Minority Politics Research Articles

Representative claims and expected gains. Minority council elections and intra-ethnic competition in Serbia

This article examines the first direct elections to minority councils in Serbia. It seeks to build hypotheses on the interplay between minority council elections and the overall patterns of intra-ethnic party competition in divided societies. Following an introduction to minority politics in Serbia, the authors analyse the campaign for the Bosniak and the Hungarian minority council. Evidence from field research suggests that minority council elections reflect the situation of intra-ethnic competition and provide an additional arena for ethnic outbidding for new ethnic parties.

The Color of Water: Observations of a Brown Buffalo on Water Law and Policy in Ten Stanzas

This article invokes Chicano Movement lawyer, Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, and his literary persona of the “Brown Buffalo” to bring the perspective of LatCrit Theory into exploring and understanding the rights, remedies, and policies associated with water resource management. Perhaps owning to water’s scarcity, humans have developed complex and sophisticated legal regimes surrounding the use, acquisition, and distribution of water as a resource. Accordingly, this article is meant to draw attention to some of the ways that law has directly contributed to an unequal and inequitable distribution of water problems; including access to domestic water supplies, maintenance of water and sewage infrastructure, contamination of drinking water, and safe levels of floodplain occupancy. Although such problems have been associated with developing countries and their subordinated racialized communities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, they are present as well among certain communities of color in the United States. Yet, outside of a very narrow range of exceptions — namely environmental justice and the water rights of political and cultural minorities such as American Indians or Hispanos in New Mexico — legal scholars or policy makers of the United States who think about, study, and write about race or water law rarely if ever address the racial intractability of these problems. The article argues that water organizations and legal institutions are too often color-blind in their legal and policy orientation. The article is organized in five parts; each introduced by stanza or stanzas of an original poem, El Grito de la Agua, I penned in preparation for my plenary remarks at the Fifteenth Annual LatCrit Symposium held in Denver, Colorado in October 2010. As such, it has been republished in 1 University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review 107 (2011). The article is not meant to be exhaustive, but merely suggestive of the many insidious ways that water law and policy creates, reinforces, and reproduces the Brown, Black, White, Red, and Yellow color lines that have become so salient a feature of social inequality in the modern world. It highlights, as well, the across-the-board neglect about the racial impact of water rights and administration by not only main stream policymakers and academics, but by progressives and the LatCrit project in particular. By invoking Acosta’s Brown Buffalo, I hope to begin a lasting conversation about water, race, and the role of water lawyers and policy makers in an ever thirsty world.

