This is a book about the difficulties of thinking and acting politically in ways that refuse the politics of nationalism.

Set against the backdrop of the imaginative geographies of the War in Terror and the new beginning promised by the Presidency of Barack Obama, the book shows how critical interventions often work in collaboration with nationalist politics, even when the aim is to resist nationalism.

Angharad Closs Stephens is a Lecturer in the Geography Department at Durham University, UK.

Part One: Unpacking Nationalist Imaginaries 1. Beyond 'imagined communities': nationalism and the politics of knowledge 2. Weberian tales: disenchantment, mastery and meaning 3. Rousseau's legacies: the politics of time, community and loss Part Two: Contesting Nationalist Imaginaries 4. Urban cosmopolitanism: the return of the nation in times of terror 5. Nationalism and its limits: the politics of imagination 6. Sites of memory and the city as a melee Conclusion: the aftermath of nationalist imaginaries