Minority Politics Research Articles

National minorities political rights in the context of decentralization of power in the Eastern European countries

The question of political minorities rights is always crucial for European countries because of mutual history and border changes. Almost each of these countries are characterized by small groups of ethnic minorities who are living in boarding areas. Some representatives of these ethnic groups have separatistic points of view during the years. In some European countries situation becomes even more complicated because of assimilation policy which was provided by the former Soviet Union.
 Decentralization is transferring of authorities to the local levels what is other serious accelerator of the questions of political minorities rights. The question of our research work is if the impact of decentralization process matches political minorities rights in Eastern Europe? In the present study we analyze the results of administrative and territorial reforms in Poland, the Czech Republic , Slovakia and we also took into consideration the impact of ethnic factor within new administrative and territorial division.
 In conclusions author emphasizes that in Eastern Europe new division process mostly happened without taking into account historical areas where small groups of political minorities lived. Author also draws our attention to the possible separatism, which can be the reason of articulation of national minorities will, who live near the borders to other countries as to unite in some areas.
 Keywords: Decentralization of authority, administrative-territorial reform, post-socialist transformation, minorities, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia

Torture and the limits of democratic institutions

What are the limits of democracy’s positive influence on human rights? In this article, we argue that contested elections and powerful courts provide leaders with different incentives with regard to hiding torture. Because government torture is generally targeted at individuals that voters find threatening, institutions that reflect public opinion – like electoral contestation – are associated with higher levels of government abuse that leave scars on the victim’s body. Other institutions – like powerful courts – protect the rights of political minorities. Leaders in countries with powerful courts prefer plausible deniability of rights violations and consequently employ higher levels of clean torture, which leaves no scars. We test our hypotheses using data from the Ill-Treatment and Torture (ITT) Data Collection Project that distinguish between Amnesty International (AI) allegations of scarring and clean torture. We employ an undercount negative binomial that accounts for AI’s (in)ability to obtain information about torture. The model assumes that some incidents of torture go unreported and allows the extent of underreporting to vary across countries/years. Estimates from the model yield considerable statistical and substantive support for our hypotheses.

Governing multicultural Brussels: paradoxes of a multi-level, multi-cultural, multi-national urban anomaly

ABSTRACTUpdating our earlier work on Brussels as the paradigm of a multi-level, multi-cultural, multi-national city, and in the context of Brussels’s recent troubled emergence as the epicentre of violent conflict between radical political Islam and the West, this paper sets out the paradoxical intersection of national (i.e. Flemish and Francophone), non-national and ethnic minority politics in a city placed as a multi-cultural and multi-national ‘urban anomaly’ at the heart of linguistic struggle of the two dominant Belgian communities. Brussels is one of the three Regions of the Belgian federal model alongside Flanders and Wallonia. It is also an extraordinarily diverse and cosmopolitan city, in which a mixed language Belgian population lives alongside very high numbers of resident non-nationals, including European elites, other European immigrant workers, and immigrants from Africa and Asia. After laying out the complex distribution of power and competences within the Belgian federal structure, we explore whether these structures have worked over the years to include or exclude disadvantaged ethnic groups. To better understand these processes, we introduce our view of the multi-level governance perspective.

