12/03/2026
Upcoming online talk by César Jiménez-Martínez (London School of Economics): Politics and National Promotion: Nation Branding and State Power in Latin America
📆18 March at 4pm (GMT)
🛜 Join via this link (no registration required): https://tinyurl.com/2zdykhhb
The event is organized by the Loughborough University Nationalism Network (LUNN).
Abstract: While literature on nation branding has been dominated by instrumental approaches (e.g. Anholt, 2007), a growing subset of works has critically interrogated this practice (e.g. Aronczyk, 2013; Kaneva, 2023). This latter set of works portrays nation branding as part of a neoliberal takeover that commodifies national identities, and reduces nations to units of economic production, symbolic goods to be traded and its inhabitants as mere consumers rather than citizens. These insights are very relevant but remain tethered to neoliberal rationalities, largely overlooking the political dimensions of nation branding. This paper takes the discussion on a different direction and suggests that approaching nation branding from the perspective of state power can be a more productive framework. Theoretically, it draws on discussions on symbolic power, nationalism, and promotional culture. Empirically, it relies on more than a decade of research on 10 nation-states from Latin America (Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Costa Rica, and Peru), including interviews, campaign analyses, and news coverage. The examination of these cases reveals that, rather than simply being an instrument of market logics, nation branding is a manifestation of state attempts to monopolise the communication and representation of the nation, consolidating what Maldonado et al (2025) call the ’neoliberal-state''. Nation branding therefore emerges as a highly political practice, entangled with the agendas of domestic elites. Instead of merely being a matter of national ‘images’, nation branding becomes an instrument of partisan struggles, as well as a target of local resistance. Reductionist economic perspectives consequently need to be challenged, in order to approach nation branding as a practice at the intersection of statecraft and stagecraft, opening new avenues for discussions about identity struggles, democracy and symbolic and material inequalities.
