Ethnic Elites Research Articles

Politik dan Strategi Budaya Etnik dalam Pilkada Serentak di Kalimantan Barat

The local politics in West Kalimantan thick politically charged ethnic identity. Local political politically involved two ethnic identity which is a native of West Kalimantan, namely ethnic Dayak and Malay. The state of the two ethnic rivalry is becoming more open in the era of district autonomy that is triggered by direct local elections. This competition occurs because history records that the ruling ethnic elite running ethnic hegemony over other ethnic groups. Regional head election (PILKADA) is currently running. Of the seven districts in West Kalimantan which organizes PILKADA very apparent that they are oriented to capture the voice ethnicity. Ethnic identity became a political commodity since this issue most easily sold to seize the people's voice. This paper use the incorporation of the views that are instrumentalism and internal colonialism perspective . The author has the view, that perspective instrumentalism able to see how an elite play social identity and cultural group to gain power and view of internal colonialism that saw socio-economic disparities and discrimination as the root of the strengthening of solidarity groups. This view is helpful to explain the fanaticism ethnic factor as a cultural strategy that occurred in the present and why identity politics in West Kalimantan is an inherent part of the local politics of this period.

The Islamic representation of Tatarstan as an answer to the equalization of the Russian regions

This article presents a study of Islamic religious symbols involved in maintaining the special status of the Tatars in post-Soviet Tatarstan. It explores how regional ethnic elites in Tatarstan use Islam (the discourse of the history of Islam in the region and Islamic symbols in the representation of the region) as a tool for legitimizing their privileged positions in the region. In addition, the article examines how Islamic culture enters into the everyday life and public space of the region, thereby, in a sense enforcing social borders between different ethnic groups. This study has two aims: a theoretical analysis of religious symbols’ role in the struggle for status in the ethnic hierarchy and the practical application of the developed theoretical framework to the case of post-Soviet Tatarstan. The author concludes that after the system of ethnic federalism was abolished in Russia, Tatars have retained their special status by appealing to Islam.

Latino Faces, Corporate Ties: Latino Advocacy Organizations and Their Board Membership

Although they have increased exponentially since the 1960s, social scientists know little about ethnic advocacy organizations. These nonprofits are important bridges between underresourced communities and mainstream funding organizations and their directors are established ethnic leaders. Sociologists study interlocking directorates—or shared board membership—to understand how organizations fit together within broader social networks. Network concepts, particularly the theory of institutional isomorphism, suggest that organizations are likely to be similar to the extent they are connected and operate within a common organizational field. We apply this logic to Latino advocacy organizations to examine the underlying source of cohesion across this ethnic field. We ask whether the organizations are tied by interlocking directorates of ethnic elites who sit on their boards of directors or if board members' common affiliation with other elite institutions creates the structural conditions that facilitate potential ideological or behavioral similarity. A social network analysis of five prominent Latino advocacy organizations reveals support for both hypotheses: Latino board members are both embedded in ethnic‐based networks and entrenched within elite organizational webs. This suggests that ethnic elites who sit on the boards of Latino advocacy organizations are also corporate elites, selected for the social capital they bring to these nonprofits.

The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion: Citizenship and Voting Rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina

This article uses the lenses of citizenship to examine the uneven distribution of voting rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). While recognizing the significance of power-sharing in BiH, the article argues that the key obstacle to modifying the politics of inclusion and exclusion through citizenship and the franchise is the static nature of political competition in the country. The intimate relationship between political parties and their ethno-centric agendas on the one hand, and the multi-tiered governance structure on the other, prevents the possibility of reaching an agreement on constitutional reform as it would disrupt the current power balances that favour ethnic elites.

Conceptualizing Party Representation of Ethnic Minorities in Central and Eastern Europe

The political representation of ethnic minorities in the party systems of Central and Eastern European states remains understudied despite the consolidation of democracy in these countries following their accession to the EU. This paper asks what institutional factors influence the way ethnic minorities are represented in the party systems of Central and Eastern European states. It does so based on a comparison of ethnic minorities in two paired cases (Slovakia/Romania and Estonia/Latvia), each of which shows similarities in some regards but have different outcomes in terms of party representation. The paper specifically examines explanations for the diverse forms through which minorities are represented in these four countries with a focus on three distinct types: ethnic particularist minority parties, integrationist minority parties, and accommodative majority parties. We examine two institutional/political factors that influence specific minority party types: (1) electoral systems and (2) political strategies of the dominant ethnic elite. We argue that while electoral systems do play a role in explaining differences in the party representation of minorities, they become particularly important in the broader political institutional context that emerged in the first decade following the collapse of communism. The manner in which dominant ethnic political-elites approached minority representation in the early years of democratization is critical in explaining different types of party representation that ensued.