Editorial

Editorial James Carter As these words are written, Beijing, and much of Eastern China, is recovering from the "airpocalypse": several days in early January when air-quality indices soared to record levels, far beyond what the World Health Organization considers "hazardous" and beyond even what the scale is able to assess. Days earlier, protesters in Guangzhou had taken to the streets, objecting to the rewriting—apparently at the direction of provincial party censors—of the Southern Weekend's traditional New Year's editorial. And all the while, tensions between Japan and China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands increased steadily. There is no telling what the state of these three events will be when these words appear in print. However, it is likely that questions of public health, political reform and dissent, and Sino-Japanese relations will remain central. These three issues are among the most persistent in twentieth- (and now twenty-first-)century China, and so it is perhaps grasping low-hanging fruit to use these headlines to draw together four apparently quite disparate articles in this issue of Twentieth-Century China. Janet Y. Chen's article, "Will the Real Refugees Please Stand Up?" pulls together several of these threads, and more, showing how Faulkner's quotation—approaching cliché status—that the "past is never dead; it's not even past" is as applicable to China as to Yoknapatawpha County. In the waning years of the Civil War, migrants and refugees in Shanghai found themselves marginalized and struggling to survive on a scale remarkable even for that desperate era. Chen—who has written powerfully on poverty in twentieth-century China in her book Guilty of Indigence—shows how violently people contested over the right to called "refugees," and how the living were forced to share homes with the recently deceased. As books like Tom Miller's China's Urban Billion vividly document the social stresses in today's Chinese cities, Chen evokes powerfully the stresses of several generations ago. Two of the articles in this issue address the role of ideology in the new Communist state, though in quite different ways. Resonating with the Southern Weekend protests of early January, Juan Wang's "The Sly Accomodationist" explores the career of Tang Dalang, a writer and journalist who accommodated the Communist regime in the 1940s and 1950s as the editor of the tabloid Yibao. Tang's dilemmas and decisions, as he balanced journalism, political pressures, censorship, and his own livelihood would ring true, I think, with many journalists working today in the PRC as they seek to understand and navigate the vague and shifting line between what is permitted and what is not. [End Page 97] Ideology and political pressure in a much different realm is the focus of Byungil Ahn's article, "Reinventing Scientific Medicine for the Socialist Republic." Ahn examines the introduction and implementation of the "Lamaze" method of childbirth in China, in the 1950s. This method (known as the "psycho-prophylactic method of delivery" in the Soviet Union, where it was developed) was promoted as "Socialist medicine," in contrast to the "Western," bourgeois methods of childbirth that were often employed in hospitals prior to 1949. Ahn documents the bureaucratic and ideological steps involved in implementing these methods, giving insight not only into debates over public health at the time, but also into the ways the state and party established control over areas of public life during this era. The persistent and worsening environmental problems exemplified by the "airpocalypse" of January 2013 are often a catalyst, or at least a rallying point, for political action, and the state increasingly finds that environmental and political concerns are closely linked. This phenomenon is familiar to the several authors of this issue's final article, "China's New Sorrow." James Cook, Yesenia Gallardo, Derek Huls, and Marc Janke examine water policies in Qinghai province, analyzing not only the effectiveness and environmental implications of the policies themselves, but the impact of these policies on politics, particularly minority politics in a region where Tibetan and Salar peoples had lived and worked for many centuries. These groups are now confronting simultaneously the expanding and intensifying Chinese state as well as the environmental impacts of economic...

National Reunification beyond Borders: Diaspora and Minority Politics in Hungary since 2010

National Reunification beyond Borders: Diaspora and Minority Politics in Hungary since 2010

Rethinking “Jews” and “Arabs” through Palestine: Transcolonial perspectives on Maghrebi literature

ABSTRACT In this essay I investigate an unexplored transcolonial relation: that tying North African writers to Palestine. Examining three sets of texts from the 1950s to the mid-1980s, I argue that, in different ways, Albert Memmi, Edmond El Maleh, Abdelkebir Khatibi, and Jacques Hassoun reconsidered the legacies of French colonial divide-and-rule tactics in the Maghreb—in particular those opposing Jews and Arabs—through the lens of Palestine. Whereas in the 1950s Memmi famously analyzed the colonial hierarchies of his native Tunisia, he later endorsed the opposition between Jews and Arabs, giving credence to these categories and proclaiming the impossibility of the “Arab Jew.” To the contrary, the Moroccan Jewish writer El Maleh faulted French minority politics, Zionist discourse, and Israeli colonialism with the destruction of Muslim-Jewish relations in the Maghreb and beyond, disidentifying with Israel and allying with Palestine in an attempt to restore the link between Jews and Arabs. Finally, Khatibi, a Muslim Moroccan, and Hassoun, a Jewish Egyptian, sought to deconstruct this opposition through philosophical exchanges on the Abrahamic. These diverse examples invite us to reconsider national and postcolonial perspectives on Maghrebi literature in light of transnational relations connecting the Maghreb to Palestine.

The difficulties in the recognition of small differences: The role of language politics with regard to minority policy making in the Serbia of the early 2000’s

In the beginning of the new millennium, Serbian minority politics accomplished institutional results that are significant even on an international scale. By this, we mean primarily the forming of personal autonomy, the system of the national so-called councils. This attracted the attention of both academics and policy makers who face similar challenges. Ethnical conditions and recent historical events of the West-Balkan have created complicated minority-political situations. These involve usual inequity issues but also new problems, belonging to the field between minority research and socio-linguistics. These problems are mostly connected to cultural self-expression and identity. Our work assesses the politico-historic and socio-linguistic origins of this situation and its minority and language-political aspects. After this, we elaborate on the political solution options of the problems within the present legal framework. Our goal is to start an interdisciplinary discourse of sociolinguistics and minority research, where our starting point is the situation emerging from the Montenegrins’ becoming minority.

