Interethnic Coalition Research Articles

Overcoming Resource Competition Among Co-Ethnics: Elites, Endorsements, and Multiracial Support for Urban Distributive Policies

When can we expect multiple racial groups to find common ground in the face of potentially unequal distributive urban policies? While we understand a great deal about the role of elites in inter-ethnic coalition building, we know less about the conditions under which cooperative behavior among their co-ethnic voters is more likely. Research has found that multiracial coalitions are critical to the political incorporation of racial/ethnic minority group interests at the local level but conflict between minority groups persists due to both real and perceived competition for resources. In this paper, we argue that elite co-ethnic endorsements can increase co-ethnic voters' support for urban distributive policies that disproportionately benefit outgroups over one’s own ingroup. We test our theory using a survey experiment from a representative sample of more than 1800 Los Angeles County voters. We find that respondents are less likely to support policy proposals that exclusively target benefits toward ethnic outgroups compared to when their ethnic ingroup exclusively benefits from an identical proposal. But we also find that the presence of co-ethnic endorsements can increase support for proposals that benefit an ethnic outgroup. We find this effect among Black, Latino, and Asian Americans in our sample.

Consociationalism under examination: Is consociationalism the optimal multiculturalist approach for Turkey?

AbstractSome scholars maintain that the Republic of Turkey should construct a consociational model to manage its ethno‐cultural diversity. This article suggests consociationalism is not the optimal multiculturalist approach for Turkey, where there is some degree of interethnic moderation between ethnic Kurds and Turks at the grassroots level. In the presence of this mass‐based moderation, a consociational formula is unlikely to provide Turkish political leaders with political incentives that urge them to cooperate and enter into consociational power‐sharing arrangements with their Kurdish counterparts. This renders consociational power‐sharing arrangements difficult to promote or enforce in Turkey. In the absence of such incentives, any multicultural reform of the consociational formula would not be sustainable in Turkey. There would simply not be enough popular support for such reforms. There are some electoral strategies that offer both majority and minority leaders political incentives to move toward the moderate middle, form interethnic coalitions, foster interculturalism, and increase the number of intercultural citizens. These strategies are offered by centripetalism, another multiculturalist approach to managing ethno‐cultural diversity.

The effect of regional income inequality and social diversity on the provision of local public goods in Indonesia

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to quantify the effects of regional income disparity and social diversity on local public goods delivery in Indonesia.Design/methodology/approachUsing Indonesian provincial data over the period 2001–2014 and by way of System GMM, this paper circumvents endogeneity and persistence of key variables over time which may bias the estimated impact of the critical variables.FindingsThe result provides no significant evidence on the influence of regional income inequality on the provision of local public goods. The result reveals that ethnic diversity is associated with the more extensive provision of local public goods. A large difference in preferences toward public goods provision in a fragmented society such as Indonesia forces the local government to deliver a greater mixed of public goods to accommodate various preferences for public goods and ensure that each group has equal access to public goods. Political fragmentation within an ethnically heterogeneous society also encourages local politicians to provide a larger provision of public goods to form an inter-ethnic coalition to gain local political access.Practical implicationsThe significant effect of ethnic diversity on public goods provision implies a set of policy recommendation for Indonesian Government in order to maintain peace within the country. The central government should establish a clear-cut standard of local public goods provision for local governments to ensure that that anyone has equal access to public goods regardless of ethnicity. This will mitigate the possibility of ethnic conflict in an ethnically plural society.Originality/valueThis paper extends its analysis using both fractionalization and polarization indexes to measure the social diversity in Indonesia to obtain a comprehensive knowledge regarding the influence of ethnic diversity on the public good provision. This paper proposes a set of policy recommendation for Indonesian Government to manage the effect of social diversity on the provision of local public goods. To the author’s knowledge, this has never been done before for Indonesia.Peer reviewThe peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-12-2018-0661

“Guardians of the Indian Image”: Controlling Representations of Indigenous Cultures in Television

