Ethnic Rights Under Threat: The Black Peasant Movement Against Armed Groups' Pressure in the Chocó, Colombia

During the past decade Colombia has been experiencing the paradox of, on the one hand, enjoying one of the most advanced constitutional frameworks for the empowerment of citizenship rights in general and ethnic rights in particular, and on the other, suffering from the drawn-out effects of endemic violence and armed conflict. In this paper, the manifestation of this paradox in a specific context, that of the black peasants' land rights movement in the Chocó region, is explored. Under the aegis of the 1991 Constitution, organisations of black peasants have been making headway in filing for and receiving substantial collective land titles on the basis of a discourse of black ethnic rights. At the same time, and not coincidentally, various armed actors such as the FARC guerrillas and paramilitary forces have made violent inroads into this region. The violence has led to internal displacement, social uprooting, and the disruption of the organisational efforts of the black peasantry. This has put the process of ethnic construction and mobilisation under severe strain. However, black peasants' organisation have been trying to use the land entitlements as a tool to mount a counterstrategy against the violence inflicted by the armed groups.     

Everyday forms of state decomposition: Quetzaltenango,Guatemala, 1954⋆

This essay explores how Guatemala's 1952 agrarian reform played out among Quetzalteco K'iche's. Much of the academic writing on the revolution is concerned with the way the agrarian reform affected indigenous communities. These studies either view the reform as creating bitter political conflicts within the community, thereby weakening or destroying local institutions of communal politics and identification, or else they understand the reform as deepening incipient class divisions. In all of these studies,‘conflict’is understood to be something antithetical to‘community’. Yet conflict is as essential to communal formation as are more visible identity markers, suggesting an intriguing correlation: the greater the degree of communal conflict, the greater the level of communal identification.     

Disproportionate minority contact in the Dutch juvenile justice system

To examine whether disproportionate minority contact (DMC) exists in the Netherlands, the representation of minority youth was determined for all stages of the juvenile justice system. Using native Dutch youth as a reference group, the odds ratios (OR) to be registered and arrested as suspect, for alternative punishment and for incarceration, were calculated for the minority youth. In all stages of the juvenile justice system, the ORs for minority youths were considerably higher, except for alternative punishment, having lower ORs. This indicates that DMC exists in the Netherlands. DMC should be politicized and programs should be developed to eliminate this inequality.     

马来西亚解决"奥郎·阿斯利"族群问题的政策、影响及其评析

“奥郎.阿斯利”是马来西亚的土著族群,国内相关论述极少。本文分析了“奥郎.阿斯利”问题的形成和政府为解决问题而针对“奥郎.阿斯利”人所实行的政策,并分析了这些政策对“奥郎.阿斯利”人的影响。最后从马来西亚现代化进程的角度对其政策进行了宏观上的评析。通过本文,可以清楚地看到“奥郎.阿斯利”这一落后族群在马来西亚现代化进程中的变迁以及马来西亚政府的政策得失,为多民族国家处理落后民族或者族群问题提供了一定的经验教训。