Instrumental and cultural considerations in constructing European identity among ethnic minority groups in Lithuania in a generational perspective

Research on European identity focuses mainly on majority populations in Western European countries without differentiating among specific population groups and generations, and, above all, disregarding ethnic minority groups living in Central and Eastern Europe. This paper addresses this gap by investigating the development of European identity among three ethnic minority groups in Lithuania: Belarusians, Poles, and Russians. Theoretically, the project is based on the instrumental approach, which argues that European identity is closely related to perceived benefits from “being European,” and on the cultural approach, which holds a common history, ancestry, and culture responsible for the development of European identity. Existing research has, above all, emphasized the importance of instrumental considerations. Analyzing qualitative interviews collected in the FP7 research project “ENRI-East,” the paper compares how young and adult members of ethnic minority groups construct European identity due to “instrumental” and “cultural” considerations. The results show that both instrumental and cultural considerations are relevant and further development of European identity depends on which age group or ethnic minority group an individual belongs to.     

Germans in Wrocław: “Ethnic minority” versus hybrid identity. Historical context and urban milieu

After 1945, German Breslau was transformed into Ur-Polish Wroc?aw at Stalin’s behest. Most of the remaining prewar population was expelled, and a stable population of a few hundred with German ethnic background is estimated to have lived in the city since then. This paper is based on qualitative analysis of 30 oral history interviews from among the self-defined German minority. It pays close attention to historical context, urban milieu, and salient narratives of identity as shaping forces, which include the suppression of German culture under Communism, prevalent intermarriage between Germans and Poles, and the city’s qualified reinvention as “multicultural” after Polish independence in 1989. Together with the group’s relatively small numbers, these narratives play out in their hybrid approach to ethnicity, often invoking blended cultural practices or the ambiguous geographical status of the Silesian region, to avoid choosing between “national” antipodes of “German” and “Polish.” The results follow Rogers Brubaker’s insight into ethnicity as an essentializing category used to construct groups where individual self-perception may differ; and the concept of “national indifference,” previously applied to rural populations. It also suggests we might better approach circumscribed “minority” identities such as these, by seeing them as a form of “sub-culture.”     

Lives on the border: language and culture in the lives of ethnic Russian women in Baltinava,Latvia

This study draws on ethnographic research conducted in a small village, Baltinava in Latvia, 2.5 kilometres from the border with Russia. The research examines how ethnic Russian women create a specific Latvian Russian identity by contrasting themselves from ethnic Latvians and Russians who live in Russia and identifying with both groups at the same time. To narrate their lives and to make them meaningful, real and/or perceived “attributes” are combined to draw boundaries between “us” and “them.” Thus, the same thing such as language can be used not only both to distinguish themselves from Russians in Russia or Latvians but also to form coherent identities and to emphasize similarities. This study suggests that ethnicities cannot be reduced to a list of set ethnic groups that are very often used in official government statistics. Ethnic identities have to be viewed as fluid and situational. Moreover, this study shows the dialectic nature of ethnicity. On the one hand, external political, historical and social processes create and recreate ethnic categories and definitions. Yet, on the other hand, the women in this study are active agents creating meaningful and symbolic ethnic boundaries.     

BOOK SYMPOSIUM

The processes of peace-building and democratization in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) were instituted on 14 December 1995 by the Dayton Accords, which brought an end to the Bosnian War. While claiming their objectives to be reconciliation, democracy, and ethnic pluralism, the accords inscribed in law the ethnic partition between Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Muslims by granting rights to “people” based on their identification as “ethnic collectivities.” This powerful tension at the heart of “democratization” efforts has been central to what has transpired over the past 16 years. My account uses ethnographic methods and anthropological analysis to document how the ethnic emphasis of the local nationalist projects and international integration policies is working in practice to flatten the multilayered discourses of nationhood in BiH. As a result of these processes, long-standing notions of trans-ethnic nationhood in BiH lost their political visibility and potency. In this article I explore how trans-ethnic narod or nation(hood) – as a space of popular politics, cultural interconnectedness, morality, political critique, and economic victimhood – still lingers in the memories and practices of ordinary Bosnians and Herzegovinians, thus powerfully informing their political subjectivities.     

Ethno-racial identity (politics) by law: “Fraud” and “choice”

Following an introduction to the changes in how ethno-racial identity is conceptualized in the social sciences and humanities by the destabilization of categorical frameworks, the author looks at how law reacts to these discussions and paradigm shifts, and argues that legal and administrative approaches face severe linguistic and conceptual limitations by operating within a “choice” and “fraud” binary. The article then questions if the free choice of identity exists as a principle of international minority protection law, a legal field that arguably represents a global political and ethical consensus. The author makes two claims. First, according to the basic tenet of legal logic, a proper right to free choice of identity allowing people to opt out of racial, ethnic, or national (minority) communities would necessitate the freedom to opt in to the majority or to any chosen group. The second claim, however, is that international law would not actually construct an approach to opting in. Thus, the right to free choice of identity is not an autonomous, sui generis right under international law.     

