Collective Equality

Abstract

This chapter opens the third part of the book in which a new theoretical account called collective equality is offered. At the core of collective equality, we find a recognition of the centrality of collectives and their equal relations as the primary pillar of justice and peace. Deeply divided places riven by ethno-national conflicts are characterized not only by national divide, but most often by practices of discrimination, political exclusion, and domination of one ethno-national group over the other(s). While the national divide itself is unlikely to disappear in such places, the way in which the ethno-national “border” is managed, or in other words how the groups and their members relate and interact, can dramatically change. Alongside liberal multiculturalism and liberal nationalism, collective equality introduces the paradigm of equality between the national groups that occupy a specific territory. In the realities of conflict-riven places, this new paradigm must respond to concerns that lay at the root of contemporary conflicts – the objection to or fear of foreign domination – common to both national minorities and national majorities caught in an “intimate conflict.”