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.     

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.     

Large-scale land acquisitions,state authority and indigenous local communities: insights from Ethiopia

The convergence of diverse global factors – food price volatility, the increased demand for biofuels and feeds, climate change and the financialisation of commodity markets – has resulted in renewed interest in land resources, leading to a rapid expansion in the scope and scale of (trans)national acquisition of arable land across many developing countries. Much of this land is on peripheral indigenous peoples’ territories and considered a common property resource. Those most threatened are poor rural people with customary tenure systems – including indigenous ethnic minority groups, pastoralists and peasants – who need land most. In Ethiopia large areas have been leased to foreign and domestic capital for large-scale production of food and agrofuels, mainly in lowland regions where the state has historically had limited control. Much of the land offered is classified by the state and other elites as ‘unused’ or ‘underutilised’, overlooking the spatially extensive use of land in shifting cultivation and pastoralism. This threatens the land rights and livelihoods of ethnic minority indigenous communities in these lowlands. This article argues that recent large-scale land acquisitions are part of state strategy for enforcing political authority over territory and people. It examines the implications of such strategy for indigenous ethnic minority groups, focusing particularly on the Benishangul-Gumuz region.     

A community under siege: exclusionary education policies and indigenous Santals* in the Bangladeshi context

Abstract

This article presents and analyses the voices and responses of the research participants about the impact of exclusionary formal and informal education policies imposed on the Santal community in Palashpur, Bangladesh (Palashpur is a pseudonym for the site of my research; it is also a metaphor for contested space where the colonial power and politics of the nation state exert domination and subordination). These policies are implemented through a state-led, centralised, monolingual and exclusionary curriculum in local primary and secondary schools, schools run by the churches, and schools supported by nongovernmental organisations. The education policies in Bangladesh bear the legacy of the combined forces of cultural homogenisation and social exclusion rooted in the colonial learning structure and its objectives. Embedded in these policies are elements of the civilising mission, an ultra-religious assimilative but exclusionary nationalistic agenda, and Western values of modernity and development. In this rural context, these alien ideologies and practices in education are actively engaged in eliminating local institutions, the knowledge system of indigenous peoples, the texture of their lives, their joy of living, their spirituality and their sense of being. This article reveals how, imposed from above, education policy and practices have dispersed an indigenous community to negotiate a life that goes against the interests of the community itself and its members.     

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.     

Rethinking the Iberian Transformations: How Democratization Scenarios Shaped Labor Market Outcomes

This article examines how dissimilar democratization scenarios in two historically important cases helped to shape a major societal outcome, that of unemployment levels. With an empirical focus on the neighboring countries of the Iberian Peninsula, the paper argues that Portugal's relative success and Spain's persistent failures in the provision of employment cannot be fully explained by the focus of some analysts on comparative labor costs, and that the Iberian countries' employment levels also rest on a set of factors connected in sometimes complex ways with the two societies' very different paths from authoritarianism to democracy in the 1970s. Factors emphasized include the degree of incorporation of women into the labor force, the availability of adequate financing for small and medium enterprises—and the impact of national financial systems and state policies on that intermediary outcome—and the extent to which the two countries' welfare states are employment friendly. Central to this article's argument is the claim that the divergence between these Third Wave pioneers in their democratization scenarios accounts for the dissimilar penetration into the Iberian cases of another global wave of the late twentieth century, that of market-centric economic liberalization.     

