This new study powerfully asserts the pivotal importance of the interplay between language and ethnicity, which is often underestimated as a component for political stability. These leading scholars present five key case studies of South Africa, Algeria, Canada, Latvia and Senegal. All five countries are multilingual nations where language has been a central political issue that has challenged their unity and stability. These studies are underpinned by two general, comparative and theoretical discussions, which analyse how scholars consider social class and economic factors to be the primary sources for political cohesion or of malcontent with the system and the new avenues opened by a focus on issues of langauge. This book will be of great interest to all students and scholars of linguistics, language, politics and sociology. This is a special issue of the leading journal Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.

Product Description: The political concept of recognition has introduced new ways of thinking about the relationship between minorities and justice in plural societies. But is a politics informed by recognition valuable to minorities today? Critics contend that relations of recognition allow dominant groups to distort and essentialize the cultures of minorities, and to co-opt them through promises for modest reforms rather than deeper structural changes to political systems which are unjust...read more

Product Description: Aspirations, desires, opportunism and exploitation are seldom considered as fundamental elements of donor-driven development as it impacts on the lives of people in poor countries. Yet, alongside structural interventions, emotional or affective engagements are central to processes of social change and the making of selves for those caught up in development’s slipstream...read more

Product Description: Throughout the world, liberal-democracies are grappling with increasing claims made in the name of minority national, socio-cultural and ethno-cultural identities that seek greater recognition in the institutions of the nation-state...read more

Most research on the effect of ethnicity on economic and political outcomes is driven by the "primordialist" assumption that ethnic identities are fixed. But "constructivist" research across the social sciences and humanities tells us that ethnic identities change over time, and are often a product of the very political and economic phenomena that they are used to explain. Constructivist Theories of Ethnic Politics is a first cut at rebuilding theories of the relationship between ethnicity, politics and economics on a fortified constructivist foundation. It proposes a new conceptual framework for thinking about ethnic identity. It uses this framework to synthesize constructivist arguments into a set of propositions about how and why ethnic identities change. It translates this framework - and the propositions derived from it -- into a new, combinatorial language. And it employs these conceptual, constructivist, and combinatorial tools to theorize about the relationship between ethnicity, politics and economics using a variety of methods.The conceptual tools provided here open new avenues for theory building by representing the complexity of a constructivist world in an analytically tractable way. The theoretical arguments challenge the bad name that ethnic diversity has acquired in social scientific literature, according to which it is associated with regimes that are less stable, less democratic, less well-governed, less peaceful and poorer than regimes in which the population is ethnically homogeneous. Taking the possibility of change in ethnic identity into account, this book shows, dismantles the theoretical logics linking ethnic diversity to such negative outcomes. Indeed, ethnic diversity can sometimes serve as a benign force, strengthening rather than threatening democracy, preventing rather than producing violence, and inhibiting rather than accelerating state collapse or secession. Even more importantly, it defines new research agendas by changing the questions we can ask about the relationship between ethnicity, politics and economics.

Product Description: In an age of multiculturalism and identity politics, many minority groups seek some form of official recognition or public accommodation of their identity. But can public institutions accurately recognize or accommodate something as subjective and dynamic as "identity?” Avigail Eisenberg and Will Kymlicka lead a distinguished team of scholars who explore state responses to identity claims worldwide...read more

Product Description: In small plural societies, cultural differences can be exaggerated, exploited and intensified during political contests. The survival of these societies as democracies - or even at all - hangs in the balance.

Product Description: This book asks what distinguishes peaceful plural democracies from violent ones and what distinguishes violent ethnic groups from peaceful ones within the same democracy. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it suggests that ethnic groups and their political demands are not inherently intransigent and that violence is not a necessary corollary of ethnic politics...read more

Product Description: Despite implicating ethnicity in everything from civil war to economic failure, researchers seldom consult psychological research when addressing the most basic question: What is ethnicity? The result is a radical scholarly divide generating contradictory recommendations for solving ethnic conflict...read more

