From Conflict to Compromise: Experimental Evidence on Occupational Downgrading in Migration from Myanmar

From Conflict to Compromise: Experimental Evidence on Occupational Downgrading in Migration from Myanmar

From Conflict to Compromise: Experimental Evidence on Occupational Downgrading in Migration from Myanmar

Skilled Migration Policy and the Labour Market Performance of Immigrants

Serbia's ethnic Hungarian minority, concentrated in the northern province of Vojvodina, is little known compared to other ethnic minorities in the Balkans. Unlike Kosovo Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Serbs, and Croatian Serbs, the Vojvodina Hungarians were not involved in violent conflict during Yugoslavia's disintegration of the 1990s. The Hungarian minority is not without its grievances or its political demands, however. Over the past two decades, Vojvodina Hungarians have organized a campaign for greater cultural accommodation and political autonomy for their community. They argue that the province as a whole has lost most of its meaningful autonomous powers, that the Hungarian minority does not have adequate political representation and cultural institutions, and that the state does not fully protect the minority from growing threats of ethnic violence and discrimination. The minority's campaign directs most of its appeals to the Belgrade authorities, but increasingly it looks beyond Serbia's borders for support as well. Especially when the Serbian government appears hostile or indifferent to their appeals, the Vojvodina Hungarians look to make alliances with foreign actors, including the Hungarian government, the US government, EU institutions, and assorted other media outlets and NGOs. The minority leaders expect that by sending these foreign actors accounts of the human rights abuses that Vojvodina Hungarians suffer, they will ally themselves with the campaign and pressure the Serbian authorities to compromise with its demands.

The Ethnic Minority‐Majority Income Gap in Rural China during Transition

The consequences of violent conflict remain puzzling, with some studies suggesting discrimination, others discovering increased prosociality, and others finding evidence for reduced prosociality. We solve this puzzle with results from dictator, ultimatum, and trust games run with Muslim and Christian students in post-conflict Ambon, Indonesia. We find that discrimination is only moderate and that the reaction of prosociality is context-specific. Prosociality is low if we reveal the counterpart’s religious or ethnic identity and is high if it is not revealed. Our effects are particularly strong if subjects had been victimised during the conflict. We argue that revealing the identity inhibits the lessons learned from the conflict and brings about emotional numbing because revealed identities remind subjects of the conflict. Such religious and ethnic cues can thus make conflict salient. We infer that avoiding such cues is important for peace reconciliation as well as economic and social development.

This article argues that the inclusion of ethnic Hungarian parties within the Slovak and Romanian democratic oppositions during the early years of democratic transition was a critical element for the peaceful management of interethnic relations in these two multiethnic new democracies. Contrary to what the existing literature suggests, violent conflict was averted despite the absence of institutions specially designed to manage interethnic relations, the exclusion of ethnic minorities from government, and quasi-majoritarian political environments. In the two studied cases, interethnic opposition coalitions resulted from the adoption of basic democratic political institutions, which constrained actors across the ethnic divide to cooperate based on a minimal consensus agenda. More broadly, this article questions the claim that multiethnic countries are unlikely candidates for peaceful democratization, and suggests that as long as participation in democratic processes, either in government or in opposition, is possible for ethnic minorities, violent conflict can be averted.