Sikh terrorism in the struggle for Khalistan

Abstract

The attack on the Golden Temple, the “Holy of Holies” of the Sikh religion in Amritsar, India, in June 1984 found the world's attention on a long‐simmering but low‐keyed conflict—the fight of the Sikh separatists for an independent Punjab, renamed Khalistan. The Sikh struggle has all of the earmarks of the type of conflicts breaking out in the new third world nations, which are remnants of the old colonial empires; a quest for ethnic identity, a desire for religious purity (i.e., the fear of being absorbed by the majority Hindus), and the desire for nationhood. The Sikhs are a proud and achieving people who feel unequally yoked with the Hindus, but their desire for an independent nation in the middle of a hostile India borders on fantasy.     

Ethnicity and conflict severity: accounting for the effect of co-ethnic and non-ethnic militias on battlefield lethality

How does the presence of armed pro-regime groups affect conflict lethality? This study examines the relationship between ethnicity, militia violence and conflict lethality in civil wars. We emphasise that differences in whether pro-regime militias were recruited in accordance with their ethnicity or not are critical in their influence upon conflict lethality, which we estimate in battlefield deaths. To that end, we categorise militias into groups recruited on their ethnic basis (co-ethnic militias) and those recruited regardless of their ethnicity (non-ethnic militias). We hypothesise that conflicts are more lethal when non-ethnic militias are involved. We link higher number of battle-deaths in conflicts with non-ethnic militias with the militia use of one-sided violence against civilians. Co-ethnic militias – that is militias recruited from the same ethnicity as rebels – are deployed amongst their co-ethnics and therefore tend to target civilians less than non-ethnic militias. This militia–civilian relationship has direct impact on conflict severity. To test our hypotheses we conduct global statistical analysis of 84 intrastate conflicts from 1989 to 2014.     

Art et artisanat en Afrique Noire: Problèmes d'une définition différentielle

In 1977, John Lonsdale published a review of William R. Ochieng's study APre-Colonial History of the Gusii of Western Kenya in the Kenya Historical Review. Entitled “When did the Gusii (or any other group) become a ‘Tribe’?”, the ten-page article was less a book review and more a treatise on the practice of history in Africa. Taking Lonsdale's question as a point of inspiration, this article provides a critical rethinking of the theories of “tribe”, ethnicity and identity politics that continue to dominate African scholarship by examining the particular case of the Luyia in western Kenya. Through the seemingly incongruous and stubbornly diverse accounting of Luyia political community, this study suggests that histories of ethnic identity remain trapped by their own constructivist logic, elevating the “inventors” of traditional accounts at the expense of the plural and dissenting voices that characterise the multiple forms of political imagination practised across Africa that, while diverse, continue to rely on the idiom of the “tribe”.     

Diversity in Daugavpils: Unpacking Identity and Cultural Engagement among Minority School Youth in Eastern Latvia

Abstract

Studies of minority ‘integration’ often focus heavily on group boundaries of ethnicity, language and identity. This essay challenges these conventional approaches in Latvia by examining individuals’ quotidian, lived experiences and how these transcend common analytical boundaries. Using the Daugavpils region as a case study, I explore Russian speaker and Latvian participation in events explicitly linked with ‘ethnic’ Latvian cultural identity. I argue, by adopting multifaceted analytical measures of identities, ethnicity and belonging, new perspectives on banal integration and minority engagement within national culture emerge. Individuals engage with each other and with ‘national’ identity and culture in complex ways. Young ‘Russian speakers’ are often more integrated with their ethnic Latvian peers than the extant literature suggests, both civically and in Latvia’s cultural sphere, as consumers and producers of Latvian ‘national’ identity.     

Narratives of Translocation,Dislocation and Location: Armenian Youth Cultural Identities in Southern Russia

The findings presented here are based on ethnographic research and are concerned with subjective definitions of ethnic belonging of young Armenians in Krasnodar krai. It is demonstrated that Armenian ethnic identifications are not ‘fixed’ but rather entwined within a complex web of diverse cultural attachments, involving many ‘routes’ of translocation, dislocation and location. It was found that most of the research participants saw themselves as Armenian while drawing occasionally on cosmopolitanism as an identity resource. This enabled them to construct a sense of belonging both in terms of ethnicity and of multicultural location.     