Immigrant politics: race and representation in western Europe

Do ethnic minority politicians play a meaningful role in Western Europe? How do European publics feel about non white politicians? How are political parties reaching out to ethnic minority communities, and how do those communities feel about their political influence? Addressing these increasingly critical questions, the authors of Immigrant Politics explore the realities, possibilities, and problems of ethnic minority and migrant political participation in Western Europe. Their combination of thematic chapters and country studies provides a thorough overview of the politics of race and representation in the region.

From Liberty to Equality: The Transformation of the Establishment Clause

In this Article, Professor Feldman argues that in the last fifty years, the Supreme Court has transformed the rationale of the Establishment Clause from protecting the liberty of conscience of religious dissenters to guaranteeing the political equality of religious minorities. When it invented the modern Establishment Clause in 1947, the Court anachronistically emphasized avoidance of religious violence, but correctly identified protection of religious liberty as the central goal of the Clause. Since then, the Court gradually developed a new justification for the separation of church and state: entanglement would cause religious minorities to feel like political outsiders, and thus create political inequality. Having traced the transformation from a liberty rationale to an equality rationale through the cases, Professor Feldman evaluates the consequences by reexamining the central modern Establishment Clause question: what is so special about religion? He argues that none of the possible answers suffices to explain why the Establishment Clause should be read to protect religious minorities' political equality. Religious minorities are not uniquely vulnerable to political inequality compared to racial, linguistic, or political minorities. The Article concludes by arguing that the political-equality approach to the Clause has distorted Establishment Clause jurisprudence. In the sphere of public manifestations of religion, it has produced tenuous distinctions between impermissible state action and permissible collective private action. In the sphere of government support of religious institutions, the political-equality approach, which set out to explain why the Constitution requires separation of church and state, could eliminate separation altogether by permitting government funding of religious institutions via formally equal, general allocations of funds.

A state in flux: Pakistan in the context of national and regional change

Over the past 10 years, Pakistan has passed through some of the most turbulent and difficult times in its history. The war in Afghanistan post 9/11 has put Pakistan on the front line of the war on terrorism and provoked violent Islamic militancy within Pakistan and some grave policy choices for Pakistan itself. Rivenin addition by the natural disasters of earthquakes and floods and hobbled by political instability, economic woes, and deep social, religious and ethnic divisions, Pakistan has reached a point of great flux with important national and regional changes imminent. This collection of six essays focus on critical elements of this flux – political Islam, militancy and religious minorities, political patronage and democracy, the economic impacts of the floods and Pakistan's relations with the US and its regional foreign policy – to identify key trends which will shape Pakistan's future.

Congressional Government Rebooted: Randomized Committee Assignments & Legislative Capacity

Congress’s stature and relative role in governance are in the midst of a long-term decline. To mitigate this trend, this article proposes a novel change to the branch’s institutional design: replacing the current committee assignment system with the random assignment of members to committees. I argue that this reform would greatly enhance Congress’s internal capacity, altering the roles that party organizations, expert or deliberative committees, interest groups, and political minorities play in the policymaking process. Random committee assignment could also impact Congress-Court dynamics, encouraging greater use of legislative history in statutory interpretation and promoting a more deferential judicial posture in assessing the constitutionality of statutes. Finally, random assignment could facilitate greater congressional involvement in administration, particularly concerning committee oversight of executive agencies and use of the post-Chadha legislative veto.

Discordia, reforma constitucional y Excepción de Inconstitucionalidad

La historia constitucional de Colombia se caracterizó por las constituciones de partido, en las cuales el vencedor imponía su propia ley al vencido. La Constitución de 1886 no fue la excepción a esta regla; el Partido Nacionalista, fundado por Núñez, discutió y aprobó una Constitución que dio las condiciones necesarias para la opresión y exclusión de la minoría política, conformada por los conservadores históricos y los liberales. Esto produjo dos cosas, la discordia con dos guerras, el cierre de medios de comunicación y el destierro de líderes políticos, y la unión de los liberales y conservadores históricos en un solo partido, la Unión Republicana, que tuvo como objetivo combatir la discordia producida por la Constitución de 1886 y por gobiernos como el de Miguel Antonio Caro y Rafael Reyes; para ello promovieron la reforma constitucional de 1910 y la consagración de la Excepción de Inconstitucionalidad.

