“Serbs” in Bela krajina: a (deliberately) forgotten minority?

There are three constitutionally recognized national/ethnic minorities in Slovenia: the Italians, the Hungarians and the Roma. In addition, there are other ethnic groups that could perhaps be considered as “autochthonous” national minorities in line with Slovenia's understanding of this concept. Among them is a small community of “Serbs” – the successors of the Uskoks living in Bela krajina, a border region of Slovenia. In this article we present results of a field research that focused on the following question: Can the “Serb” community in Bela krajina be considered a national minority? On the basis of the objective facts, it could be said that the “Serbs” in four Bela krajina villages are a potential national minority, but with regard to their modest social vitality and the fact that they do not express their desire for minority status, the realization of special minority protection is questionable.     

Securing the nuclear nation

In 1946, in the Southern Urals, construction of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics first plutonium plant fell to the GULAG-Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD). The chief officers in charge of the program – Lavrentii Beria, Sergei Kruglov, and Ivan Tkachenko – had been pivotal figures in the deportation and political and ethnic cleansing of territories retaken from Axis forces during WWII. These men were charged with building a nuclear weapons complex to defend the Soviet Union from the American nuclear monopoly. In part thanks to the criminalization and deportation of ethnic minorities, Gulag territories grew crowded with foreign nationals and ethnic minorities in the postwar years. The NKVD generals were appalled to find that masses of forced laborers employed at the plutonium construction site were members of enemy nations. Beria issued orders to cleanse the ranks of foreign enemies, but construction managers could not spare a single healthy body as they raced to complete their deadlines. To solve this problem, they created two zones: an interior, affluent zone for plutonium workers made up almost exclusively of Russians; and anterior zones of prisoners, soldiers, ex-cons, and local farmers, many of whom were non-Russian. The selective quality of Soviet “nuclearity” meant that many people who were exposed to the plant's secret plutonium disasters were ethnic minorities, people whose exposures went unrecorded or under-recorded because of their invisibility and low social value.     

Preventing violence through hip hop: an evolutionary perspective

ABSTRACT

For decades Hip Hop cultural practices have been disparaged for allegedly inciting and being responsible for the eruption of urban violence. This assumption, likely built upon pre-existing biases regarding the street culture and ethnic minorities where Hip Hop emerged, ignored how some of the genre’s main elements – particularly freestyle rap, breakin’ or breakdancing and graffiti tagging – initially served the purpose of providing at-risk youths with real alternatives to direct physical violence in their day-to-day lives, and continue do so today. It has also ignored broader analogies with other cross-cultural and cross-species manifestations of similar practices that have served for millennia as effective mechanisms for reducing the likelihood of potentially lethal violence. By presenting these manifestations – namely song dueling and mark making – in comparative terms with Hip Hop’s freestyle song and dance battles and tagging territorial contests, this article seeks to highlight the relevance and potential of Hip Hop for preventing violence while also suggesting a common evolutionary backdrop within the context of strategies aimed at minimizing intraspecific aggression.     

“An orgy of licence?” Democracy and property redistribution in Poland and the Baltics in their international context, 1918–1926

The article argues that property redistribution was a major tool of democratization and nationalization in Poland and the Baltics. It provided governments with a means to give peasants a stake in the new democratic states, thus empower the new titular nations and at the same time marginalize former elites, who became national minorities. The most significant acts of property redistribution were the land reforms passed between 1919 and 1925, which achieved the status of founding charters of the new states. Activists of the disenfranchised minorities conceptualized minority protection as the “Magna Carta” of the international order, which should contain the principle of national self-determination and thus safeguard private property, the protection of which was not clearly regulated by international law. By examining the contingencies of the aftermath of the war in East Central Europe as well as discussions about changing conceptions of property ownership in both East Central and Western Europe, the article shows that land reform was meant to counter Bolshevism, but, at the same time, created the impression abroad that the new states themselves displayed revolutionary tendencies and did not respect private property – an image that became a significant argument of interwar territorial revisionists.     

