Ethnic conflict and elite bargaining: The case of Belgium

Ethnic cleavages have dominated Belgian politics for two decades, fragmenting the party system. Constitutional solutions have only met with limited success. In this article two theoretical approaches are applied to the Belgian situation: consociational elite accommodation and bargaining processes in conditions of common and conflicting interests. Bargaining theories, which deal with the actual process of accommodation and give adequate weight to contextual factors are found to explain the situation more adequately than theories which rely on a particular set of consociational ‘devices’.     

You’ve got to fight to be white: the rural foundation of the new militia for race control

In this paper, we situate the recent rise of racialized and often violent political discourse within a framework of a class-based conception of nature and property. In this theoretical work, we contribute to thinking about how Whites are racially constituted by showing how an understanding of whiteness among the far right is significantly linked to narratives surrounding rural spaces as havens of individualism and in sharp contrast to the perceived multiculturalism of the city. In developing our argument, we utilize public statements made by Ted Nugent as observable examples of this far-right, violent, and racialized rhetoric. We argue that the far right is able to create a common ground with moderate conservatives around a shared understanding of rural places as embodiments of virtuous white culture, private property, and individualism. This politicized whiteness project, we argue, helps to galvanize and strengthen a conservative coalition while simultaneously pulling their collective ideology further to the right.