and explores their unique consequences for different substantive outcomes, including collective identities, development, and conflict. The main empirical anchor of our work is the Nation-Building Policies (NBP) Dataset, the first longitudinal global dataset on nation-building. It tracks state policies both at the group and country levels, covering more than 1,300 distinct ethnic groups in 163 countries for every year from 1945 to 2020. The NBP Country Profiles present these data in an accessible narrative format and document the sources we used.

Where to find us

We welcome you to find out more about our work by exploring this website and our publications and works using the NBP Dataset. Updates on our research are frequently posted on BlueSky and LinkedIn. Supplementary material of our work is available on the research group’s GitHub.