This study enhances existing scholarship on Indigenous media and activism by documenting the strategies Native organizations have historically used to challenge misrepresentation in television. Focusing specifically on the efforts of the National Congress of American Indians, the National Indian Youth Council, and the Native American Public Broadcasting Consortium, this article demonstrates that control of televisual images is a political struggle in which Indigenous activists have repeatedly asserted self-determination through confrontation and collaboration with governing institutions. Historical news sources, organizational reports, legal proceedings, and interviews reveal the motivations for and consistency with which Indigenous activists have attempted to seize control of mediated images. Since the 1960s, Native advocacy groups have initiated petitions, boycotts, and lawsuits to hold lawmakers and federal agencies accountable for misrepresentation. In doing so, these organizations have relied on Indigenous peoples and resources outside of the media industry, including intertribal and interethnic coalitions that supported the broader Red Power movement. Ultimately, these activists have created opportunities for Native peoples to re-present meaningful images of themselves in television. This history of organized resistance to racism in television offers important lessons to activists engaged in the ongoing battle against popular stereotypes and cultural imperialism.

Making the Mission: Planning and Ethnicity in San Francisco

Ocean Howell's Making the Mission explores the durability of local, neighborhood-based planning, coalition building, spatial practices, and ethnic formation in San Francisco's famed Mission District. Howell compellingly argues that these nodes of collective action forged and sustained the Mission's enduringly distinct entity—a city within a city—throughout the twentieth century. Howell also connects urban and ethnic histories, arguing persuasively that “broader shifts in the very boundaries of ethnicity,” especially regarding Latinas/os, “were accomplished in no small part through debates over urban planning power” (p. 21, emphasis in original). In fact, he argues that “neighborhood identity was largely ethnic identity,” even as the Mission's cultural politics shifted from defending whiteness to celebrating diversity (p. 121). Making the Mission also triangulates San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles, in part to demonstrate profound differences between San Francisco and the most studied cities of the “great West.” Howell divides the narrative into four periods defined by the availability of institutional space at the municipal, state, and federal levels to allow Mission-based planners political and spatial efficacy. From the 1906 earthquake through the 1920s, “citizens of the Mission” took leading roles in determining the district's economic, social, and spatial development by acting collectively through unions, social groups, and the powerful Mission Promotion Association. During the 1930s, New Deal agencies favored sanctioned municipal authorities, limiting the Mission's neighborhood power. From 1945 through the 1950s, the dominance of centralized planning and urban renewal effectively precluded neighborhood planning. Mission organizations endured, however, building stable interethnic coalitions and capacity to work with city government. When the central-planning stranglehold broke, the Mission Coalition Organization partnered with city government and the federal Model Cities program. The new regime of neighborhood planning rose and fell in lockstep with municipal agencies and the Great Society more generally.

Maria's Rebellion: Gayl Jones's Mosquito and the Problem of Recognition

This essay proposes a hermeneutic of critical invisibility, borrowed from the politics of silence in African American and Latin American cultural studies, to offer a revisionary account of recognition: rather than a condition to which to aspire, the undocumented immigrant demonstrates what can be gained by remaining in the shadows of recognition. Using Mosquito 's attention to interethnic coalition building between African Americans and Latinos both in the U.S. and abroad, this paper proposes that we read the novel for what it might say about the failures, and not the promises, of recognition for these populations. In so doing, I extend the project of looking to African American literature as a necessary and valuable source for powerful and enduring representations of immigration, as well as critiques of the methods and objectives of immigrant rights movements.