Product Description: This volume conceptualizes the dynamics underlying electoral politics in ethnically divided societies, providing empirical evidence and analysis of recent elections in such societies on a comparative and single-case basis, including case studies of Macedonia, Slovakia, Belgium, Malaysia, Singapore, Rwanda, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago...read more

Product Description: Has ethnicity become institutionalized as a political category? Drawing on international studies, including New Zealand, the book shows that this process of public policymaking creates artificial divisions that can become permanent and detrimental as well as being at odds with the social fluidity of modern societies...read more

Product Description: The contributors discuss the links between ethnicity, inequality and governance. Their findings suggest that it is not the existence of diversity per se, but types of diversity that explain potentials for conflict or cohesion in multiethnic societies...read more

Product Description: This book offers a brief, broad, comparative study of ethnic politics that places ethnic conflict within the context of particular political systems. To develop these themes, they are explored by comparing and contrasting the experiences of France, Czechoslovakia and its subsequent division, and Nigeria...read more

Product Description: This book tests a new approach to understanding ethnic mobilization and considers the interplay of global forces, national-level variation in inequality and repression, and political mobilization of ethnicity. It advances the claim that economic and political integration among the world's states increases the influence of ethnic identity in political movements...read more

Product Description: Ethnic Realignments offers a fresh look at the phenomenon of rapidly changing ethnic identity claims. By focusing on the countries of Australia, China, Malaysia, and India, Matthew Hoddie provides a comparative study arguing that government policies designed to favor one ethnic group over another can influence individuals among the disfavored group to change their "identities" and recast themselves as members of the favored group...read more

Product Description: Ethnic Realignments offers a fresh look at the phenomenon of rapidly changing ethnic identity claims. By focusing on the countries of Australia, China, Malaysia, and India, Matthew Hoddie provides a comparative study arguing that government policies designed to favor one ethnic group over another can influence individuals among the disfavored group to change their 'identities' and recast themselves as members of the favored group...read more

Product Description: In this update of the 1998 Jusoor Books edition, Moughrabi (international relations, political psychology, and Middle East politics, U. of Tennessee, Chattanooga) presents 11 undated essays on Palestinian claims to the city of Jerusalem by scholars from Palestine, North America, and a Holocaust survivor who taught at Hebrew U...read more

Product Description: Ethnic violence is rampant, but avoidable. Cook compares and contrasts all major options in ethnic minority policy, including forms of separation, assimilation, or accommodation typically favored by subordinate ethnic groups. Topics include segregation and genocide, emigrations and secessionist struggles, attempts at cultural annihilation, assimilating for individual or collective opportunities, accommodations as minimal concessions in such things as tolerance, special group rights or power-sharing, and accommodations as maximal demands on those same themes...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

In Ethnonationalism in the Contemporary World, world-renowned scholars employ various aspects of Connor's work to explicate the recent upsurge of nationalism on a global scale. In keeping with the growing awareness that the study of ethnonationalism requires an interdisciplinary approach, the contributors represent a number of academic disciplines, including anthropology, geography, history, linguistics, social psychology, sociology and world politics. The book discusses issues such as identity, ethnicity and nationalism, primordialism, social constructionism, ethnic conflict, separatism and federalism. It also features case studies on the Basque country, South Africa and Canada. (view table of contents)

The idea of the nation is globally in crisis, but multiculturalism has often seemed to name a specifically national debate. Multicultural States challenges the national focus of these debates by investigating theories, policies and practices of cultural pluralism across eight countries with historical links in British colonialism: the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Ireland and Britain. This important book combines discussions of the principles of multiculturalism with studies of specific local histories and political conflicts. The contributors discuss: * communalism and colonialism in India* Irish sectarianism and postmodern identity politics* ethnic nationalism in post-apartheid South Africa* British multiculturalism as part of the heritage industry* feminism and Australian republicanism. Contributors: Ien Ang, David Attwell, Homi K. Bhabha, Gargi Bhattacharyya, Abena P. A. Busia, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Terry Eagleton, John Frow, Henry A. Giroux, Ihab Hassan, Smaro Kamboureli, Maria Koundoura, Beryl Langer, Anne Maxwell, Meaghan Morris, Susan Mathieson and Jon Stratton