Micropolitical entanglements: Positioning and matter

How could one harness a 'micropolitical/minor ethics'? I take this question as an invitation to reflect on the ways micropolitics intersect with ethnographic endeavours inflated by an activist ethos. What I want to put into focus here is the nexus between Deleuzian-Guattarian metaphysic, ethnographic praxis and grass-root politics--a nexus that, I believe, was a primary concern for the two French thinkers and it definitely is as such in my current research. I will introduce my discussion by quoting two short passages from Deleuze and Guattari. The first reads: 'Molecular escapes and movements would be nothing if they did not return to the molar organizations to reshuffle their segments, their binary distributions of sexes, classes, and parties' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 219). The second, longer quote comes actually from Guattari only and it can be found in that powerful collection of essays called 'Soft Subversions'. In there we can read: I believe that there is a collective, unformed search, from above and below, for another kind of politics. This is what I call 'micropolitics,' and 'molecular revolution.' It begins with very immediate, daily, individual preoccupations, yet remains connected to what happens at the social level, and even, why not, at the cosmic level. (Guattari, 2009: 138) In these quotes, Deleuze and Guattari are inviting us to move from the molecular to the molar, and back again. (1) It is in this journey that I see the activation of a 'minor' politics. This is because to perform this journey means to re-shuffle things constantly, to link, de-link and re-link them. Such an oeuvre does not provide a once-and-for-all recipe for political action, but it invites by default, by the immanent act of doing and (re)doing things, to a minor politics characterised by a capacity to become, to articulate difference and to open new articulations that are not to be subsumed by 'a redundant majority' (Conley, 2010: 167). What really interests me is how we--as academics--can actively perform this journey from the molecular to the molar. Even more precisely, how can we ethically perform this kind of journey and the related minor politics? One needs, first of all, to understand what kind of ethics we are confronting. Since I am constrained by space, and since much has already been written on this subject, I will define it clearly from the very beginning: without diminishing the importance of fundamental and universal rights, it is not in the light of these rights that we are moved ethically, but in the contextually based construction (and deconstruction) of these rights. Ethics is, in other words, always contextual--part of a 'context' understood as matter of processual unfoldings (Thrift, 2004), embodiment (Bignall, 2010), post-human entanglements (Braidotti, 2013) and eventful possibilities (Dewsbury, 2000). Although it is still related to certain standard norms--as any molecular thing is related to a molar one--the kind of ethics that fuels the work of Deleuze and Guattari is there first and foremost to challenge those norms starting from the 'micropolitics of the social field', the very specific social field in which we find ourselves plugged-in. The ethics sketched in the above lines is characterised by two interlinked facets. First, there is the performative facet of ethics: ethical actions and blueprint to actions are always contextual, because they are understood as material and immaterial practices arising from the performed field rather than deriving from a universalising norm. Second, there is the normative facet, which states that ethics should be always attuned to a minor form of politics against the normalising forces that tend to control and reduce the potential of contextual becoming. On the basis of these two facets, a micropolitical/minor ethics is a matter of field performances and production of knowledge that are relevant to the context in question. …

Stavroula Pipyrou, <em>The grecanici of southern Italy: Governance, violence, and minority politics</em>, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016, pp. 246

Recensione di Stavroula Pipyrou, The grecanici of southern Italy: Governance, violence, and minority politics, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016, pp. 246.

Between Christian and multicultural democracy: religious legacies and minority politics

The article presents a comparative analysis of the religious underpinnings of 19 liberal democracies in the West and their relevance for contemporary minority politics. The democratic relevance of religion is conceptualised as stemming from actors (churches, religious parties) and from historical and structural factors such as confessional patterns, relationships between state and church and degrees of secularisation in 19 democracies with a Christian background. The article’s historical mapping demonstrates that democratic development has occurred in distinct patterns rooted in the Catholic‒Protestant divide. It then demonstrates that there are distinct effects of this divide on minority politics. It is hypothesised that in line with the confessional patterning of democratisation, Catholic countries and actors seem to be more resistant to the pressures arising from religious pluralisation than Protestant ones and that, even after 9/11, there is no cross-national or cross-confessional convergence in these responses.

Minority politics in the Mediterranean world

On 29 July 2011, King Mohamed VI of Morocco promulgated into effect a new constitution. Responding to weeks of intense country-wide protests for social justice, dignity, and inclusivity, and decade...

A promoção dos direitos humanos em uma instituição de ensino superior: relato de experiência do Projeto Diversidade

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1807-0221.2017v14n25p124Esse texto apresenta, assim como avalia as intervenções e o legado do Projeto Diversidade que foi desenvolvido pela Secretaria de Direitos Humanos do Diretório Central dos Estudantes de uma Instituição de Ensino Superior localizada no município de Novo Hamburgo-RS. Tendo como eixo metodológico as teorizações advindas dos Estudos Culturais, esse projeto objetivou representar e acolher identidades étnico-raciais, de gênero e de orientação sexual com fins a promoção dos direitos humanos e da cidadania na e pela Instituição. Para tanto, o Projeto Diversidade desenvolveu atividades como forma de representação dessas minorias políticas. Enquanto proposta política e social; o Projeto Diversidade oportunizou espaços privilegiados de discussão política sobre racismo, machismo e homofobia, fomentando a positivação de identidades étnicas e de gênero, enquanto proposta educativa; ofereceu subsídios teóricos e práticos para que licenciandos/as pudessem promover práticas pedagógicas com fins à promoção da igualdade social, da cidadania e dos direitos humanos em outras instituições de ensino.