The Politics, Practice and Paradox of ‘Ethnic Security’ in Bosnia-Herzegovina

The international intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina was intended to support conflict resolution by introducing territorial self-government and power sharing as the foundation for a governance framework that would provide for collective and individual security alignment over time. Instead, it has contributed to the ethnification of security whereby collective security in the form of an ‘ethnified state’ remains at the forefront of political discourse and practice. Social acceptance of this ethnified state as the guarantor of security—despite the fading reality of the ethnic threat in public perceptions of post-war insecurity—has been actively manufactured by the country’s ethnic elites using the very institutional means put in place by the international intervention. The result is an ‘ethnic security paradox’ in which the idea of individual safety—linked to the protection of ethnic identity in the form of an ethnified state—unsettles both collective and individual security alike.

Nation Building. A Long-Term Perspective and Global Analysis

Why have some states been captured by specific ethnic elites and their clienteles, excluding all others from access to government power? Conversely, what explains political inclusion across ethnic divides or, in other words, successful ‘nation building’? Assuming a relational theoretical perspective, I argue that high state capacity to deliver public goods, well developed voluntary organizations, and low levels of linguistic diversity enhance nation building because they make it easier to extend networks of political alliances across an entire territory. Contemporary state capacity and linguistic diversity are in turn related to levels of state formation achieved during the late 19th century. On average, such long-term factors of political development are more important for explaining contemporary nation building than political institutions (including democracy) or the legacies of imperial rule. This is demonstrated on the basis of a cross-national data set covering all countries of the world since 1945.

Ethnic Elites and Canadian Identity: Japanese, Ukrainians, and Scots, 1919–1971 by Aya Fujiwara (review)

Ethnic Elites and Canadian Identity: Japanese, Ukrainians, and Scots, 1919–1971 by Aya Fujiwara (review)

Crisis of Governance in Maya Guatemala: Indigenous Responses to a Failing State

Crisis of Governance in Maya Guatemala: Indigenous Responses to a Failing State

Fujiwara, Aya, <i>Ethnic Elites and Canadian Identity: Japanese, Ukrainians and Scots, 1919-1971</i>.

Fujiwara, Aya, Ethnic Elites and Canadian Identity: Japanese, Ukrainians and Scots, 1919-1971. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2012. Pp. xi + 256. ISBN 978-0-8875-737-8 (paperback). $27.95.

Is Leviathan Back? Circassian Ethnic Mobilization after the 2012 Presidential Elections in Russia

This article explores the hypothesis that on-going instability in the North Caucasus can no longer be explained by its violent history of colonization. Instead, instability is carefully negotiated by ethnic elites, who do not see the North Caucasus as an indispensable part of the Russian Federation and who can only make a public show of action on the eve of crucial political campaigns: the 2012 presidential elections and the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. Focusing on the question of ethnicity and its relation to federal politics in the North Caucasus, the main argument of the article is while Circassian ethnicity and ethnic politics in general, have been partly the outcome of the authoritarian rule of the Russian Imperial and Soviet legacies, the way ethnicity has been and is being politicized by the ethnic, federal, and international actors, have created serious grounds for the rise and the consolidation of Circassian nationalism in the North Caucasus.

Census taking and inter-ethnic relations in Macedonia

A census is not only a public policy tool to classify and enumerate the population but also to construct social reality. Establishing a particular vision of social reality during census taking is important because public resources are granted and denied to ethnic groups depending on their numbers. In principle, the bigger the number of an ethnic community, the bigger share of public resources and jobs its political representatives can claim. The Macedonian census conflict is directly related to ethnic rivalry for public resources. Since the Macedonian economy is weak and there is a high unemployment rate, public administration jobs are coveted assets. The failed 2011 census reveals that the ethnic Albanian and Macedonian elites had fears that their kin had declined in absolute numbers, and in relation to the other ethnic group, and that this decline could lead to potential loss of their political influence and power. The principle of ‘equitable and just representation of non-majority communities’, enshrined in the public policies of the country since 2002, has direct implication on census taking in Macedonia. The paper argues that reforming the affirmative action policies to focus on economically disadvantaged instead of ethnic groups would be a good first step to eliminate some of the tensions in conducting a census in Macedonia.

Relieving Bosnia from the Orbit of Dysfunctional Consociationalism: Reasoning Under the Light of Local Committees Experience in Kosovo and Ethnocomitology

Although power-sharing arrangements are seen as favorable political formulas for the societies divided along ethnic lines, they are problematic in some aspects. Particularly, once put into operation they generate a kind of gravity pull avoiding the self-transformation of polity despite consociational arrangements’ visible malfunction because of some reasons. This study essentially tries to point out that power-sharing arrangements are relied upon the consent among the ethnic elite which firmly control their own mono-ethnic patronage networks, thereby sustaining and cementing ethnic segregation. It claims thats that ethnic committees of UNMIK in pre-independence Kosovo may offer a model to solve the problem of mono-ethnic patronage networks in Bosnia in an unconventional way.

Ethnic Elite Organisation and Political Transitions in Nigeria: Ohanaeze Ndigbo in Perspective

Abstract Nigeria has experienced various phases of political regime transitions. Though a lot of studies have been done on these transitions, there has been no systematic study of the roles of ethnic elite socio-political organizations in the transition processes. Where they were studied, organizations were subsumed into civil society and portrayed either as constituting an opposition to political repression or as agents of public accountability. Yet, such organizations are usually composed of ruling and opposition figures. It is against this backdrop the paper attempts to examine the role of Ohanaeze Ndigbo in the Nigeria’s political transitions from 1985 to 2003. Key words : Ethnicity; Ethnic organization; Elitism; Political transitions

""""""""""""" " (The Mythology of 'Historical Justice' in Ethnopolitical Conflicts as a Factor of Ethnic Elites' Legitimation)

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Sounds of Ethnicity: Listening to German North America, 1850–1914 (review)

Reviewed by: Sounds of Ethnicity: Listening to German North America, 1850–1914 Mario Nathan Coschi Lorenzkowski, Barbara – Sounds of Ethnicity: Listening to German North America, 1850–1914. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010. Pp. xiii, 295. Barbara Lorenzkowski’s innovative Sounds of Ethnicity examines the relationship between language and ethnic identity in the German communities of Buffalo, New York and Waterloo County, Ontario. Her book is divided into two parts: Part One: Language Matters, examines the German-language press of Waterloo County and German classes in the schools of Waterloo County and Buffalo, while Part Two: Music Matters explores the Peace Jubilees held in Waterloo and Buffalo in 1871 to commemorate the end of the Franco-Prussian War and Saengerfeste, or singers’ festivals, held in the Great Lakes region between 1860 and 1912. For sources, Lorenzkowski primarily examines newspapers [End Page 448] from the Great Lakes region, particularly the local German-language presses of Buffalo and Waterloo County. She also studies school board records and the records of the Saengerfeste and of the individuals prominently involved in them. Lorenzkowski envisions ethnicity as something that “happens” rather than membership in a group. The use of language in speech or in song served “to sound out the shape of this ethnicity” (p. 6). She therefore moves beyond a simplistic understanding of language as a static marker of ethnic identity, whereby language loss signals assimilation. To do this, she delves past the exhortations of the ethnic elite, such as newspaper editors and leaders of cultural institutions, who called for linguistic purity, and lamented the increasing use of English amongst the ethnic rank and file, a group less clearly defined by Lorenzkowski. What she reveals is a dynamic, fluid relationship between language and ethnicity for both the rank and file and the elite, despite the conservative rhetoric of the latter. In speaking a German-English hybrid rather than a pure High German, or singing and making merry in the less formal setting of the beer gardens rather than listening politely in the concert hall, the rank and file Germans were not rejecting their ethnicity, but were expressing an ethnic identity that spoke to their own experiences in North America. For both the elite and the rank and file, language practices were also a forum for interaction with the host society, rather than a barrier between the two. In staging the singers’ festivals, the elite were partly trying to foster a musical culture in North America. Anglo-Saxon audiences, for their part, eventually came to claim these festivals as their own. As a result, these ethnic festivals became part of the mainstream public culture of Canada and the United States. Lorenzkowski’s transnational approach, which sees the German communities of Buffalo and Waterloo County as “cast in a continental, not transatlantic mould,” makes a significant contribution to the historiography (p. 17). Studies of the formation of ethnic communities and identity in Canada are quite often limited to the level of a single neighbourhood or city. Those studies which venture beyond this local level are typically bounded by the receiving country’s borders. Those works which adopt a transnational approach, such as Elizabeth Jane Errington’s Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities, generally look at the continuing ties of community between the sending and receiving countries. The world that immigrants knew and lived, however, was not limited to the axis of sending and receiving countries. When immigrants came to North America, they frequently moved from one place to another in search of work, paying little heed to the border between Canada and the United States. Even once they had settled more permanently, these migrants continued to have ties of kin and community that straddled borders. These local studies of Waterloo Country and Buffalo enable Lorenzkowski to explore the growth of a larger German community in the Great Lakes region. She argues that the German-language press of Waterloo County created a transnational space that encompassed Canada, the United States, and, initially, Germany. In their advocacy for linguistic purity, editors criticized not only immigrants who spoke in a German-English hybrid, but European Germans whose language was riven by dialects and littered with French loanwords. The German-Canadian...

