Ethnic Lines Research Articles

Navigating neoliberal natures in an era of infrastructure expansion and uneven urban development

Since the 2008 global economic crisis, the neoliberalization of nature and space, and consequently of environmental and planning policies, have exacerbated significantly. From infrastructure megaprojects, mining, fracking, waste disposal and land grabbing to shrinking access and loss of public green spaces, uneven gentrification and urban regeneration policies, public spaces, and natures within and beyond cities have been appropriated, privatized, commoditized, profoundly transformed and degraded with the aim to overcome recession and boost urban development. Despite the varying degree of success in pursuing urban growth, this has disproportionally affected people along lines of class, ethnicity, and gender, deepening environmental, social, and spatial inequality in many places across the globe. By drawing on my long-term research on biodiversity offsetting, the key argument I aim to advance in this essay is that since the 2008 financial crash, we have been witnessing the emergence of an increasingly symbiotic relationship between neoliberal conservation policies, infrastructure expansion and uneven urban development. This has been accompanied by the reframing of non-human nature as a movable amenity and has been intertwined with the new territorialities that the profound changes in global urban and economic geographies have brought about. This shift aims to legitimize and render common sense the idea that nature, either a protected area, a forest, an endangered species, or an urban green space, can be simply (re)located and (re)created where the interests of particular sections of capital dictate. Crucially, the underlying argument is not only that non-human nature should not be considered a barrier to infrastructure expansion and urban growth but perfectly compatible with it.

Patching identity. How Russian language media in Estonia reconstitutes our understanding of citizenship

The conceptual novelty of this article rests in seeing identity not as a nominal category, but as a complex sequence of relationships between groups and narratives. It offers a deeper reading of Engin Isin's “citizenship in practice” and an empirical interpretation of how Andersen's imagined communities are brought to life through print media. Drawing from Raivo Vetik's analysis of the Estonian ethnopolitical field the author explores narratives of two major Russian language web-portals in Estonia: Rus.Postimees and Rus.Delfi. As a result, the reader may observe how the practice of citizenship simultaneously constitutes and is constituted by the minority's identity and subject position. The content analysis conducted from the samples of the aforementioned media outlets shows that the lack of shared citizenship practices between the majority and the minority causes a voluntary grouping along the lines of legal status, language, space and ethnicity. Discussing what constitutes Isin's act of citizenship the author concludes that acts are far more elusive than the ruptures they cause. A media analysis shows that aside from bearing long-term ruptures such as geographical, linguistic or formal, Estonian citizenship practice also received a new one, namely the symbolic rupture caused by the war in Ukraine. By breaking the previous status-quo, it pushes forward securitization and forces the minority to contest, redefine, and reestablish its allegiance and perceptions of its place in Estonian society.

Ethnic plurality, political mobilisation, social divisions and the formation of conflict structures in North-Eastern Ghana

Political mobilisation is a necessary aspect of any democracy in the world. Since the introduction of democracy in Ghana, political mobilisation has become part of the political process that characterises the selection and choice of leaders. This phenomenon manifests itself differently in different geographical areas of the country. While processes of political mobilisation have received adequate academic attention, the extent to which they are immersed in coincidental ethnic cleavages to engender the formation of conflict structures in the specific region of the Bawku/Kusaug Traditional Area is less studied. This study contributes to the critical literature on political mobilisation by nuancing the debate on political mobilisation to include how political mobilisation reinforces ethnic division and creates contours and pathways through which ethnic conflicts inchoate and sophisticate. The study used a case study design of the qualitative approach to investigate the phenomenon. Twenty-seven participants were selected through an expert purposive sampling technique to partake in focus group discussions and personal interviews. The data collected through these methods were analysed using inductive thematic analysis. The analysis revealed that political mobilisation in Bawku is often anchored through the ethnic elite who mobilise their people along ethnic lines for or against specified political parties. This often creates different political rewards for each ethnic group depending on the political party that emerge victorious in elections. These differential rewards lead to violent confrontations with several economic, social and security consequences. The study therefore suggested strategies to better anchor political mobilisation and ensure peaceful co-existence among ethnic groups in the Bawku/Kusaug Traditional Area, the Upper East, Northern Ghana and Ghana as a whole

Segregated mobility patterns amplify neighborhood disparities in the spread of COVID-19