Nationhood and the minority question in Central Asia. The Russians in Kazakhstan

This article aims to present the situation of the Russian minority in Kazakhstan and to stress the political, social and identity evolutions in this country since independence in 1991. It develops three main points: the non-homogeneous nature of Russians in Kazakhstan; the development of non-ethnic allegiances that could explain the failure of the local Russian political parties; and the difficulties the leaders have in choosing between the defence of the political rights and the cultural rights of the country's first minority. In order to examine these issues, this article focuses on a series of issues: the place of the national question in the Kazakh public debate; the process of linguistic and ethnic Kazakhisation; the political activities of the Russian minority; the Cossack issue and the stakes of autonomist claims; and, finally, the issue of emigration and the narrative of the ‘return’ to Russia.     

The politics of recognition of Crimean Tatar collective rights in the post-Soviet period: With special attention to the Russian annexation of Crimea

This paper examines the process of how Crimean Tatars strived to attain group-differentiated rights since they have returned to their homeland in the early 1990s. Whereas the politics of minority rights were viewed through security lens in earlier literature, we emphasize the significance of cultural constructs in influencing the minority policies, based on qualitative content analysis of “speech acts” of elites, and movement and policy documents. Focusing on the interaction of the framing processes of Crimean Tatars with the Crimean regional government, Ukraine, and Russia, we argue that the “neo-Stalinist frame” has played a major role in denying the rights of Crimean Tatars for self-determination and preservation of their ethnic identity in both pre and post annexation Crimea. The Crimean Tatars counter-framed against neo-Stalinist frame both in the pre and post-annexation period by demanding their rights as “indigenous people”. Ukraine experienced a frame transformation after the Euromaidan protests, by shifting from a neo-Stalinist frame into a “multiculturalist frame”, which became evident in recognition of the Crimean Tatar status as indigenous people of Crimea.     

Biopolitics,borders, and refugee camps: exercising sovereign power over nonmembers of the state†

This article addresses the relationship between the concepts of national identity and biopolitics by examining a border-transit camp for repatriates, refugees, and asylum seekers in Germany. Current studies of detention spaces for migrants have drawn heavily on Agamben’s reflection on the “camp” and “homo sacer,” where the camp is analyzed as a space in a permanent state of exception, in which the government exercises sovereign power over the refugee as the ultimate biopolitical subject. But what groups of people can end up at a camp, and does the government treat all groups in the same way? This article examines the German camp for repatriates, refugees, and asylum seekers as a space where the state’s borders are demarcated and controlled through practices of bureaucratic and narrative differentiation among various groups of people. The author uses the concept of detention space to draw a theoretical link between national identity and biopolitics, and demonstrates how the sovereign’s practices of control and differentiation at the camp construct German national identity through defining “nonmembers” of the state. The study draws on ethnographic fieldwork at the Friedland border transit camp and on a discourse analysis of texts produced at the camp or for the camp.     

Conceptualizing “Ethnicity” and “ethnic conflict”: A controversy revisited

The literature on “ethnicity” and “ethnic conflict” still fails to yield either definitional precision or usable empirical referents for the study of either phenomenon. This article offers a critique of the key literature on these subjects and a propositional inventory summarizing points of scholarly agreement, a discussion of the empirical problems that face scholars in this field, and, finally a general model for the analysis of particular ethnic conflicts, including consideration of the correlative tangents of resolution intervention.     

“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.     

Process and practice: groupness,ethnicity, and habitus in Carpathian Rus’

This article synthesizes Wimmer's and Brubaker's processual approach to analyzing ethnic groups with Jenkins and Bentley's practice-based theories of ethnicity to explain the role played by socio-emotional experiences and practical concerns in Carpatho-Rusyns, both mobilizing as an ethnic group as well as resisting such mobilization. Data were gathered from interviews and participant observation during the eight months of fieldwork in 10 different villages, towns, and cities in the Pre?ov region of Slovakia and the Zakarpattia oblast of Ukraine. Carpatho-Rusyns live in an area where borders have changed frequently and where religions, states, and political movements have encouraged the inhabitants’ assimilation to a new or larger group. Rusyns tend to describe ethnicity as instrumentalist theorists do, that is, something largely produced as a result of struggles over territory, resources, and political power. Nevertheless, they evince a profound emotional connection to their language, land, and spirituality. This emotional connection manifests itself among “ethnopolitical entrepreneurs” as well as among the general population, but only motivates explicit political organization among the former.     

