Amasyalı, EmreTarasov, Andrei2025-09-092025-09-092025Amasyalı E, Tarasov A. Nation‐building in the wake of empire: identifying patterns of minority policies in the aftermath of soviet collapse. Nations Natl. 2025 Jul 31. DOI: 10.1111/nana.700061354-5078http://hdl.handle.net/10230/71178Data de publicació electrònica: 31-07-2025The collapse of the USSR forced newly independent states to forge national identities while grappling with imperial legacies. This study investigates nation-building strategies in post-Soviet states during 1990–1999, using the Nation-Building Policies (NBP) dataset from the ETHNICGOODS project, which includes all socially and politically relevant minority groups. Employing cluster analysis, it identifies three typologies of nation-building policies: low, moderate and high inclusion. These typologies reveal varying levels of minority inclusion in language education, citizenship policies and constitutional measures. By examining short-term variations and using the year 2020 as a reference point, this study challenges the simplified view of post-Soviet nation-building as uniformly ‘nationalising’ and highlights significant regional and group-specific differences. Policy shifts reflect dynamic state-minority interactions influenced by geographic, cultural and political factors. The findings enhance understanding of diverse nation-building approaches and provide broader insights into contemporary minority relations in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus, contributing to comparative studies of nation- and state-building.application/pdfeng© 2025 The Author(s). Nations and Nationalism published by Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1111/nana.70006Ethnic minoritiesNationalising stateNation-buildingPost-Soviet countriesTypologyinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess