The Institute develops three main fields of research. First, a research on the processes of nationalization and some related questions: identities, ideas of nation coming from the State or from the civil society, confrontations of several conceptions of the nation, etc. paying specific attention to the Basque case. We also are interested in other political cultures for which the territorial question was never decisive.

A second line of research is focused on political violence. We want to connect it with the memory of the victims, the narratives of violence or the link between political violence and nationalization. Terrorism has been in recent years a specific field of interest for the Institute from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) to the present time.

Finally, the original idea that aimed the creation of the Institue, Social History, is still one of the main fields of interest for it. We refer to Social history in the widest sense as an epistemological instrument of analysis with an ample range of points of interest.