An Analysis of Race Equality Policy and Practice in the City of Birmingham,UK

The city of Birmingham is home to a significant number of ethnic minorities. In 2004 it is estimated that almost a third of the city's one million people are of ethnic minority origin. How the city's institutions have responded to race equality issues is analysed in the light of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report (1999) and the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000. Based on secondary analysis of documentary evidence and interviews with key actors, it is shown that ethnic minorities are disadvantaged in education, the labour market, and in relation to health and housing. It is argued that the local authority has made some genuine efforts to ensure that all its citizens are provided equality of opportunity; however, given the diversity and socio-economic polarity of the ethnic minorities in Birmingham, we conclude that race equality policies remain ineffective and a great deal more is required to ensure that ethnic minorities are treated equally as full British citizens.     

Culture and theater as foundation for national identity formation in the Russian far east: where Europe meets Asia

Although most contemporary theories of nationalism and identity formation rest on some form of social constructivism, few theorists of nationalism and identity formation interrogate social constructivism as a social construction – a social science concept “imposed” on the non-self-consciously constructivist behaviors of people, who generally do not believe they are engaging in construction. Since social constructivism – unless it is a metaphysics about what is real – is really about the concept of social construction, the first task of constructivists is to ask not how various populations have engaged in social construction but how social construction should be defined. As this article shows, constructivism is at best a run-of-the-mill theoretical approach – perfectly respectable, but no different from any other theoretical approach in the social sciences. It is only when social constructivism makes outlandishly radical claims – that all of reality or all of social reality is constructed – that it is unusual, exciting, and wrong.     

The Black European Women's Council: ‘thinking oneself into the New Europe’

With the continuous political shift to the right in many European countries, exclusivist constructions of the nation and concepts related to national identity – issues which are immersed in and often conflated with biology and culture – the necessity for mobilization and political activism among women, migrants, and minorities in Europe has become all the more acute and timely. Organized within the framework of the ‘European Year for Equal Opportunities 2007’ and initiated by Béatrice Achaleke, AFRA (International Centre for Black Women's Perspectives in Vienna, Austria, and co-organized by Helen Felter, Director of Tiye International (The Netherlands); the Black European Women's Congress (26–29 September 2007) culminated in the formation of the Black European Woman's Council (hereafter BEWC). Employing a mix of discourse analysis, social movement and intersectional theory, I address the issues of Black female subjectivity, political agency, and strategies in relation to the socio-political empowerment of Black women across Europe. Based on qualitative data, I argue that the cross-border network of the BEWC exhibits the potential to serve as a structured political force not only on local and national levels, but also within the sphere of the European Union; and to possibly assist Black European women activists with the task of ‘thinking themselves into the New Europe’.     

Representative Bureaucracy in the Public Service? A Critical Analysis of the Challenges Confronting Women in the Civil Service of Ghana

In the public administration literature, the debate concerning the representation of minorities in the public bureaucracy continues to attract attention. The idea is that passive representation may lead to active representation with the later helping to develop policies and programs that will benefit minorities. Consequently, a number of governments have been implementing policies to enhance the involvement of minorities in public services. The Ghana government has not been left out in this endeavor. Since 1957, it has continued to institute measures to ensure a fair gender representation in the bureaucracy. This notwithstanding, the upper echelons of the bureaucracy continue to be dominated by males despite the over representation of women at the lower levels. What are the challenges confronting women in the public sector that make it difficult to achieve active representation? In this article, we examine the challenges confronting women to achieve active representation from a representative bureaucracy perspective.     

