Introduction: Struggles for Inclusion and Reconciliation in Modern Democracies

Abstract

Abstract Most countries around the world exhibit a long history of exclusion and discrimination directed against particular groups, often dened along ethnic, racial, religious, or ideological lines. Members of these groups have been treated as second-class citizens, if not as slaves, enemies, traitors, aliens, or barbarians unworthy of even second-class citizenship. The underlying justications for these forms of exclusion have been increasingly discredited by the post-war human rights revolution, decolonization, and by contemporary norms of liberal-democratic constitutionalism, with their rm commitments to norms of equal rights and non-discrimination, and their repudiation of older ideologies of racial, ethnic, and religious hierarchies.