Book reviews

Paulin Kola, The Search for Greater Albania (London: Hurst, 2003), xiv, 416 pp. + maps. Few are the monographs available in English and written by Albanian scholars that deal with the contemporary history of the Balkans. The Search for Greater Albania is therefore a welcome contribution to the study of Albanian nationalism. The author endorses a definition of nationalism as an ideology “whose proponents advocate the indispensable congruence of the political and the national unit, i.e. the state and the nation” (p. xii) and endeavors to demonstrate that no one among Albanian leaders from King Zog to the present, including Hoxha, ever worked to achieve a “Greater Albania.” The intent of the book is then to explain why state-builders in Tirana from the very beginning disregarded their irredenta despite the fact that a substantial part of the ethnic population had remained outside the borders because of international treaties. After a summary of the historical developments in the first part of the twentieth century, Kola pays particular attention to the space for ethnopolitics among Albanian communist and post-communist elites in Albania proper, in Kosovo and marginally in Macedonia. The author is keen to question the nationalist credentials attributed to Enver Hoxha by most scholars of Albania. Kola describes the key historical events in the region after the Second World War by looking for references to Kosovo and the preservation of national independence and shows that these references were all just instrumental to elites' power politics. What the communist regime instead managed to do, observes Kola, is to impoverish its own citizens and to alienate Albanian communities from one another. Kola concludes that political leaders in Tirana have all been prone to “a comfortable parochialism vis-à-vis the national question“ (p. 233). Exceptions to the rule are considered, such as the attempt to internationalize the Kosovo crisis by the first post-communist governments. However, the 1997 descent into anarchy of Albania proper compromised the cause of nationalism in the “motherland.” The idea of “Greater Albania,” according to Kola, never existed in Albania proper but was rather rooted outside the nation-state borders. In Kosovo, where “real Albanian nationalism” instead resided, the discovery of the poverty of the “motherland” in the 1990s toned ambitions down (p. 394). The same Macedonian Albanians did not expect help from Tirana when they initiated the armed confrontation in 2000 and did not show any intention to seek national unification with Tirana. Therefore, Kola observes, foreign observers should be reassured that national unification is not the ambition of Albanian politics today and no one will press for it in the foreseeable future.     

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.     

Race relations,nationalism and the humanitarian Rohingya crisis in contemporary Myanmar

ABSTRACT

The recent ethnic tensions in Myanmar especially in the Rakhine state has once again placed the country onto the centre stage of global media attention. The aim of this paper is to look at race relations in contemporary Myanmar with a special focus on the Rohingya community. The paper argues that problematic race relations in the country today should be analysed within a certain historical context and should be seen as part of a historical continuum. This paper places a lot of importance on this historical continuum. In this connection, the British colonial policies of divide and conquer, politicians and their obsession with Buddhism and trying to make it the state religion shortly after independence in 1948, and the xenophobic policies followed by the military junta after 1962 deserve special mention. The paper further argues that the current state of affairs and escalation in violence has happened recently because of the convergence of the activities and ideologies of certain political groups like the military junta, the National League for Democracy, the Arakan League for Democracy, and the role played by certain Buddhist extremist groups like the MaBaTha in Burmese politics. To ease the existing tension in the Rakhine, the central government would need to take a more federally minded approach and introduce meaningful democracy and development in the frontier parts of the country where there is a strong ethnic minority presence.     

Liberalization and ethnic conflict in Latin America

Most contemporary analysts explain ethnic identity as a socially rooted phenomenon which can be catalyzed by changes in both economic and political conditions. Taking the 1982 debt crisis as a main triggering event, this article analyzes the relationship between economic adjustment and increasing levels of indigenous mobilization in Latin America. Through a comparison of the Bolivian, Peruvian, and Mexican cases,the analysis reveals wide variation in the types and levels of ethnic conflict in the region. Explanations for these differences center on the timing and content of economic adjustment policies, and on the institutional opportunities available for expressing and channeling economic and political demands. The article concludes that political and economic liberalization are likely to clash when shrinking the state also removes channels for popular participation; moreover, when those that bear most of the adjustment burden are also challengers to national identity, states ignore this challenge at their peril. Alison Brysk is assistant professor of politics at the University of California at Irvine. Her book,The Politics of Human Rights in Argentina, was published by Stanford University Press. Various aspects of her current research on Latin American indigenous rights movements have appeared inComparative Political Studies, Latin American Perspectives, andPolity. Carol Wise is assistant professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. She has published articles on Latin American political economy inInternational Organization, Latin American Research Review, and theJournal of Latin American Studies; she is the editor of a forthcoming collection entitledThe Post-NAFTA Political Economy: Mexico and the Western Hemisphere.     