AbstractThe global and uneven spread of COVID-19, mirrored at the local scale, reveals stark differences along racial and ethnic lines. We respond to the pressing need to understand these divergent outcomes via neighborhood level analysis of mobility and case count information. Using data from Chicago over 2020, we leverage a metapopulation Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Removed model to reconstruct and simulate the spread of SARS-CoV-2 at the ZIP Code level. We demonstrate that exposures are mostly contained within one’s own ZIP Code and demographic group. Building on this observation, we illustrate that we can understand epidemic progression using a composite metric combining the volume of mobility and the risk that each trip represents, while separately these factors fail to explain the observed heterogeneity in neighborhood level outcomes. Having established this result, we next uncover how group level differences in these factors give rise to disparities in case rates along racial and ethnic lines. Following this, we ask what-if questions to quantify how segregation impacts COVID-19 case rates via altering mobility patterns. We find that segregation in the mobility network has contributed to inequality in case rates across demographic groups.

Timber and Forestry in Qing China: Sustaining the Market by Meng Zhang

Reviewed by: Timber and Forestry in Qing China: Sustaining the Market by Meng Zhang Faizah Zakaria (bio) Timber and Forestry in Qing China: Sustaining the Market By Meng Zhang. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021. Pp. 280. Meng Zhang's engaging and empirically rich study deconstructs the "market," an institution that has surprisingly garnered little deep attention in Asian environmental history. More than an examination of the circulation of goods—in this case, timber—Timber and Forestry reveals how the timber market in Qing China was built at the intersection of a complex supply chain connected by multiple players along the Yangzi river and a rising demand for timber that fueled the felling of millions of trees. Deftly interweaving economic and environmental histories, the book demonstrates that—far from being an alternative to the state in forest management—the timber market worked with and around the state to produce self-regulating mechanisms that promoted sustainability. This core insight provokes a rethinking about the environmental impact of capitalism and the possibility of staking sustainability to profit. The book first establishes that the Qing state ruled the market with a light hand in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, moreover, imposed a procurement system that "was in a market, not in replacement of it" (p. 47). This argument resonates with and extends recent conclusions reached by scholars that timber markets in China were sustainable up to the 1600s. But it also indirectly refutes contentions that this sustainability declined rapidly during the Qing period; instead, this chapter shows major continuities in the governing of the timber market during the Ming–Qing transition. What distinguished the Qing era, though, were the sheer volume of the timber trade and the pressing need to develop interregional transport and market routes that incorporated relatively undisturbed forests of southern China into a widening cross-regional timber network. The second chapter follows the infrastructure of this long-distance riverine trade, paying close attention to distinctive cultural features of the timber business such as the system of measurement and pricing. Pegging prices to a function of the circumference of the logs sold set in motion processes that enabled the cross-regional market legibility and enriched traveling merchants, with Hankou in the middle Yangzi area becoming the country's largest timber market by the nineteenth century. Zhang's work is at its most lively and innovative when tracking timber market players from below—cultivators, merchants, brokers, and trade associations—and their impact on the market. Here, historians of technology will find Zhang's depiction of Qing silviculture informative in demonstrating how fir planting could be made sustainable. Financing such efforts also involved innovation. Demystifying contracts that were used to create incentives for timber cultivators to rotate and replant to maintain supply, the third chapter [End Page 647] highlights that tradeable and divisible shares based on landownership and labor input were not only crucial in maintaining the level of long-term investment needed for this market but also in encouraging reforestation. Moreover, the market spurred participation across class and ethnic lines, incorporating players such as the Miao of the lower Qingshui region, who adopted Chinesestyle contracts and began profiting from—as well as replanting—pine and fir. The final chapters expand on the theme of market self-regulation through the perspectives of timber brokers and trade associations. The wide variety of sources ranging from legal digests, contract disputes, and local gazettes provide a persuasive basis of evidence for the argument that these players, when given full rein and direct stakes in the health of the forests, tended to move toward responsible management of woodland resources. The overall positive view of the market in this book might spark unease among market skeptics about the self-regulatory potential of such mechanisms as described in the book. Indeed, Zhang herself points out caveats to market success, including but not limited to the reduced biodiversity of reforested landscapes and the dual-faced nature of the market, which "could be devouring and enabling" unless there was "a careful deliberation over how to delineate and assign the bundle of rights … that constitute the abstract notion of 'property' to different entities" (p. 178). One could extrapolate then that such...

Rethinking the Ecofeminist Discourse: View from the Western Ghats, India

Literature on Ecofeminism in the West is based largely on ideological terms. In India and the Global South, the ecofeminist discourse needs to be understood somewhat differently. One needs to analyze the ecofeminist discourse in the context of the growing protests against environmental destruction and the privatization of the Commons. In this paper I propose to analyse the Appiko Chaluvali (movement) of the Uttara Kannada district of the Western Ghats of India that took place in the early 1980s. The movement was led by the local communities to protect the forests on which the spice garden economy of the region depends. Even at present times, the women of the region have tried to forge a sisterhood across lines of caste, class and ethnicity to come together to solve their problems and to take initiatives such as creating seed collectives and cultivating kitchen gardens thus subverting the dominant betelnut economy. It is in this context that one would like to critically analyse the discourse on ecofeminism. The attempt would be to rethink the discourse on ecofeminism from a feminist political ecology perspective and to propose a context specific variant of the Global South.

Public service media and race relations in postcolonial Britain: BBC and immigrant programming, 1965–1988

This article explores how British Asians negotiated the politics of race in the formative years of British broadcasting from the 1960s to the 1980s. Marked by significant changes within the BBC and British society at large, this period saw the first institutional initiatives oriented towards Caribbean and Asian communities. Drawing on primary research materials from the BBC Written Archives, we analyse the Immigrant Programmes Unit and the Immigrant Programme Advisory Committees as sites where ideas of race, ethnicity and citizenship were continually debated and worked out. We argue that the BBC functioned as a profoundly asymmetrical contact zone in which British Asians’ efforts to counter assimilationist ideas and programmes were stymied by senior managers working with deeply ingrained ideas of cultural, ethnic and racial differences. Immigrants would be accommodated, but in ways that would not challenge the viewing habits of the majority or imagine solidarities across racial, ethnic and national lines.

Just decarbonization? Environmental inequality, air quality, and the clean energy transition

AbstractEnvironmental inequalities are often large and consequential, exacerbating vertical inequalities of income and class and horizontal inequalities along lines of race and ethnicity. Climate policies can widen these inequalities as well as mitigate them, depending on their design. Decarbonization of the US electricity sector illustrates these possibilities. A strategy narrowly focused on carbon reduction alone is likely in some regions to increase disparities in exposure to localized co-pollutants emitted by fossil fuel combustion and, in some cases, to increase exposure in absolute terms. Strategies that in addition explicitly mandate improvements in air quality, both overall and specifically for frontline communities, can couple decarbonization with remediation of environmental inequalities and broad-based gains in public health.

Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961–1975 by Natalia Telepneva

<i>Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961–1975</i> by Natalia Telepneva

Building an Equitable Future Through Data Disaggregation.

Building an Equitable Future Through Data Disaggregation.

There is Something Special about War Criminals …

Abstract This article assesses how the rehabilitation of perpetrators of international crimes is being constructed and evaluated at the domestic level, in particular in Croatia, and how it compares to international practice at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) or International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT). The analysis is based on a convenience sample of early release decisions issued by the Croatian judiciary and the most recent early release decisions issued by the IRMCT. Up until very recently, rehabilitation of war criminals has been approached through a rather conventional prism, both at the ICTY/IRMCT and domestically. The most recent IRMCT early release decisions, however, developed a sui generis approach focusing primarily on an offender’s critical reflection on crimes, gravity of the offence and views of the larger community. At the same time, the Croatian approach to assessing rehabilitation remained centred around the perceived risk of reoffending. Due to inconsistencies in incorporating the various factors, however, there seems to be double standards being applied along ethnic lines. In this article, we analyse and contrast rehabilitation assessments and early release practices at the ICTY/IRCMT and Croatia and ask the proverbial question whether there is anything special about rehabilitating war criminals.

Racial and ethnic heterogeneity in diets of low-income adult females in the United States: results from National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys from 2011 to 2018