Lost In Transition: Ethnographies of the Everyday Life After Communism (review)

Yuson Jung Wayne State University Kristen Ghodsee, Lost In Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life After Communism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. 232 pp. Lost in Transition by Kristen Ghodsee is not a conventional ethnography which analyzes daily practices around a particular theoreticallyinformed framework leading to larger theoretical debates. Yet, it is written with great sensibilities that captivate readers with intimate narratives of ordinary people who lived through communism and experienced often confusing realities of its aftermath. As Ghodsee mentions, this book is written for students and non-specialists as an introduction to the joys and sufferings of ordinary people who, from our perspective in West, were on losing side of Cold (xiv). The author successfully achieves her objective with highly accessible prose and engaging stories which she deftly blends together with her own experiences as a scholar, participant, and observer of this historical transformation. The volume consists of 15 short stories, four of which are marked as fiction, as well as an introduction and afterword. These stories are based on Ghodsee's fieldnotes, journal entries, and her memories of events that occurred between 1989 and 2009 in Eastern Europe, primarily in Bulgaria where she has conducted over 13 years of long-term research on issues of gender, ethnicity, and Muslim minority politics. The engaging opening chapter interweaves Ghodsee's own intellectual biography with motivations and goals of book. The subsequent stories are organized so that they speak for themselves rather than follow a particular narrative sequence. At same time, chapters follow a 20-year chronology, which allows readers to have a glimpse of lived experiences of this turbulent period. In afterword, Ghodsee offers her own interpretation of these stories and discusses some final thoughts on post-communist transition. Ghodsee calls her stories ethnographic snapshots (xiii), which read as historical episodes that capture various moments of transition from communism with wonderful anthropological insights. Many targeted readers will be drawn to book by introductory chapter where Cold War is contextualized with Ghodsee's own intimate experience as an American student in 1970s and 1980s who worried about nuclear threats and other fears arising from confrontations between United States and Soviet Union. She shares how such experiences resulted in her dropping out from college and traveling across Europe and Middle East. It was during her travel in Europe that she came to witness end of Cold War as Berlin Wall crumbled in 1989. Chapter one is based on one of her traveling experiences during this period when Ghodsee returned to Europe to witness lives behind Iron Curtain before its anticipated changes. The story captures her own stereotypes of young Eastern European (Serbian) men with whom she ended up sharing train compartment transiting from Istanbul to Belgrade. When she discovered that her train companions hid something from customs officers, she thought they were drugs and panicked. It turned out that they were smuggling something, but it was Heinz ketchup in bulk quantity, which couldn't be obtained in Belgrade. The ketchup was important for restaurant business that one of young men's father ran. The readers are leftwith a strong impression of first encounter between ordinary Westerner and Eastener immediately after fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe. The next chapter fast-forwards to 1998, almost a decade later, when Ghodsee returns to Bulgaria as a graduate student. She introduces life histories of two Bulgarian men who are children of former communist elites and who were young adults at time when democratic changes occurred. …

Siu Keung Cheung, Joseph Tse-Hei lee, and Lida V. Nedilsky, Marginalization in China: Recasting Minority Politics

Siu Keung Cheung, Joseph Tse-Hei lee, and Lida V. Nedilsky, Marginalization in China: Recasting Minority Politics

European integration and minority politics: ethnic parties at the EP elections

This article examines the behaviour of ethnic parties and their electorates in four new EU member states at the 2009 European Parliament (EP) elections. Building on earlier arguments from within the literature on Europeanisation, the propositions of this article are that the ethnic minority parties are more EU-enthusiastic than the mainstream political parties; that they treat the EP elections both as a more important arena of political contestation than do the mainstream political parties and as equally important to national elections; and that they will use the elections as an opportunity to further their minority-specific agendas. Using the EuroManifesto and the Voter Studies of the 2009 European Elections Study this article tests these propositions and finds support for the first two, but only limited support for the third one.