Language territorial regimes in multilingual ethnic territorial autonomies

Ethnic territorial autonomy (ETA) is an institutional way to ensure simultaneously the integrity of the state and the rights of ethnic minorities through preferential policies in certain ethnically sensitive spheres. Language preferential policies differ greatly across multilingual ETAs and can be analyzed through the concept of “language territorial regime” (LTR). In this paper, we examine LTRs along two dimensions: (1) the scope of state regulation of language use and (2) the way language rights are perceived and used. The first considers the depth and universality of state regulation of language use – “strong” or “weak.” The second concerns whether the community’s approach to language rights is symbolic or pragmatic. The combination of these two dimensions allows the categorization of LTRs into four main classes: “strong parting-regime,” “strong pooling-regime,” “weak pooling-regime,” and “weak parting-regime.” A comparison of South Tyrol, Vojvodina, and Wales allows conceptualizing LTR as a system of de jure institutional arrangements of linguistic issues and practice of self-organization and perpetuation of multilingual communities.     

Notes on contributors

This paper examines the impact of development, including the impact of government and donor programmes, on ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples in Southeast Asia. Through an examination of government policy, it considers arguments that mainstream development strategies tend to generate conflicts between states and ethnic minorities and that such strategies are, at times, ethnocidal in their destructive effects on the latter. In looking at more recent government policy in the region, it considers the concept of ethno-development (ie development policies that are sensitive to the needs of ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples and where possible controlled by them), and assesses the extent to which such a pattern of development is emerging in the region. Since the late 1980s, it argues, governments across the region have made greater efforts to acknowledge the distinct identities of both ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples, while donors have begun to fund projects to address their needs. In many cases, these initiatives have brought tangible benefits to the groups concerned. Yet in other respects progress to date has been modest and ethnodevelopment, the paper argues, remains confined to a limited number of initiatives in the context of a broader pattern of disadvantage and domination.     

Social policy 2000: affirmative action

Empirical research, summarized here, clearly establishes that racial and ethnic minorities continue to experience substantial discrimination in employment. However, this discrimination is often subtle and unconscious. Because discriminatory practices are so intertwined with apparently-neutral employment practices, affirmative action remains an important means of combating them. Properly designed, affirmative action can benefit employers and non-protected employees as well as the minorities directly covered.     

Two variants of the Russian radical right: Imperial and social nationalism

The text combines three lines of discussion. First, on the empirical level two Russian political parties – the CPRF and the LDPR – are characterized with regard to their specific profiles of right-wing radicalism. Second, these profiles are attributed to specific variations of the interpretation of the Russian past. Third, the empirical findings are traced for insights into the Leninist legacy concept. The main hypothesis on the empirical level is that Russian ultra-nationalist actors refer to different currents of a common national imagination in order to combine nationalist ideological elements with other programmatic features. On the conceptual level, the legacy concept is able to render systematic insights not into the history of a given state but into varying interpretations of what can be seen as ‘usable pasts’ from the perspective of various intellectual entrepreneurs.     

Rise of xenophobic nationalism in Europe: A case of Slovenia

The article focuses on rise of nationalism and xenophobia in Slovenia. It starts by considering the issue of unrecognized minorities in Slovenia (former Yugoslavia nations) that have no minority rights, despite being large groups, as many international organizations for the protection of minorities have pointed out. A particular issue in this relation for Slovenia is the ‘Erased’ – the individuals who did not acquire Slovenian citizenship when Slovenia seceded from federal Yugoslavia – and despite the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) decision, the Slovenian state has still not recognized their rights, which were violated in the post-independence period. The article also examines two other minorities in Slovenia, the Jews and the Roma. The article finds Slovenia to be a closed, non-globalised society which, in spite of its constitutional declaration to protect the rights of minorities and other national communities, is seeking to retain a politically and culturally homogeneous nation state.     

Leaving area studies behind: the challenge of diasporic connections in the field of African studies

Abstract

In recent years, diaspora has become one of the key terms of social analysis in various fields. Emphasizing the multiple trajectories out of which present identities – inasmuch as political or economic realities – are forged, the concept forces us to reconsider the scope of classical area studies (and associated disciplinary boundaries) in radical terms. The article looks at the colonial foundations of African Studies as area studies and examines some ways by which to overcome enduring colonial epistemologies. The author suggests a theoretical framework in which Africa herself is considered as diasporic. Moreover, she calls for a critical perspective that will facilitate the comparative analysis of different diasporic discourses and practices.     