BackgroundPoor diet is a major risk factor of cardiovascular and chronic diseases, particularly for low-income female adults. However, the pathways by which race and ethnicity plays a role in this risk factor have not been fully explored. ObjectivesThis observational study aimed to identify dietary consumption differences by race and ethnicity of US female adults living at or below the 130% poverty income level from 2011 to 2018. MethodsA total of 2917 adult females aged 20 to 80 years from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (2011-2018) living at or below the 130% poverty income level with at least one complete 24-hour dietary recall were classified into 5 self-identified racial and ethnic subgroups (Mexican, other Hispanic, non-Hispanic [NH]-White, NH-Black, and NH-Asian). Dietary consumption patterns were defined by 28 major food groups summarized from the Food Pattern Equivalents Database and derived via a robust profile clustering model, which identifies foods that share consumption patterns across all low-income female adults and foods that differ in consumption patterns based on the racial and ethnic subgroups. ResultsAll food consumption patterns were identified at the local level, defined by racial and ethnic subgroups. Legumes and cured meats were the most differentiating foods identified across all racial and ethnic subgroups. Higher consumption levels of legumes were observed among Mexican–American and other Hispanic females. Higher consumption levels of cured meat were observed among NH-White and Black females. NH-Asian females had the most uniquely characterized patterns with a higher consumption of prudent foods (fruits, vegetables, and whole grains). ConclusionsDifferences among the consumption behaviors of low-income female adults were found along racial and ethnic lines. Efforts to improve the nutritional health of low-income female adults should consider racial and ethnic differences in diets to appropriately focus interventions.

‘Gukurahundi Continues’: Violence, Memory, and Mthwakazi Activism in Zimbabwe

Abstract One effect of Zimbabwe’s 2017 coup was to unleash a new wave of public engagement with the unresolved state repression of the 1980s, known as Gukurahundi. This wave was led by the ‘post-Gukurahundi generation’ and particularly by activists whose narratives of Gukurahundi were entwined with calls for a separate ‘Mthwakazi nation’. This article explores these activists’ stories of Gukurahundi and asks why they broke through into the public realm after decades of relative silence. It argues that Mthwakazi activists’ engagement relied on an interpretation of Gukurahundi not simply as a discrete historical event, but as the clearest expression of an ongoing ‘Grand Plan’ of ethnic marginalization. This narrative was foundational to the construction of a moral order that divided the country along ethnic and regional fault lines, ultimately legitimizing Mthwakazi nationalism. The paper roots this narrative’s emergence in two interrelated processes. Speaking to the role of silencing in keeping conflicts alive across generations, it examines how the ‘noisy silence’ that has surrounded Gukurahundi in both public and private has meant that Gukurahundi lingered as a readily available interpretative lens. This lens became meaningful when the second generation, faced with political and economic marginalization, was grappling for meaning and political belonging.

Education as a site of contestation among Nagas in Manipur: politics of language and cultural assertion in the school curriculum

ABSTRACT This article is an attempt to understand education in light of the complex multiethnic relationships and politics prevailing in the state of Manipur. With the sustained tension between the Nagas, Kukis, and Meiteis over the matter of identity, education in the state remains massively divided along ethnic lines. That said, the Meiteis, as the ethnic majority, have been systematically influential in prioritising their identity and development in education, as its control remains in their purview. The subsequent claim and counterclaim regarding the imposition of the dominant Meitei language and culture in the school curriculum have further worsened the ethnic relationship. Consequently, the perceived sense of alienation by the tribal minorities in this sense has added to their sectarian aspirations and detachment from the state. Thus, through fieldwork and a review of literature, this paper presents the various discourses concerning the complex tussle over the control of resources and governance in the education system of Manipur.

Bridging Uncompromising Borders: Ethnicity, Party Politics and Democracy in Africa

Abstract Since the 1960s when the majority of African countries acceded to independence, the continent is still without its own political formula that can reconcile and accommodate the claims of ethnic identity on the one hand, and party politics, democracy and patriotism on the other. This is because the majority of the continent is made up of a conglomeration of ethnic groups and cultural traditions that lay primary claim to the loyalty, sense of belonging and identity of their peoples. Africa needs a political model rooted in traditional reality that can check and curb rivalries among communities based on ethnic and party lines. The old traditions of governance can provide such a political formula for democratically choosing leaders and organizing governance that overrides the influence of ethnicity and political parties; a formula based on societal interests and concerns and promoted by non-governmental organizations, trade unions and professional associations.

The Contrasting Effects of Ethnic and Partisan Identity on Performance Evaluation

Why is voting behaviour tied to ethnicity in many new democracies? A predominant view, offered by the instrumentalist theory, argues that voters use candidates’ identity -ethnic or partisan- as a signal of expected performance. However, voters will reward well-performing politicians by being more likely to vote for them and punish bad performance regardless of candidates’ identity. To test these assumptions, we conduct a nationally representative survey in Kenya asking voters about their spending preference for the country’s main anti-poverty programme, which is managed by MPs in collaboration with citizens. We find that voters, regardless of ethnicity or party, have an erroneous view of how their MP spent the anti-poverty funds. Then in an experiment, we share with voters the spending made by the MPs and audit results probing for corruption. Once voters are aware that their MP’s spending does not match their spending priorities, their approval and likelihood of voting for the MP decreases if primed to view the politician as partisan. Voters also electorally punish MPs for corruption whether copartisan or non-copartisan. In contrast to instrumentalist expectations, if voters are primed to view their MP in ethnic terms, they are more likely to vote for their coethnic overlooking bad performance and corruption. The availability of alternative parties in local elections may explain why voters attach partisanship to performance evaluation. Still, in our case study, as in other new democracies, politicians continue mobilising support along ethnic lines, perhaps explaining why voters prioritise group loyalties if primed to think about ethnicity.