Minor Literature, Politics, and Language in Postwar Japan: A Case of Goto Meisei

Minor Literature, Politics, and Language in Postwar Japan: A Case of Goto Meisei

Modern singing sons of the Pharaohs

In 2009, the U.S. Library of Congress officially launched the Ragheb Moftah Collection, an online exhibit that presented the largest music archive of Coptic liturgical recordings and music transcriptions outside of Egypt. Moftah, an amateur Egyptian collector, had commissioned an English composer, Ernest Newlandsmith, to notate and record the entire Orthodox hymnody. They both believed that, as the last connection to a Pharaonic and pre-Islamic past, the ancient melodies lay unchanged, “buried under a debris of Arabic and other ornamentation.” Drawing on Wendy Cheng’s notion of strategic orientalism (2013) and Timothy Mitchell’s staging modernity (2000), I explore contemporary discursive politics of sound archives in the Coptic community. Specifically, I investigate the role of Coptic music archives in articulations of community legitimacy, indigeneity, and agency as a religious and political minority in a Muslim majority nation. How have today’s cantors and activists rendered western transcriptions as sound objects which to negotiate authenticity as Egypt’s last remaining “modern sons of the pharaohs,” even without being able to read them? As the principal curator of the site, I explore how Western scholarly encounters have not only entangled Coptic music discourses in a western-centered teleology of modernity and progress, but in emulating the West, also infused them with orientalist critiques that equated heterophony and embellishments to “Arab debris” that marked signs of backwardness.

Postliberalism: The New Centre Ground of British Politics

AbstractBrexit and support for anti‐establishment insurgencies suggest that British politics is moving away from the old left–right opposition towards a new divide between the defenders and detractors of progressive liberalism. As this article suggests, progressive liberalism differs significantly from both classical and new liberalism. It fuses free‐market economics with social egalitarianism and identity politics. Both the hard left and the radical right reject this combination and want to undo a number of liberal achievements.British politics is also moving in a postliberal direction. In the economy, postliberalism signals a shift from rampant market capitalism to economic justice and reciprocity. In society, it signals a shift from individualism and egalitarianism to social solidarity and fraternal relations. And politically, it signals a shift from the minority politics of vested interests and balkanised group identity to a majority politics based on a balance of interests, shared identity and the embedding of state and market in the intermediary institutions of civil society. This article argues that postliberalism is redefining Britain's political centre ground in an age where neither progressive liberalism nor reactionary anti‐liberalism commands majority support. First, it charts the ascendancy of progressive liberalism over the past quarter‐century. Second, it contrasts anti‐liberal reactions with postliberal alternatives, before exploring why earlier iterations of postliberalism failed to gain traction with the political mainstream. Third, it provides a discussion and critique of Theresa May's postliberal conservatism, notably the tension between free‐market globalisation and free trade, on the one hand, and the support for national industry and the indigenous working class, on the other.

The Importance of Being Patriotic: Enregistered Connections in Croatian Minority Activism

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a school in a village in Vojvodina, Serbia, where teaching in Croatian has been introduced, this article analyses relationships maintained between Croatian minority activists, the teaching staff at the school, and representatives from Croatian state institutions who visited. This minority context is especially sensitive as, following the wars that accompanied the break-up of the Socialist Yugoslav state into primarily nationally defined states, Serbo-Croatian split into two mutually intelligible standards, Serbian and Croatian. The article examines the contexts of such visits, with a focus on what was at stake in the encounters and how different participants in minority politics manage various connections ( veze) with Croatian state institutions. In particular, it describes how a hegemonic register consisting of tropes, or ideologemes, relating to domoljublje (patriotism) and caring for/preserving Croatian national identity featured in these interactions. This article makes the ethnographic argument that some activists primarily used this patriotic register non-referentially, its use indexing the pursuit of connections with Croatian state institutions, whilst other activists used the patriotic register referentially. Nevertheless, it is argued that when disputes occurred, “pro-national” activists used the enregistered tropes referentially, in so doing disrupting the networks of activists who used them in a primarily non-referential sense. Finally, the consequences and wider implications of this are explored.

Why So Few Women and Minorities in Local Politics?: Incumbency and Affinity Voting in Low Information Elections

Previous research has examined the effects of incumbency or affinity voting on the political representation of women and minorities. No study has considered the interaction of these two factors, even though there are good reasons to suspect that both may play a key role in voter choice. This study examines the joint effects of incumbency and gender and racial affinity voting in non-partisan and generally low information ward elections in the City of Toronto. Results reveal the absence of gender affinity effects, regardless of the presence of an incumbent, but that racial affinity is a factor in wards without incumbents.