The tension between might and rights: Siberians and energy developers in post-socialist binds

One of the flashpoints of post-socialist life has been the conflict between indigenous peoples and energy developers in the Russian Federation North. As a result of tensions over land and resources, multiple identities and political rivalries have been revealed. Such tensions spark the uncertainties that are not only a hallmark of post-socialism, but also hallmarks of post-colonial and post-welfare societies. The many levels of social interaction in ‘transition societies’ provide a challenge for anthropologists accustomed to focus refined ethnographic lenses at the nomadic camp, village or ‘ethnic’ level. This article covers conflicts of values and expectations for several Siberian groups regarding ecology, land and homeland, as well as cultural rights and revitalisation. Featured cases derive from West Siberia (Yamal and Khanty-Mansi okrug) as well as the Far East (Sakha Republic), and highlight the author's field experience in Siberia for over 25 years. Conclusions urge greater sensitivity to internal debates and trans-national comparisons as we struggle to define a range of analytical categories that both embrace and go beyond ‘post-socialist’ and ‘post-Soviet’ studies. In the process, dilemmas of advocacy are probed, as well as dilemmas of defining ‘homelands’ for indigenous peoples.     

Understanding the exclusionary politics of early Turkish nationalism: an ethnic boundary-making approach

Turkish nationalism has long presented a study in contrasts. The nationalist movement that created the Republic of Turkey sought to define the nation in explicitly civic and inclusive terms, promoting a variety of integrationist reforms. Those same nationalist politicians, however, endorsed other policies that were far more exclusionary, expelling many religious and ethnic minorities from the new nation and imposing harsh restrictions on those who remained. The seemingly contradictory nature of Turkish nationalist policies has been mirrored by much of the scholarship on Turkish nationalism, which has often viewed Turkish nationality through the lens of the “civic/ethnic divide,” with various scholars arguing that the Turkish nation is exclusively civic or ethnic. This article seeks to transcend this dichotomous way of looking at Turkish nationalism. I argue that the policies previously seen as being exclusively civic or ethnic are in fact both examples of boundary-making processes, designed to forge a cohesive nationalist community. Seen through a boundary-making perspective, the seemingly contradictory nature of Turkish nationalist policies in its early years is not paradoxical at all, but represents a multidimensional effort to construct a cohesive national community that could replace the defunct Ottoman state.     

Systems of Partial Control: Ethnic Dynamics in Post-Soviet Estonia and Latvia

This article offers a theory to capture ethnic dynamics in post-Soviet Estonia and Latvia. It also explores a research question of great interest to political scientists, historians, sociologists, and economists: what accounts for stability in deeply divided societies? Drawing on Ian Lustick’s formulation of control, the author suggests that stability in deeply divided societies is a result of conscious efforts made by elites to construct what she calls “systems of partial control.” In such systems, the majority ethnic group controls the political sector, but shares control of the economic sector with minority ethnic groups. Economic prosperity derived from dispersed economic control accounts for stability in Estonia and Latvia. The article identifies two conditions that must be satisfied for elites to tolerate partial control. First, elites must reach a threshold of political hegemony at which point they dominate the political sector and second, the respective state must have a flourishing private sector. The article concludes with an assessment of whether or not systems of partial control are likely to be stable, and a reflection on implications of these systems beyond the post-Soviet region.     

Engaging Modernity: the political making of indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador, 1900–2008

Most analyses of the recent indigenous mobilisations in Bolivia and Ecuador (as well as other Latin American countries) have sharply divided the new indigenous politics from earlier class-based political projects of the left. The emergence and mass-appeal of indigenous movements, in these analyses, are rooted in ethnic and cultural cleavages between indigenous peoples and the rest of Bolivian and Ecuadorean society. This article argues that a political interpretation of indigenous movements in these countries gives a more coherent explanation for their historical trajectories as well as their present situation, in particular their high degree of articulation with other popular political actors. Its historical section describes the emergence of indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador as part of an engagement with modernity that began in the first half of the twentieth century as part of the cross-ethnic projects of unions and radical parties of the traditional left and put indigenous communities into positive relationships to the modernizing Bolivian and Ecuadorean states.     

