We now live in an age ruled by an unprecedented "irresponsibility."

Highly developed bureaucracies, financial capital that moves instantly across borders, and information spaces optimized by algorithms. These systems of our time appear to manage our lives more efficiently than ever before and to provide us with prosperity. Yet once a system breaks down, or runs out of control and a concrete tragedy strikes an individual, we are confronted with a chilling fact.

There is no "one" there.

Widening economic inequality, environmental destruction, or a sudden conflict. When we look for a "responsible party" to blame for these calamities, all we find is a tangled web of causes and effects, countless functionaries who repeat that they "only followed the rules," and insubstantial abstractions such as "the logic of the market" or "historical necessity." In contemporary society enormous power is certainly exercised, but where responsibility lies has evaporated. The "rule by Nobody" that Arendt once exposed is now on the verge of being perfected to its limit.

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What is "responsibility"? It is not simply a matter of identifying who is liable to legal punishment. It is the capacity to take on what has happened, saying "this is what I (or we) did," and to answer for its consequences. Globalization and the bloating of bureaucracy, however, have structurally eliminated this answerability. In the strange phenomenon where victims exist but perpetrators do not, in this "vacuum of responsibility," there is suffering, but no subject who inflicted it can be found. This very absurdity is the source of the nihilism that eats away at the minds of people today.

We establish the Society for the Studies of Nation Issues in order to recover, in this depoliticized world, responsible subjects who once again have a "face." To refuse to shift responsibility onto systems, and to reinterpret history as the will and action of human groups of concrete flesh and blood. Unless this is done, we will degenerate forever into mere objects at the mercy of faceless systems.

The liberal international order of the postwar era has held up the concepts of "world citizenship" and "universal human rights." But have these been applied unconditionally to refugees and stateless people as well? In reality, what the international order grants to such "others," who are accepted by no "state," is extremely limited. To be concrete, citizens on "provisional release" in this country are given neither the freedom to work nor even the freedom to move. And, as seen in the postwar stripping of nationality from Zainichi Koreans in this country, the arbitrariness of their treatment is underpinned by their being managed by the "state." Since the "liberal international order" presupposes the existence of states, examples of human freedom being suppressed on the basis of nationality or residence status are too numerous to count.

We do not attribute this problem, as existing academia does, to a lack of protection by the state. Rather, we believe that the structural root of this unfreedom is precisely that the source of rights has been monopolized by a privileged organization called the state.

Therefore, this Society declares clearly: we stand on the position of "libertarian nationalism" (cf. Huerta de Soto), which recognizes neither the reality of any nation-state (Nation-State) nor its idealist validity.

The modern nation-state is a historically very peculiar and artificial construct, established by arbitrarily fusing the "nation (Nation)," a cultural and organic bond, with the "state (State)," an apparatus that monopolizes violence. The state has used and exploited the spontaneous bond of the nation for taxation, conscription, and homogeneous administration.

We focus on the "nation" not to strengthen state power, but to defend society against the enormous parasite called the state. The nation is, in essence, an accumulation of "private property" and "contracts" in the broad sense, based on a common language, customs, and historical memory; it is a spontaneous order that can come into being without the intervention of the state.

Of course, we have no intention of repeating the Romantic errors of the past: the attitude that mystifies the nation as an unchanging biological entity continuing from time immemorial. At the same time, as Benedict Anderson argued, the fact that the nation is an "imagined community" does not mean that it is false. As long as it functions as a "social fact" that constitutes people's identities and gives rise to a solidarity willing to face even death, it is not enough merely to deconstruct it as a construct.

The problem lies not in the fact that the framework of the nation "exists," but in how it is "politicized." We critically re-establish the nation not as a closed "shell" but as a "foothold" that makes dialogue with others possible, and as a possibility of free solidarity that does not depend on the state.

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Policy of Activities
Based on the concerns above, this Society establishes the following three specialized Divisions and attempts a multidimensional approach.

1. Nationalism Division
This Division investigates, theoretically and historically, the formation of national consciousness and the dynamics of nationalism. How does an "imagined community" become real? How are language, religion, and myth mobilized? We regard nationalism not merely as a political tool but as a mental phenomenon bound up with existential human needs: the thirst for recognition and the fear of death. In addition to the theories of Western modernity, our main aim here is to understand from within the logic of "indigenous nationalisms" outside the Western world.

2. Human Rights Division
This Division deals with the concrete human rights violations that occur in places of ethnic conflict and oppression, from the standpoint not of protection by the state but of individual autonomy and of justice against violation. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, refugee problems, and minority rights: on these we closely analyze the structures of victimization and perpetration, and record "who" committed violations "against whom" and "in the name of what justice." Rejecting the imposition of universalism while not falling into the nihilism of relativism, we seek the restoration of rights as a response to concrete suffering.

3. Political Science Division
This Division analyzes how ethnic and national questions are manipulated and institutionalized within political power games. It deals with the merits and demerits of federalism, the legal and political requirements of secession, the mechanisms of resource allocation in multicultural societies, and so on. In particular, it explores the institutional conditions under which a peaceful order can be formed not through coercive integration by the state but through voluntary separation and association.

In addition to the Divisions above, this Society will set up "Study Groups" as needed to carry out more flexible and agile individual research, digging deeper by theme or by region.