The making of an interethnic coalition: urban and rural anarchists in La Paz, Bolivia, 1946–1947

ABSTRACTThe 1947 upheavals on haciendas outside La Paz, Bolivia, were facilitated by an interethnic coalition between indigenous peasants and urban anarchists, most of whom were mestizos and cholos (thus ‘non-indigenous’ by official definition). Three sets of factors were essential to this alliance. First, the urbanites’ own politics – their libertarian socialist vision, their attentiveness to both ‘ethnic’ and ‘class’ demands, and their organizational federalism – proved particularly conducive to coalition-building. Second, prior autonomous mobilization outside the city had created local leaders and networks which would form the rural bases for the coalition, and which would also help redefine the anarchist left starting in 1946. Finally, a series of coalition brokers bridged traditional divides of language, ethnicity, and geography. These three factors allowed anarchist organizers to exploit a limited political opening that appeared in 1945–1946. This account qualifies common dismissals of the Latin American left as mestizo-dominated and class-reductionist while also illuminating the process through which the alliance developed.

Ethnic Power Sharing: Three Big Problems

In societies severely divided by ethnicity, race, religion, language, or any other form of ascriptive affiliation, ethnic divisions make democracy difficult, because they tend to produce ethnic parties and ethnic voting. Two commonly proposed methods of amelioration are called consociational and centripetal . Three problems derive from these proposals: The first concerns the adoptability of either of the two principal prescriptions. Under what conditions can either be adopted? The second relates to a possibility inherent in centripetal regimes: the potential degradation of the electoral arrangements that sustain the interethnic coalition. The third derives from a common consequence of the adoption of a consociational regime: Where robust guarantees, including minority vetoes, are adopted, immobilism is a strong possibility, and it may be very difficult to overcome the stasis that immobilism can produce. By examining these three problems, we can uncover some of the frailties inherent in both of the common prescriptions.

Excerpt from <em>Triangulations: Narrative Strategies for Navigating Latino Identity</em>

Just as mariners use triangulation, mapping an imaginary triangle between two known positions and an unknown location, so, David J. Vázquez contends, Latino authors in late twentieth-century America employ the coordinates of familiar ideas of self to find their way to new, complex identities. Through this metaphor, Vázquez reveals how Latino autobiographical texts, written after the rise of cultural nationalism in the 1960s, challenge mainstream notions of individual identity and national belonging in the United States.In a traditional autobiographical work, the protagonist frequently opts out of his or her community. In the works that Vázquez analyzes in Triangulations, protagonists instead opt in to collective groups—often for the express political purpose of redefining that collective. Reading texts by authors such as Ernesto Galarza, Jesús Colón, Piri Thomas, Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, Judith Ortiz Cofer, John Rechy, Julia Alvarez, and Sandra Cisneros, Vázquez engages debates about the relationship between literature and social movements, the role of cultural nationalism in projects for social justice, the gender and sexual problematics of 1960s cultural nationalist groups, the possibilities for interethnic coalitions, and the interpretation of autobiography. In the process, Triangulations considers the potential for cultural nationalism as a productive force for aggrieved communities of color in their struggles for equality.

Towards Interracial Understanding and Identification: Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker

African Americans and Korean Americans have addressed Black–Korean encounters and responded to each other predominantly in their favorite genres: in films and rap music for African Americans and in novels and poems for Korean Americans. A case in point is the intertextuality between Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker. A comparative study of the two demonstrates that they are seminal texts of African American–Korean American dialogue and discourse for mutual understanding and harmonious relationships between the two races in the USA. This paper reads the African American film and the Korean American fiction as dialogic responses to the well-publicized strife between Korean American merchants and their African American customers in the late 1980s and early 1990s and as windows into a larger question of African American–Korean American relations and racialization in US culture. This study ultimately argues that the dialogue between Spike Lee's film and Chang-rae Lee's novel moves towards a possibility of cross-racial identification and interethnic coalition building.