Democrats and Minority Marginalization: The Case of Pakistan

Pakistan is the first post-war experiment in political Islam to establish a democratic state. While Pakistan's consistently poor democratic record has disadvantaged every citizen, its religious minorities are especially marginalized. This article argues that this marginalization is a consequence of institutionalized political inequality, which indeed may be the root cause of Pakistan's overall democratic weakness. Again, contrary to the popular perception, this article demonstrates that Pakistan's democratic leaderships are as—if not more—complicit in this marginalization as the Islamist dictator Zia-ul-Haq and others. First, the worldview of Pakistan's ostensibly liberal-democratic founder Mahomed Ali Jinnah and its impact on the constitutional framework of Pakistan is analysed. Second, the political culture spawned by another ostensibly democratic leader Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in securing the mandate for the new post-1971 constitution is explicated. These two ‘democratic’ processes have profoundly influenced the marginalization of religious minorities in Pakistan. This has significant lessons for ‘democratic’ transition leaderships in the contemporaneously evolving cognate experiments in the Arab Spring regions and elsewhere where similarly small minorities exist.     

The Gender Gap in Agricultural Productivity: The Role of Market Imperfections

This paper hypothesises that labour and credit market imperfections – by discouraging off-farm income-generating activities and restricting access to inputs, respectively – affect female farm productivity more deeply than male productivity. The paper develops a theoretical model, which decomposes the contribution of various market imperfections to the gender productivity gap. Empirically we show that agricultural labour productivity is, on average, 44 per cent lower on female-headed plots than on those managed by male heads. 34 per cent of this gap is explained by differences in labour market access and 29 per cent by differences in credit access.     

Under construction and highly contested: Islam in the post-Soviet Caucasus

While scholarship on Islam in the Caucasus has focused on the late Soviet religious revival – the rise of Salafi jihadism and religious radicalisation in the northern part of these strategic crossroads – no study to date has addressed the discursive struggle over the social functions of regional Islam. This article deconstructs these discourses in order to examine the very varying, and often conflicting, representations of Islam advocated by various actors across the region and within particular republics. The article highlights the contested functions of regional Islam against the background of a religious revival that is still a work in progress.     

‘Pedagogies of resistance’ and critical peace education praxis

This paper explores ‘pedagogies of resistance’ – or critical and democratic educational models utilized by social movements – and how global examples of engaged educational praxis may inform peace education. The central inquiry of this article is ‘How can educational projects that resist larger social, political and economic inequalities offer understandings about how we learn, teach, and act for peace in diverse settings?’ Drawing upon literature from various fields, ideas and insights are offered about how the field of peace education can better respond to multiple and diverse realities, particularly those facing marginalized communities. The article provides an overview of key tenets of peace education and ideas central to ‘critical peace education;’ offers a framing of ‘pedagogies of resistance;’ and, lastly, details what directions emerge by putting these two educational forms in conversation.     

When are Minorities Worse Off? A Systematic Investigation of Size and Status

Are smaller ethnic groups less advantaged than large groups? This question has not been systematically studied. Using two new datasets, we find that when group size and status are analyzed at national levels smaller groups are generally worse off than larger groups. By contrast, when group size and status are analyzed at subnational (regional or district) levels, smaller groups are better off than larger groups. “National” minorities are disadvantaged while “local” minorities are advantaged.We theorize that two factors are at work in generating this surprisingly consistent relationship. First, a synergy exists at national levels among three features of ethnic groups: size, power, and status. The second factor is based on social dynamics. Specifically, insofar as internal migration is characterized by positive selection, then migrants and their descendants should form the basis of small, privileged groups within the region that they migrate to. Insofar as distance enhances positive selection, this explains why smaller migrations are associated with more privileged groups and larger migrations with somewhat less privileged groups.