Peripheral nationalism refers to the nationalist sentiments of some regions or territorial entities within a sovereign state, in occasions in conflict with the larger concept of the nation-state in which they reside, and trying to construct a minority social space.
[1] Peripheral nationalism is so called because the regions in which it exists are at the "periphery" as opposed to the "center" of the territory of the State.
Peripheral nationalism occurs in a culturally or linguistically distinctive territory — and oftentimes with a different socioeconomic degree of development — that resists incorporation or assimilation into an expanding State,[2] or resists the larger Statewide nationalist construction.
Existing theories of peripheral nationalism explain that the emergence of peripheral nationalism occurs in regions with a larger or greater degree of economic development in relation to the rest of the State, overlapping spatially delimited ethnic communities,[3] as it is the case in the Basque Country or Catalonia in Spain, or Xinjiang in China.
"[5] Even if the aim of peripheral nationalists is emancipation, their solution may not be the creation of a nation-state for themselves, in which case a federal solution is preferred, according with the concept of "regional pluralism" in opposition to monism or imperialism.