Russian nationalists in the Komi Republic: a case study of the Frontier of the North

The article examines some generic traits of the “new” Russian ethnic nationalism, namely, de-ideologization of the nationalist milieu and its inclination for civic activism. It results from a case study of the Frontier of the North (FN – Syktyvkar), an ideologically ambivalent organization that combines dual Russian/Komi ethnic nationalism, anti-migration sentiments, white racism, and fragments of other ideologies. The article demonstrates that, unlike nationalists of the previous generation, FN is not hostile to public authorities and is ready to cooperate with them. FN’s grassroots activism, as well as sports and healthy recreational activities, attracts young people. The organization tackles the most acute social problems, often neglected by everyone else, and has become a working civil society institution. The authors argue that these tactics win the “new” nationalists sympathy among ordinary people and makes the groups politically stronger and more influential than the previous nationalist generation. However, state anti-extremist policy hampers the advancement of nationalists into mainstream politics.     

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.     

Resilience and disaster risk reduction: reclassifying diversity and national identity in post-earthquake Nepal

This paper discusses disaster resilience in the context of disaster risk reduction. It focuses on how the Nepali state, through disaster risk reduction and resilience strategies, is reinventing the ‘diversity’ question in Nepal. Disaster risk management and disaster risk reduction are being used to create a specific form of national identity that paradoxically both segregates and excludes ethnic and traditional communities through a variety of strategies of paternalism and inclusivity. The emerging state-led use of exploiting and capturing ethnic and indigenous ‘traditional knowledge’ is part of the government’s disaster risk strategy. This is sanctioned by multilateral bodies, which further legitimates subtle practices of exclusion through state-led monitoring. This has wider implications for contested narratives on Nepali democracy and federalism.     

Unfulfilled promises of the consultation approach: the limits to effective indigenous participation in Bolivia’s and Peru’s extractive industries

Indigenous peoples’ right to prior consultation and to informed consent represents the basis of the new global model shaping state–indigenous relations. Consultation processes promise to enable indigenous people to determine their own development and are especially promoted when extraction projects with significant socio-environmental impacts are planned on indigenous lands. In this article we draw on debates on participatory development in order to analyse the first state-led consultations in Bolivia’s and Peru’s hydrocarbon sectors (2007–14). The analysis shows that effective participation has been limited by (1) an absence of indigenous ownership of the processes; (2) indigenous groups’ difficulties defending or even articulating their own visions and demands; and (3) limited or very general outcomes. The study identifies real-life challenges, such as power asymmetries, a ‘communication hurdle’ and appropriate timing – as well as simplistic assumptions underlying the consultation approach – that account for the unfulfilled promises of this new model.     

Analysis of current events: “towards the rule of law in Kosovo: EULEX should go”

Strong civil society provides individuals with arenas to bring their interests to the attention of policymakers. In so doing, civil society organizations (CSOs) can support state policies, but can also criticize policies. This paper argues that most minority rights advocacy CSOs in the Baltic states have little say in the crafting of policy and are compartmentalized into the existing agendas, with only a few groups able to evaluate policies independently. It concludes that the Baltic civil society is weak because the CSOs working on minority issues ask policymakers either too much, or too little. The findings suggest that policymakers quell criticism of their work from the side of the CSOs by ignoring their activities. Alternatively, by funding the CSO that shores up the state agenda, policymakers delegate their responsibilities to civic actors, keep critical voices from public debates and claim that their policies have the full support of a vibrant civil society. This paper investigates the options available for civil society actors to relate to policymakers in a nationalizing state by drawing on the data collected in 77 semi-structured interviews with the CSOs working with Russian and Polish minorities in the Baltic states between 2006 and 2009.