This chapter explores the relationship between ethnopolitics and nationalism, and more specifically how ethnic identity contributes to war and the amelioration of ethnic conflicts. It first considers the construction and politicization of ethnic identities — in other words, the construction of ethnic and ethnopolitical identities — before discussing the construction of a variety of nationalist identities in the developing world. It then examines the conflictual, competitive, and cooperative interactions of groups based on nationalist identities with one another and with states, along with states’ efforts to mould these interactions in ways that enhance the legitimacy of state-based nations and their support from various groups. The chapter shows that cooperative interactions tend to promote nation-building through multi-ethnic/multicultural nationalism.
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Stephanie Lawson
Global Politics is an introduction to international relations. It introduces the key theories and concepts underpinning the discipline, providing a foundation for the study of politics on both a personal and global scale, including issues relating to gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, as well as the economy, environment, and concepts of justice. The text presents theories in their historical context, demonstrating how they can evolve over time. Case studies, both contemporary and historical, and biographies of key figures, help bring these issues to life. Additional features, such as key debates and summary questions, provide opportunities to analyse issues from a range of perspectives.
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This chapter turns to issues relating to political power and society. The goal of a contemporary democracy is to allow people to be both equal and different. The UK is a diverse society and people in the UK differ in many ways by their gender, sexuality, abilities, ethnicity, religious beliefs, age, and many other aspects. The importance of various ‘identities’ has recently been recognised in UK politics and they now co-exist alongside more traditional ways of classifying people which tend to lie along socio-economic lines. The chapter then looks at the effectiveness of scrutiny measures to protect people from unequal treatment in the political or legal sphere on the basis of their identity.
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Daniel Deudney and Jeffrey Meiser
This chapter examines how America can be described as different and exceptional. The belief in American exceptionalism is based upon a number of core realities, including American military primacy, economic dynamism, and political diversity. Understanding understanding American exceptionalism is essential for understanding not only U.S. foreign policy but also major aspects of contemporary world politics. The chapter first considers the meaning of exceptionalism, the critics of American exceptionalism, and the roots of American success. It then discusses the liberalism that makes the United States exceptional, along with peculiar American identity formations of ethnicity, religion, and ‘race’. It also explores the role of American exceptionality across the five major epochs of American foreign policy, from the nation’s founding to the present. It concludes by reflecting on the significance of the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 to the story of American exceptionalism, difference, and peculiar Americanism.
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This chapter focuses on fundamental assumptions that researchers make about how we can know and develop knowledge about the social world, such as assumptions about the nature of human behaviour and the methods appropriate to studying and explaining that behaviour. The main objective is how to carry out a systematic and rigorous investigation of social phenomena. The chapter considers three different answers to the question of how to approach the study of social phenomena: those offered by positivism, scientific realism, and interpretivism. It also explores the differences among these answers and their implications for conducting political research. Finally, it discusses the use of a positivist (rational choice) and interpretivist (constructivist) approach to the analysis of ethnic conflicts in Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
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Tom Kirk, Tim Allen, and John Eade
This chapter explores the rise of identity-based explanations for domestic politics and international conflicts in the 1990s, before turning to the War on Terror and its affects. An influential view of the current global situation is that there is a clash of civilizations or cultures, especially between Islam and the West. This idea has been reinforced by terrorist atrocities in the United States and elsewhere, and by the so-called War on Terror. Conceptualizing cultures as in conflict has origins in older ideas about nationalism and ethnicity, which have had a tendency to absorb or euphemize racist attitudes to outsiders. Several well-known scholars have been scathing about the clash of civilizations thesis, but there is no doubt that the argument has profoundly affected national and international agendas, and helps explain the rise of morally populist, nationalistic, and isolationist policies in many countries. The clash of civilizations also relates more specifically to concerns in the US about its position in the world, and its declining capacity to shape global agendas.
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This chapter evaluates new modes of theorizing in global politics. These are based on long-standing concerns in social and political theory and all of them involve identity politics in one way or another—a form of politics in which an individual’s membership of a group, based on certain distinctive characteristics such as race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexuality, acquires significant political salience and is implicated in hierarchies of power. It follows that identity itself involves issues of both who an individual is, and who that individual is not. This involves not just self-identification or self-definition, but is also mediated by the perceptions of others. In some cases there are connections with social movements concerned with issues of justice and equality in both domestic and global spheres. In almost all cases the specific issues of concern, and their theorization, have come relatively late to the agenda of global politics and so may be said to constitute a ‘new wave’ of theorizing in the discipline. The chapter looks at feminism, gender theory, racism, cultural theory, colonialism, and postcolonial theory.