Recollections of emerging hybrid ethnic identities in Soviet Central Asia: the case of Uzbekistan

This paper is a contribution to the debate about how people in Central Asia recall Soviet ethnic policies and their vision of how these policies have shaped the identities of their peers and contemporaries. In order to do so, this paper utilizes the outcomes of in-depth interviews about everyday Soviet life in Uzbekistan conducted with 75 senior citizens between 2006 and 2009. These narratives demonstrate that people do not explain Soviet ethnic policies simply through the “modernization” or “victimization” dichotomy but place their experiences in between these discourses. Their recollections also highlight the pragmatic flexibility of the public's adaptive strategies to Soviet ethnic policies. This paper also argues that Soviet ethnic policy produced complicated hybrid units of identities and multiple social strata. Among those who succeeded in adapting to the Soviet realities, a new group emerged, known as Russi assimilados (Russian-speaking Sovietophiles). However, in everyday life, relations between the assimilados and their “indigenous” or “nativist” countrymen are reported to have been complicated, with clear divisions between these two groups and separate social spaces of their own for each of these strata.     

Ethnicity as political cleavage: the political agenda of the Polish national minority in Lithuania

This article examines the role of ethnicity in the formation of political cleavage and is based on the analysis of the political agenda of the Polish national minority in Lithuania after the re-establishment of the independent state in 1990. It analyzes the political performance of the Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania (EAPL), an ethnic-based “niche” political party that tends to keep a monopoly over the representation of interests of the Polish minority in Lithuania and collects a vast majority of the votes of citizens of Polish origin. The article considers how specific in comparison to the titular nation the interests of the Polish national minority are, and how different in comparison to the political agendas of other political parties the political agenda of the EAPL is.     

“Imagining community” in Soviet Kazakhstan. An historical analysis of narrative on nationalism in Kazakh-Soviet literature

Although much attention has been paid to national construction in Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia, the field of literary and cultural analysis of the origins of current national symbols and texts in this region is yet not fully acknowledged and discovered. This article tries to shed light onto the literary construction of an ethnic identity and its historical background in Soviet Kazakhstan and its influence on the post-Soviet ideology in this multicultural country. In doing so it investigates the ways and the time when most of the important historical epics were “re-written,” brought back by the Kazakh writers and intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century. The importance of investigating this period and this phenomenon is twofold. First, it provides further contribution to the Soviet creation of binary approaches to the formation of ethnic identities and the continuous attack on local nationalisms. Following the arguments of some scholars in the field (e.g. [Adams, Laura. 1999. “Invention, Institutionalization and Renewal in Uzbekistan's National Culture.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 2; Dave, Bhavna. 2007. Kazakhstan: Ethnicity and Power. London: Routledge]) this asserts that the local cultural elites found ways of bargaining and re-structuring such identity contributing to its “localization” through the usage of pre-Soviet and pre-Russian historical symbols. In a way, they were able to construct their own “imagined community” and resistance to the past and existing (according to them) colonialism within the given framework of Kazakh-Soviet literature. Secondly, the historicity that became a leitmotif of most important literary works and later on a main focus of national ideology in post-Soviet Kazakhstan must be viewed not just as an instrument of legitimation in this post-colonial state but also as a strong continuity of cultural and ethnic identity lines. The very fact that a detailed and continued genealogy of Kazakh medieval tribes and rulers was the main focus of major works by such famous Kazakh writers as Mukhtar Auezov or Ilyas Yessenberlin demonstrates the importance of the “continuity” and kinship and family lines for Kazakhs. The paper raises the questions of how national and elitist these movements were before the independence and how the further post-independent projects of using and re-establishing these links and continuity formed more questions than answers for the nation-builders in independent Kazakhstan.     

Flagging Turkishness: the reproduction of banal nationalism in the Turkish press

This article explores banal nationalist themes and symbols in the Turkish media on the basis of the study by Michael Billig titled “Banal Nationalism”. In this study, we used content analysis method to reveal how the key concepts that encompass the idea of the nationhood have been propagated within presentations of the daily news. The research sampling consisted of 36 daily newspapers of the mainstream Turkish media dated 3th February 2010. Our analysis revealed that even in an ordinary day when nationalist themes or developments were not intensely situated in the newspapers, nationhood was reproduced via both nationalist language forms and classifications of “us” and “them”, praise of the nation/country, and the emphasis on common interest or common history. This further highlights the constant transformation of nationalism, underlining its allusions and evocations not as a forgotten ideology but as something that is being reproduced in an unnoticed way every day and survives as a principal determinant of daily life activities. In addition, although it is not possible to see overt dichotomies or expressions of feeling within each part of the news or in every column, we found that the nation was implied or the national sentiments were presented.