John Hutchinson is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work has contributed to theories of nationalism, the study of cultural nationalism, notably in Ireland, and more recently, warfare and nationalism.John Hutchinson is a leading scholar of the ethnosymbolist school (established by Anthony Smith) that highlights the role of embedded historical memories in the formation of modern nations. His first monograph, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism was nominated in 1988 for the Political Studies Association Prize and is widely cited by scholars as a pioneering contribution to the field of Irish history and cultural nationalism. Hutchinson rejected earlier scholarship that tended to conflate nationalism and state-seeking movements. He argued that cultural nationalists should be differentiated from political nationalists, in having as their goal the defence of the nation as a community and its historical distinctiveness rather than on the achievement of a state. He explains how cultural nationalists act as moral innovators, emerging at times of crisis, to form movements that offer new maps of identity based on historical myths, that in turn may inspire programmes of socio-political regeneration. Hutchinson argues such movements operate sometimes as complementary to and sometimes as communitarian alternatives to political nationalism, when statist strategies are defunct. He emphasises the dynamic the role of historians and artists, showing how they interact with religious reformists and a discontented modernising intelligentsia to form national identities.His second book, Modern Nationalism (Fontana 1994) applies this cultural approach to the analysis of contemporary politics, notably, the relationship of nationalism to the collapse of communism, the religious revival and contentions in multicultural polities. More recently, his Nations as Zones of Conflict (Sage 2005) has sought to combine the focus of ethnosymbolists on the historical embeddedness of nations with the stress of postmodernists on the multiplicity of identities by exploring nations as heterogeneous entities, characterised by persisting conflicts that derive from historic divisions (e.g. civil wars). Hutchinson argues that the role of contestation in nation-formation has been neglected. Such conflicts serve to ‘fill out’ national identities and they give rise to alternative cultural and political visions that offer options to populations at times of crisis. This study has provoked praise and controversy. Eric Kaufmann claims ‘Hutchinson dramatically expands the boundaries of the ethnosymbolist argument to engage not only 'modernist' but postmodernist critiques of the nation.’ Although critical of what he sees as Hutchinson’s idealist approach, Andreas Wimmer states: ‘(Hutchinson’s) analysis of the layered character of nationalist myths, the internal heterogeneity and conflictual nature of nationalist discourse, as well as the episodic nature of nationalist mobilization represents a considerable step forward towards a more differentiated view of the nature of nationalism.’

With Anthony Smith Hutchinson has co-edited Nationalism (Oxford 1994) and Ethnicity (Oxford 1996) that have become standard teaching texts for courses on nationalism in the English-speaking world, and his works have been translated into several languages, including Turkish, Norwegian and Chinese.