Limits of Electoral Equality and Political Representation

Constitutional limits to the discretion of the legislature in forming the electoral system — Political equality — Equal suffrage — Equal opportunities for political parties — Free expression of popular will — Functionality of the parliament — Concrete normative standards for assessing the constitutionality of an electoral system — Conception of parliamentary democracy emphasising representation of political minorities and protection from ‘tyranny of the majority’

Transforming Korea into a multicultural society: reception of multiculturalism discourse and its discursive disposition in Korea

Since 2005, multicultural-based words such as multicultural society, multicultural family, and multicultural education have grown explosively in Korean society. Due to this social trend, adoption of the term multiculturalism has become a trend within the government and press to explain current social changes in Korea. Nevertheless, there have been few efforts to tackle multiculturalism as a crucial political project or a considerable academic theme of discussion. Thus, this study aims to examine how multiculturalism discourse in Korea has been received and draws its discursive disposition. It argues how the media, especially the press, incorporate other crucial issues such as ‘diversity’, ‘human rights’, and ‘minority politics’ in terms of multiculturalism. To analyse, a total of 275 journal articles were selected and scrutinised. This study contextualises Korean multiculturalism and suggests a meta-picture of the discursive economy of multiculturalism in Korea.

Forgetting Lutheranism: Historians and the Early Reformation in Poland (1517–1548)

This article reconstructs and explores the problematic historiography of the early Reformation in the lands of the Polish Crown, a significant locus of Lutheranism in the reign of King Zygmunt I Jagiellon (1506–1548). The eighteenth, nineteenth, and early-to mid twentieth centuries produced a sizeable literature on early Lutheranism in Poland, fuelled by Polish-German conflict, minority politics, and Stalinist state sponsorship. Since the 1960s, however, scholarship in Polish and German has had very little to say about Lutheranism in the lands of the Polish Crown before 1548. It is argued that the discrediting of Ostforschung after World War Two, coupled with the rise of a new Polish nationalist reading of the Reformation from the 1960s (which rejected Lutheranism as German, and un-Polish), have led to a deliberate twentieth-century “forgetting” of the Polish kingdom’s Lutheran past, which impoverishes our understandings of the European Reformations.

SRTM 3" comparison with local information: Two examples at national level in Peru

The access to the high resolution digital terrain models (DEM) generated from the data collected by the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) of NASA is freely available to the public. Consequently it has become a source of topographic information which is of great value to scientists involved in geophysical or geodetic analysis. Despite the efforts of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), to validate and complement the information contained in these DEMs (currently offered as version 4.1), they still need to be checked for their accuracy in certain regions of the planet. In this paper, the vertical accuracy of the SRTM 3" version 4.1 DEM was analyzed in several areas of Peru using two sets of control points: the height of the district capitals (the minor politics units) and the heights of the weather and hydrological stations from the National Meteorology and Hydrology Service (SENAMHI) of Peru. The comparison shows that the height differences are independent of the altitude, latitude and longitude of the evaluated points. They are rather related to the aspect of the terrain and to the way the SRTM data were acquired. It shows that the mean square of the height differences at national level was ±20 m for district capitals and ±25 m for the SENAMHI stations. This is slightly larger than the overall accuracy of the SRTM ±16 m.

Michele E.CommercioRussian Minority Politics in Post‐Soviet Latvia and Kyrgyzstan: The Transformative Power of Informal NetworksPhiladelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010, 248 pp. £39.00 hbk.

Michele E.CommercioRussian Minority Politics in Post‐Soviet Latvia and Kyrgyzstan: The Transformative Power of Informal NetworksPhiladelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010, 248 pp. £39.00 hbk.

Diversifying State Supreme Courts

Why do some states diversify their supreme courts sooner than others? Using original data on the first black and female state supreme court justices, I contend that political and institutional pressures influence when states diversify their high courts. The results suggest that selection systems, institutions affecting turnover, and the appointment of political minorities to the United States Supreme Court are associated with states seating their first black and female justices. The findings have implications for our understanding of the political and institutional circumstances that promote judicial diversity.