Atmospheric memories: Affect and minor politics at the ten-year anniversary of the London bombings

This paper addresses how the ten-year anniversary of the London bombings was made present through political affects and atmospheres on 7 July 2015. Although the anniversary of a terrorist event forms an opportune moment for invoking the nation as united in feeling, we are interested in how people attune to political atmospheres of memory and trauma in multiple ways, which do not always cohere to sovereign narratives about unity and certainty. By focusing on these events through an attentiveness to the atmospheric and affective, we examine how these events were recalled, memorialised, felt and sensed in the small-scale ceremonies taking place across London on that morning, by way of a multi-authored sensory auto-ethnography. As such, we are led towards various moments of encounter, which involve ‘minor gestures’ (Manning, 2016), and imply ways of responding to acts of terror that rub against the unifying forces of the state. In contrast to the ‘rolling maelstroms of affect’ (Thrift 2004: 57) pursued by the state and media following a terrorist attack, this project is attentive to multiple, uncertain and ambivalent encounters. These matter because they suggest other ways of being political and of responding to both terrorist and state-led violence.

Introduction to “Cartographic Anxieties”

Author(s): Bille, Franck | Abstract: While the term “cartographic anxieties” is metaphorically loaded, it has remained under-theorized and is used to refer to very different situations. A state can experience anxiety when it is subject to the “cartographic aggression” (de Blij 2012) of another. Anxiety can also be found in the gap between state representations and the imaginaries held by the citizens of that state, or between a dominant majority and an ethnic, religious, or political minority (Cons 2016). Further, it can have different temporal resonances in that the gap can index the nostalgic mourning for past territorial grandeur (Callahan 2010; Cartier 2013), evoke a programmatic future (Fortna 2002), or offer poetic and corporealized visions of the nation-state (Ramaswamy 2010). The five articles in this special issue explore various political and cultural reverberations of cartography, as well as the complex set of discursive practices in which it is embedded. The discussion framing these papers began as a panel at the 2016 American Association of Geographers’ annual meeting, which included four of the authors featured here (Akin, Bille, Roszko, and Saxer). The contributions focus on China and its neighbors from the perspective of different disciplines: anthropology (Bille, Roszko, Saxer), history (Akin), and history of art (Tsultemin). In addition to bringing a cohesive and coherent focus to the special issue, this geographic convergence is timely given China’s recent economic and political trajectory. In tracing and analyzing the cartographic tremors of a geopolitical formation in flux, the different articles offer an outline of the mechanics of “cartographic anxiety” and together contribute to a better understanding of the affective power of mapping.

The Legacy of St. George Tucker: College Professors in Virginia Confront Slavery and the Rights of States, 1771-1897 by Chad Vanderford

Reviewed by: The Legacy of St. George Tucker: College Professors in Virginia Confront Slavery and the Rights of States, 1771-1897 by Chad Vanderford Jennifer Oast The Legacy of St. George Tucker: College Professors in Virginia Confront Slavery and the Rights of States, 1771-1897. By Chad Vanderford. ( Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2016. Pp. x, 262. $49.95, ISBN 978-1-62190-216-4.) Chad Vanderford has written an intellectual history of how white southern scholars viewed the Constitution, particularly regarding slavery and states' rights, in The Legacy of St. George Tucker: College Professors in Virginia Confront Slavery and the Rights of States, 1771-1897. Vanderford analyzes how professors in Virginia—in particular, three generations of the Tucker family—addressed those contentious topics. [End Page 404] St. George Tucker, his son, Henry Tucker, and his grandson, John Randolph Tucker, are the central figures, although the writings of other contemporary intellectuals receive attention, too, such as Thomas Jefferson, Henry Ruffner, and George Frederick Holmes. Two chapters are devoted to each generation of Tuckers and their contemporaries: the first chapter examines their views on slavery; the second focuses on their opinions on states' rights. Throughout, Vanderford makes the tenuous claim that southern arguments for the necessity of slavery and the rights of states were based on intellectual issues related to natural right, not motivated by racism or the economic benefits of slavery. Vanderford draws a distinction between modern natural right and classic natural right. Modern natural right is the idea expressed at the founding of the United States that the consent of the governed is necessary to legitimate government and that all men are equal. In contrast, classic natural right is the theory that the wise should rule; it is drawn from ancient philosophers like Aristotle, who believed that men were inherently unequal. Vanderford asserts that St. George Tucker, in his role as a professor and a writer, was a strong defender of the concept of modern natural right. How did St. George Tucker's championing of modern natural right relate to slavery? According to Vanderford, while Tucker did argue that Virginians should free their slaves, he and his like-minded contemporaries justified slavery because they feared retribution from manumitted slaves. One of Vanderford's most problematic arguments is his assertion that Tucker, Jefferson, and others were not hypocritical for continuing to be slaveholders because they had a legitimate right to self-preservation that would be threatened if they were to free their slaves. He argues that historians have underestimated the inherent dangers of freedpeople to their former masters: "it may well be contemporary historians, not men like Jefferson and Tucker, who have failed to give the slaves of this period their due" (p. 22). Generally, Vanderford takes a dismissive tone toward modern historians and their "obsession with racism" (p. 12). Perhaps Tucker, Jefferson, and their intellectual heirs did try to justify slavery as a necessary evil by claiming the right of self-preservation, but Vanderford's presentation of this view as legitimate is puzzling. Vanderford also discusses how St. George Tucker's legacy was betrayed when southern intellectuals began to argue that slavery was a positive good instead of just a necessary evil, which reflected a new reliance on classic natural right. Vanderford is stronger in his chapters on the Tuckers' views on states' rights. St. George Tucker argued that individual states had rights analogous to the rights of individuals. Because under modern natural right individuals can leave the social compact, the states also had the right to secede from the United States under the Constitution. In contrast, Vanderford argues that those who opposed secession had reverted to classic natural right in insisting that the states remain subservient to a "wise" federal government. Vanderford's sympathies lie with the Tuckers; regarding the present he argues "the rights of states should [End Page 405] continue to exist as a means to defend the rights of political minorities" (p. 137). In brief, Vanderford's arguments are thought provoking but not entirely convincing. This book would make for some spirited conversation in a graduate seminar. Jennifer Oast Bloomsburg University Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