Reviewed by: The Crisis of Belonging and Ethnographies of Peacebuilding in Kaduna State, Nigeria by Benjamin Maiangwa Dare Leke Idowu BOOK REVIEW of Maiangwa, Benjamin. 2020. The Crisis of Belonging and Ethnographies of Peacebuilding in Kaduna State, Nigeria. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 161 pp. $95.00 (hardcover). The Crisis of Belonging by Benjamin Maiangwa draws from "critical qualitative research and narrative inquiry methods" (13) to interrogate how contested notions of belonging and stereotypical conjectures fuel violent intercommunal conflicts in Kaduna, a Nigerian state. From a decolonial perspective, Maiangwa documents and analyzes the peacebuilding efforts of local voices and their contribution to understanding the local turn in peace and conflict studies—a Euro-American discipline in outlook and methodology. The book consists of a foreword by Dominic Aboi, a preface, a prologue, four chapters, and a conclusion. In the introduction, Maiangwa frames his argument by explaining how British colonization laid the foundation for contested claims of belonging on the basis of identity and territory, and how this foundation supports the feelings of deprivation and grievance that fuel recurrent intercommunal conflicts in Kaduna. The first chapter explores intergroup dynamics, similarities, paradoxes, stereotypical conjectures, and the complex realities that make intercommunal conflict inevitable. It traces the conceptual, historical, and sociopolitical trajectories of the precolonial bifurcation of the Fulani ethnic group and other ethnic minority groups and shows their representations to be binary opposites. Remarkably, it underscores how the notion of binary opposites reinforces the stereotypes that intermingle with ethnoreligious intolerance, contested claims over political ascendency, and socioeconomic deprivation to fuel violent intercommunal conflicts. Apart from the laudable contribution to the geopolitics and political economy of the major intercommunal crisis, a crucial feature of this chapter is the exposure of the deficiencies of terminologies like "ethnic minority communities" and the "farmer-herder" reductionist classification in capturing "the dynamic intricacies embodied in the identity of the various communities in Kaduna" (48). Arguably, this signals the need for creating appropriate concepts to capture the nuances of violent intercommunal relations in postcolonial African states. Titled "The Crisis of Belonging," the second chapter draws from personal stories and questions about the sources of conflicts to contextualize how disparate ethnicities in Kaduna conjure notions of indigeneity and claims of belonging. Maiangwa establishes that crises in southern Kaduna are ingrained in conflicting notions or ideologies of belonging between [End Page 144] ethnic minority groups and the Fulani, who lay no exclusive claim to land because they conceive it as a gift from God to humanity, while the ethnic minority groups claim a right to land by physical birth and autochthonous origin because they visualize their birthplace as their ancestral homeland. Their claim to indigenous and autochthonous belonging is a response to their historical grievances and perceived or real exclusion from the state's polity. They feel a need to defend their homeland against incursion by strangers, who, implementing sociocultural and religious notions of land as a gift, consider themselves rightful landowners. The ethnic minorities, consequent upon their "historical connection to the land as the ancestral people and first comers" (56), consider Fulani claims of belonging and expansionist efforts to upgrade their marginalized positions as a threat to their autonomy, economic development, and survival. In contrast, Fulani political power and the government's lack of response to their perceived violent expansionism have emboldened the Fulani to embark on violent expansionist migratory practices: they deliberately encroach on farmland and repeatedly unleash mayhem on the ethnic minority groups. The third chapter, titled "The Complementarity of Group Relations," argues that despite the intercommunal conflicts caused by conflicting claims of indigeneity and belonging, intergroup relations in Kaduna are not devoid of some level of harmony. The tendency of the disparate ethnicities to allude to what Maiangwa conceptualizes as the golden age of intergroup relations in Kaduna offers hopes for constructive peacebuilding efforts and postconflict reconstruction of solidarity and social cohesion. Despite glaring ethnoreligious differences, this golden age featured a strong bond of oneness, involving symbiotic and complementary socioeconomic relations and intermarriages. The fourth chapter interrogates the ethnographies of the ground-level peacebuilding toolkits of the minority ethnic nationalities and the Fulani amid state apathy and governmental ineptitude in preventing conflicts and promoting sustainable peace. Apart...

Social Networks, Job Matching and Labor Market Outcomes in Low-Skilled Jobs: Evidence from Ethiopia

Post-colonial states in the Asian region have frequently been subject to political tensions derived from their multi-ethnic make-up and, what some have argued to be, the failure of states to adequately represent the interests of their ethnic minorities. This article will look at examples of where states in Asia have failed to adequately represent or otherwise incorporate their ethnic minorities as full and equal citizens. It also considers the range of responses to such perceived or actual state failure in adequately incorporating all citizens, including inter-ethnic and racial violence and separatist conflict. The article will conclude by considering conceptual and actual models of state organization intended to resolve racial and ethnic tensions in the Asian region.