The diversification of Norwegian Pentecostalism: changing cultures, identities, and theologies through migration

ABSTRACT This article describes the emergence of Christian migrant-initiated churches (MICs) in Norway and how these contribute to the diversification of the Norwegian Pentecostal landscape. The author describes various dimensions related to the ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and theological diversity that these MICs represent. The article's main findings build on fieldwork and interviews in a series of MICs and their transnational networks across various ethnic, cultural, and denominational lines. From this, the article discusses issues related to identity, culture, and spirituality and how these shed light on differences and the potential for unity across cultural and other boundaries. In particular, the article highlights the spiritual and organizational characteristics of global Christianity and many MICs and how these may represent challenges and opportunities for an increasingly diverse Norwegian Pentecostal landscape today and in the future.

THE IMPACT OF INTER-ETHNIC CONFLICT ON DEVELOPMENT IN ETHIOPIA

Ethiopia is known for its long history of highly centralized, exclusive and suppressive governance system which came to an end with the adoption of multi-ethnic federal political system in 1991. The new ethnic federal state arrangement was believed to bring peace, provide a new basis for unity and reduce conflicts. However, ethnic conflict has become the day-to-day experience in different parts of the country. Afar Regional State is one of the constituent units where conflict has been prevalent. Different researches indicated that conflict affects socio-economic development in various ways. The objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of inter-ethnic conflict on the socio-economic development of Afar Regional State in Ethiopia. The data for this paper were gathered through qualitative methods as well as review of published and unpublished documents. Specific tools for primary data collection include key informant interviews, focus group discussion, and observation,. The study analyses the causes and consequences of conflicts between Afar and its neighboring ethnic groups, the Issa-Somali and Amhara. The study reveals that the restructuring of the country along ethnic lines has transformed the century-old resource-based conflicts among pastoralist communities into territorial conflicts. The paper concludes that interethnic conflicts have been adversely affecting the socio-economic development of Afar Regional State.

Automated vs. manual case investigation and contact tracing for pandemic surveillance: Evidence from a stepped wedge cluster randomized trial.

Case investigation and contact tracing (CICT) is an important tool for communicable disease control, both to proactively interrupt chains of transmission and to collect information for situational awareness. We run the first randomized trial of COVID-19 CICT to investigate the utility of manual (i.e., call-based) vs. automated (i.e., survey-based) CICT for pandemic surveillance. Between December 15, 2021 and February 5, 2022, a stepped wedge cluster randomized trial was run in which Santa Clara County ZIP Codes progressively transitioned from manual to automated CICT. Eleven individual-level data fields on demographics and disease dynamics were observed for non-response. The data contains 106,522 positive cases across 29 ZIP Codes. Automated CICT reduced overall collected information by 29 percentage points (SE=0.08, p<0.01), as well as the response rate for individual fields. However, we find no evidence of differences in information loss by race or ethnicity. Automated CICT can serve as a useful alternative to manual CICT, with no substantial evidence of skewing data along racial or ethnic lines, but manual CICT improves completeness of key data for monitoring epidemiologic patterns. This research was supported in part by the Stanford Office of Community Engagement and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

Fear of Victimization among LGBQ, Non-Binary, and Transgender College and University Students in the United States

ABSTRACT This study examines fear of victimization (FOV) among lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer (LGBQ), and (T)ransgender college and university students across the US. We expand the FOV literature by examining the relationship between fear and both gender and sexual identities across racial and ethnic lines among college and university students in the US. We find that being a transgender or non-binary (NB) student is significantly associated with FOV, as well as being an LGBQ student. In addition, Black trans/NB students and Black LGBQ non-trans students are both roughly 11 times more likely than their counterparts to report FOV. Being trans/NB matters; it is an independent identity from one’s sexuality, and it operates differently across race and ethnicity.