National activism and symbolic space: The struggle for Riga’s cathedral church in 1931

ABSTRACTDuring the period of democratic rule 1918–1934, the newly formed Republic of Latvia adopted policies toward the state’s ethnic minority populations that have been lauded then and now as progressive and democratic. The adoption of such policies created a climate in which ethnic minority politicians and publicists could advocate for inclusive stances toward national belonging in the new republic. The economic distress of the early 1930s and ensuing political turmoil served to undermine such advances, however, leading to a deterioration in relations, of which the struggle for control of Riga’s cathedral church was emblematic. The conflict over Riga’s largest church showed both the potential and the limitations of civic nationalism in interwar Latvia.

Translation and the limits of minority discourse in the Philippines

For many decades now, minority discourse in the Philippines has been trapped in a nativistic framework that essentializes the country’s linguistic and cultural diversity, canonizing one language, Tagalog, and euphemizing it as Filipino. This then has been institutionally imposed as the official medium for postcolonial resistance, routinely invoked in a binary opposition against a colonially endowed English—a dualism that obfuscates the neglect of all the other local languages, effectively minoritizing them as well as their corresponding oratures and literatures. While the ongoing overhaul of national education—that entails its restructuring into the Kindergarten to 12 System and the adoption of mother-tongue instruction in the first few years of primary school—does promise a rectification, as envisioned (and thus far implemented) this reform is tokenist at best, and will in fact pursue the same bilingual policy that has seen the privileging and intellectualization of Tagalog and English across the past half-century. Rethinking the relevant Deleuzian concept, this paper argues that it is by translating and therefore pluralizing texts of the country’s de jure national myths—the founding father Jose Rizal’s anarchist novels, required to be read by all Filipino students—that a new kind historically grounded, non-defeatist, and complex “minority politics” can emerge.

National Minorities in an Era of Externalization

This article investigates how two processes of externalization—deeper integration into European institutions, and the extension of citizenship and voting rights offered by neighboring kin-states—impact national minority politics using the critical case of the ethnic Hungarian political community in Romania. It finds that external citizenship and voting rights may help strengthen ethnic political identity, but also reorients resources away from minority political projects toward the kin-state and encourages intra-minority stratification. Access to European political spaces offers additional arenas through which minority political actors can make claims and gain allies, but is of limited use as a mobilizational resource.

Hungarian Minority Politics in Post-Socialist Romania: Interests, Strategies, and Discourses

AbstractThis paper analyses the integration strategies formulated by the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania and the Hungarian political elite in the post-communist period. It argues that the internal debates of the political community are formulated in a field where other actors (the Hungarian and the Romanian state, political parties, European institutions, etc.) carry out their activities, which deeply influences both the chosen strategies and the needed resources for their implementation. Moreover, it questions the monolithic organization of the minority organization, showing that DAHR as the representative of the minority community was shaped by several internal debates and conflicts. Also from 2003 these conflicts have grown beyond the borders of the organization and since 2008 we can follow a whole new type of institutionalization. In achieving this, I introduce three strategies - individual integration, collective integration, and organizational integration - which are chosen by different fragments of the Hungarian minority elite both toward the Hungarian and the Romanian political sphere. Throughout the 1989-2012 period, the outcome of the conflict between the supporters of these strategies is deeply influenced by the policies of the two states.