THE RISE AND FALL OF AFRIKANER ETHNIC POLITICAL MOBILISATION, 1943–1999

ABSTRACT The dominance of the National Party (NP) in South African white politics for nearly five decades represents a highly successful example of ethnic political mobilisation. This paper seeks to examine the changing course of mobilisation in the period 1948–1992. It considers the NP victory in 1948 and early consolidation; the peak of ethnic mobilisation between 1958 and 1974; and the NP as an inter-ethnic coalition in the face of growing divisions in Afrikanerdom between 1977 and 1992. With the ending of white minority rule Afrikaners quickly lost what remained of their political unity, and by 1999 constituted one of the most electorally fragmented population groups in South Africa. The paper examines the patterns of this fragmentation in historical context, and comments on the significance or otherwise of ethnicity in the voting of all ethnic groups in the ‘rainbow nation’ since the end of apartheid.

Governing American Cities: Interethnic Coalitions, Competition, and Conflict

Governing American Cities: Interethnic Coalitions, Competition, and Conflict

Governing American Cities: Inter-Ethnic Coalitions, Competitions, and Conflict

Governing American Cities: Inter-Ethnic Coalitions, Competitions, and Conflict

Governing American cities: interethnic coalitions, competition, and conflict

Governing American cities: interethnic coalitions, competition, and conflict

The Powers That Bind

Studies on coalition building have neglected the role of historical, cultural, and spatial relationships in shaping the development of interethnic coalitions, particularly between immigrant and native-born minority groups. Based on interviews, participant observation, and archival research on one public space coalition in Koreatown and West Adams, the author argues that (1) the intersection of use and exchange positions among organized segments of both communities provided the interest basis for coalition building, and (2) the competing claims of Koreans around their financial contributions and African-Americans around political and territorial advantages forced each side to negotiate and recognize the benefits of coalescing.

Prelude to conflict: communal interdependence in the Sanjak of Alexandretta 1920–1936

In the late 1930s, Kemalist Turkey exploited anxiety over the growth of fascism in Europe to coerce France into ceding the Sanjak (district) of Alexandretta,1 a tiny piece of territory it held under mandatory control in the northwestern corner of Syria. Various historians have dutifully chronicled the story of Ankara's irredentism and Paris' appeasement, detailing the sundry diplomatic ploys, subterfuges and deceptions each employed in an attempt to legitimize an illegitimate act.2 Virtually all commentators have vilified (correctly, I may add) the cession of the Sanjak as an unconscionable and an illegal deal struck between two governments who showed little concern for the integrity of international law or the wishes of the local residents. At the same time, though, these historians base their analyses of the Sanjak affair upon a subtle but powerful perception of the paramount role of ethnicity in Middle Eastern politics. For most, Alexandretta is a code word for Arab-Turk animosity. Because of its collage of ethnic, religious and linguistic communities, the 'inevitability'3 of conflict there is assumed without question. As a result, historians present the Franco-Turco-Syrian struggle of the late 1930s as a large-scale version of the domestic conflict understood to have plagued the Sanjak for decades. A thoughtful inquiry into the pre-1936 history of that region reveals the error of that assumption. High diplomacy comprises only half the history of Alexandretta during the 1920s and 1930s, the far less significant and explosive half. Inside the Sanjak, more than 200,000 people, representing at least 21 linguistic and religious communities, participated in a novel and successful experiment at communal compromise and co-operation. For 15 years, from 1921 to 1936, 'traditional rivals' like Turks and Armenians fashioned a thriving and workable relationship within an artificial administrative framework thrust upon them by foreign powers. The essential feature of this relationship, it will be argued, was the trade-off between the maintenance of traditional political power in exchange for across-the-board economic prosperity. Residents of the Sanjak created patterns of economic interdependence that simply would not function in an atmosphere of widespread ethnic hatred and mistrust. Years seemed to pass so uneventfully in this period that Arnold Toynbee could assert that 'the Sanjak had been happy in having scarcely any history.'4 During those years, of course, the Sanjak did have a history, a history marked by the evolutionary disintegration of the inter-ethnic coalition. But even then, the coalition did not fracture along ethnic lines but along economic divisions within ethnic groups. Prosperity fostered the growth of new classes of financially secure artisans and modern-educated youth dissatisifed with the apportionment of political power. At first, the established