Part-time work among British women is extensive, and the (raw) pay penalty large. Since part-time work features most prominently when women are in their 30s, the peak childcare years and a crucial period for career building, its impact on subsequent earnings trajectories is important from a social as well as individual perspective. We find that part-time work experience gives a very low return in future earnings, particularly when acquired in lower-skill jobs. In addition, one-quarter of women in high-skill jobs downgrade occupationally on switching to part-time work, rising to 43% among those who also change employer. In combination these effects give an immediate earnings drop of 32%, followed by a permanently lower trajectory. It is these accompanying changes, rather than part-time status itself, which damage earnings. Return to full-time work, even with reversal of the occupational downgrading, brings only a partial recovery; without it the earnings losses continue to grow.

The ways in which enclaves affect residents labour market outcomes are not fully understood, with outcomes varying substantially across countries, migrant and ethnic groups. In this study, we examine how co-national and co-ethnic enclaves influence migrants’ and ethnic minorities’ labour market outcomes within England. We account for residential sorting through a computational causal modelling framework. Our analysis reveals three key findings. First, migrants and ethnic minorities with poor human capital were disproportionately found in neighbourhoods with high co-ethnic and co-national concentration. This suggests residential sorting occurs in UK enclaves. Second, co-national enclaves were associated with higher employment probabilities (but not higher incomes) amongst male migrants, and neutral to negative employment probabilities and incomes amongst female migrants. Third, co-ethnic enclaves were generally not associated with higher employment probabilities or income, suggesting UK co-ethnic networks do not help most minority ethnic groups to find work. To our knowledge, this study represents the first evidence of positive co-national employment effects within the UK context. These findings could inform policy by highlighting groups whose employment rates are negatively affected by enclaves. These include female migrants and women of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnicity.

The chapter provides an overview of the methods used in the investigation of youth social identities in the Western Balkans. For quantitative part of the study, 767 young people aged 20–30 years from four Western Balkan countries were surveyed. Each country sample includes an ethnic majority and an ethnic minority with a history of tensions or violent conflict. The survey measured their identifications with a wide range of social groups, from local, ethnic, religious, and national to the overarching identities (Balkans, Europe). The chapter further describes the qualitative portion with focus groups and case studies in each city, the guidelines followed in conducting the studies, and the data analysis procedures. The chapter closes with remarks on the importance of integrating quantitative and qualitative data.

Since 1989, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have experienced major institutional transformations. As part of that process, territorial contestations between states and ethnic minorities engendered three outcomes: negotiated territorial self-government (TSG) arrangements; the denial of such arrangements; and the emergence of de-facto states. Through a qualitative comparative analysis of twenty-four minority TSG claims in seventeen post-communist CEE states, we find that: (i) TSG arrangements emerged as externally facilitated instruments for managing or preventing violent conflict in predominantly low-capacity, only partially democratic states; (ii) peacefully pursued TSG claims were most likely to be denied in high-capacity consolidated democracies; and (iii) de-facto states emerged where patron-states intervened in violent conflicts in low-capacity states. These findings defy widely held expectations about the influence of Europeanization, coupled with democratic consolidation, on the accommodation of minority claims; and they offer new insights into the significance of external intervention for the institutional outcomes of ethnic minority TSG claims.

For years, demands have been made for the improved integration of ethnic minorities who are citizens of Germany and elsewhere. The riots in the French suburbs, which are usually the result of ethnosocial tensions, the terrorist activities of British Muslims in recent years and the Sarrazin debate in 2010 have added renewed urgency to these demands. The alarming reports of high unemployment rates among foreigners, and the fact that they are concentrated in the poorer areas and in certain schools, intensify the fear that violent conflicts with and among ethnic minorities could also occur in Germany.