(Re)framing identity claims: European and state institutions as opportunity windows for group reinforcement

AbstractHow do we account for the reinforcement of identity particularisms despite transnational integration? This paper addresses the question by comparing two ethnolinguistic groups, Silesians and Kashubs in Poland. It is argued that in order to obtain state protection and tools to develop and survive, ethnic entrepreneurs adjust to institutions and discourses. Census politics, state laws' elaboration, transnational institutions represent openings to which groups adjust by reframing identity claims. In doing so, they re‐imagine and reinforce their communities. Following Rogers Brubaker, group‐making is presented as an eventful process where ethnic elites invest identity categories with groupness by taking advantage of opportunity windows at hand. Further, tracing changing political opportunities, strategic adjustments and groups' boomerang effect bid, the paper embeds identity groups within the social movement literature.

INTEGRATION OF THE NORTHERN ETHNIC FRONTIERS IN TANG CHINA

This article investigates how the Tang ruling elite tried to integrate nomadic and other ethnic frontier peoples into the multi-ethnic empire and how effective such efforts were. By examining and analyzing the court debate in 630 on how to resettle the submitting Turks, a set of rewards by the government for incorporating the ethnic elites into the Tang structure, and the “loose-rein area commands and prefectures,” the article argues that Emperor Taizong did not intend assimilation but incorporation of the non-Han into the military in order to build a multi-ethnic empire. Although the rewards aimed at assimilation, the policy also validated ethnic differences. The Tang ethnic inclusion efforts, on the one hand, enhanced the ethnic consciousness of the non-Han peoples and, on the other hand, served the Tang’s political, economic, and military purposes, resulting in a gradual transformation of the non-Han peoples who came to identity with the Tang.

Hybridising State and Ethnicity in an Indonesian Region

This study traces long processes of ethnic politics in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. It argues that ethnicity has always been a component in the hybrid state throughout the contemporary political history of the region. By employing the concept of hybridisation, the study reveals that the weak degree of the hybridised state during the Soeharto era has become a necessary condition for the rise of ethnic violence. Only recently, the reconstruction of the benevolent hybrid state may gradually prevail. The existence of power sharing among ethnic elite, the democratic and peaceful gubernatorial direct elections that have taken place, and the inter-ethnic economic co-operation among ordinary citizens could make ethnicity develop in a constructive way as one of basic components within the hybrid state. Qualitative method has been used to collect data from various actors who have direct and indirect knowledge both during and after the Suharto eras.

Bathroom Mixing: Youth Negotiate Democratization in Postconflict Bosnia and Herzegovina

Consociational democracy, as a political project of passive coexistence and agreement among ethnic elites, has been shaping sociopolitical processes in the world's postconflict regions, including Northern Ireland, Lebanon, and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). In BiH, this political model, when combined with continuous governance by the International Community, solidifies war‐generated ethnic segregation and erodes state sovereignty. Furthermore, these political, social, and spatial arrangements lead to the institutionalized separation of ethnic groups and territories in BiH. At the famous Mostar Gymnasium, my primary research site, this is manifested in the simultaneous unification of the school management and segregation of classroom spaces, classroom instruction, and students along the ethnic lines. The implementation of a top‐down cartography of peace building at the school led to the destruction of common spaces for students to interact. This spatial ethnic division limited what the students call, in the local vernacular, miješanje (mixing). I understand mixing as a long‐standing cultural practice of interconnectedness and intermingling among ethnic groups. This article pays special attention to the practices of bathroom mixing at the school that unfolded alongside the consociational model of democracy and the history of mixing as an interethnic social order. Focusing on bathroom mixing illuminates the paradoxes and unintended effects of the spatial governmentality of peace‐building in BiH.