Melissa Aronczyk, Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity

Melissa Aronczyk’s Branding the Nation is a watershed moment for the field of nation brands research. Published by the highly respected Oxford University Press, it is the first critical monograph on the topic to achieve mainstream recognition, as evidenced by a review in the Times Higher Education supplement. Drawing on over a decade of research and advertising industry experience, 100 interviews with practitioners, and the analysis of thousands of pages of documents from 12 countries, Aronczyk promises a comprehensive deconstruction of the phenomenon of nation brands in the context of nationalism, neoliberalism, and 21st-century nationhood. This promise is only partly realized however, with the initial theory-building sections providing the main contributions to the field.