Statues and Vandalism in Armenia and North Macedonia: Securitizing Official and Unofficial Nationalist Identity

In some countries, nationalism is communicated as opposition to colonization, securitizing attacks on identity through various patriotic symbols, statues, structures, and vandalism, sometimes graffiti. This chapter discusses the centrality of statues in nationalism and considers the persistence of national traumatic memories experienced by the collective. Similarly, nationalist graffiti is prolific. These acts of graffiti/vandalism communicate a message of disorder and dissatisfaction against the state. This message is nationalistic in nature as it communicates a political message. These official and unofficial nationalist sentiments are fighting for meaning, defending an identity that is expressed because of the need to recover. In North Macedonia’s case, the need is to recover a long-suppressed sense of national identity, and in the Armenian sense, to defend nationalism under attack both within and without. Nationalism in this sense is actively being securitized as an expression of cultural revitalization, an essentially Postcolonial need to recover notions of self.