Abstract
The politics of identity have the potential to include and therefore to exclude. As the quote above exemplifies ethnicity in politics, as I call it for now (since I shall shortly distinguish between politicised ethnicity and ethnicised politics), excluded in Rwanda with most dramatic consequences and included in terms of exalting differences “in the notion of ‘rainbow nation’” (Solomon and Matthews 2001: 137) in South Africa. Coinciding with the modern nation state, which currently represents the legitimate form of political representation and organisation (Barnes 2001: 86; Calhoun 1993), the notion of the ‘rainbow nation’, and in this sense, ethnicity in politics, facilitated inclusion in South Africa. In contrast, the Rwandan example, in which the ethnic categories of Hutu and Tutsi not coinciding with the nation state were and are salient in politics, shows how prone to conflict exclusion along ethnic categories can be if these do not coincide with the nation state.
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