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This chapter assesses culture as a driver of democracy. Despite the popularity of cultural theories of democracy, there is little empirical evidence to support them. The chapter highlights that although research does not support the notion that cultural factors cause democratization, there is some evidence indicating that culture—as expressed through values, attitudes, and beliefs—affects the persistence of stable democracy. Once democracy has emerged, democracy is most likely to deepen and endure where elites gradually adopt a values-based commitment to the rules of the democratic game. Beyond culture, the chapter also examines several historical drivers of democracy. In particular, it focuses on the most widely discussed social and historical drivers in the academic literature, including state identity and boundaries, ethnic cleavages, and historical experience with democracy and dictatorship. For each of the drivers, the chapter considers how they influence both democratization and democratic consolidation.
Book
Xavier Guillaume and Kyle Grayson
Security Studies: Critical Perspectives takes a question-centred approach by introducing the analysis of security from critical and interdisciplinary perspectives. It provides a set of analytic steps so that readers develop the critical thinking skills and confidence to ask important questions about security and our worlds in contemporary politics. Common-sense security assumptions that reproduce forms of oppression and domination are revealed and their justifications decentred while perspectives inclusive of class, gender and sexualities, ethnicity and race, religion, disability, culture and ideology, political belonging, and the global south are introduced. In doing so, the chapters in this book combine critical analysis with concrete empirical issues that connect readers to the social and political worlds around them.
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Raymond Hinnebusch
This chapter offers critical reviews of the explanatory power of identity and culture in understanding international relations in the Middle East. It focuses on Arabism and other regional ethnicities as sources of political identity. The importance of these identities within the region has been accentuated because of the poor fit between identity and states and regimes — a colonial legacy, but one that remains pertinent today, as revealed in the Arab uprisings. Indeed, the persistence of conflict in the Middle East must be understood through this ‘incongruence of identity and material structures’. Focusing on pan-Arabism, as well as the irredentist and separatist movements that have characterized the history and political development of the region, the chapter shows how the interaction of identity with state formation and development has contributed to numerous wars, and most recently to the evolution of regional developments following the Arab Spring.
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Matthijs Bogaards
This chapter focuses on electoral systems and institutional design in new democracies. It first compares Maurice Duverger’s electoral laws with those of Giovanni Sartori before discussing the main insights from the literature on electoral systems in established democracies as well as evidence from new democracies. It then considers the impact of the electoral law on the type of party system and its role as intermediary between society and government in plural societies. It also examines the party system as an independent variable, along with dependent variables such as the number of political parties, social cleavages, and presidentialism. Finally, it discusses consociational democracy and how electoral system design can be used in managing ethnic conflicts.
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This chapter examines the concept of nation, its relationship with the state, and the phenomenon of nationalism. The concept of nation implies a notion of common biological descent and may thus be associated with ‘race’. In turn, nationalist ideas may be expressed in racist forms, although we must exercise caution when relating nationalism to racism. The chapter first considers the many different ways that the phenomenon of nationalism has been theorized, focusing on nationalist ideology in relation to the nation-state, as expressed in the principle of self-determination, and patriotism as a form of nationalism. It then explores the phenomenon of the multinational state and of sub-state nationalism and discusses three forms of nationalism: ethnic nationalism, civic nationalism, and anti-colonial nationalism. It also shows how nationalism has been faring in the era of globalization.
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Daniel Deudney and Jeffrey W. Meiser
This chapter argues why we must think of the United States as an exceptional kind of nation with a very distinct past and an equally distinct set of capabilities. It first considers American difference and exceptionality before discussing the meaning of exceptionalism, the critics of American exceptionalism, and the roots of American success. It then examines the liberalism that makes the United States exceptional, along with peculiar American identity formations of ethnicity, religion, and ‘race’ and how they interact with — and often subvert — American liberalism. It also analyses the role of American exceptionality across the five major epochs of US foreign policy, from the nation’s founding to the present day. Along the way, the chapter explores notions of American liberal republicanism, anti-statism, state-building, militarism, capitalism and prosperity, immigration, federal internationalism, unipolarity, war on terrorism, and unilateralism.
