Origins and Implications of Ethnic Conflicts: A Historical Perspective, Apuntes de Ciencia de la administración

¡Descarga Origins and Implications of Ethnic Conflicts: A Historical Perspective y más Apuntes en PDF de Ciencia de la administración solo en Docsity! Introduction: Ethnopolitics: Conflict versus cooperation 1. THE HUMAN DIMENSION. Facts, figures, and stories of ethnic conflict Data collected by researches at the international Peace Research Institute in Oslo and the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University: 1946- 2001 there were 50 ethnic conflicts. Of these, 60% started and some of them ended before 1990 whilst the other 40% dated in the post-1990 period. E.C. as an international security challenge: Yemen is one among many examples of ethnic conflict as a phenomena with major international security implications. Links, differing in scale and intensity, exist btw ethnic conflict, organised crime and 7or international terrorism. Examples: Iraq and Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Nigeria, Burma, Bangladesh and north-east India, and in the separatist regions of Chechnya, Igushetia, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Transnitria. 2. ETHNICITY AND NATIONALISM T1. W7. Ethnicity, Nations and Nationalism A universal definition of the concept “nation” does not exist because the politics of nationalism is one of inclusion and exclusion. Whosoever set the terms of the debate also sets the criteria for national membership and belonging. What is a nation? Where and when it came from? About the origin of “nations” we identify 2 perspectives: modernist and primordialist. 1. Modernist position nation as a relatively recent invention intended to answer that most vexing of modern political conundrums “where does sovereignty lie?”. The emergence of nations is linked to the transformations of social, economic and political life that began in Europe during the 18th and 19th and spread around the globe (The Polanyi “Great Transformation”). However, se can distinguish btw 3 modernist thinkers on the origins of nations: • Elie Kedourie: the great transformation is a top-down intellectual revolution that emerge with the German idealist philosophy and the European Romantic movement. Nationalism is a “doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century” to supply a criteria for the determination of the unit of population proper to enjoy a government exclusively its own, for the legitimate exercise of power in the state, and for the right organization of a society of states. This is an idealist account. Ethnic Conflict: a global perspective 23/03/13 01:19 • Ernest Gellner: a materialist view of the origin of the nations. The transformation from agrarian to industrial society (dependent upon the effective organization of the mass population) explains the emergence of nations and its concomitant ideology of nationalism. It is a bottom- up transformation reinforce by a top-down imperative: employers, generals and the political rulers needed to communicate with the newly industrialised masses in order to effectively control them. These material changes set the crucial historical context for the political salience of “nations” and the ideology of nationalism. • Benedict Anderson: constructivist account offers a middle way. He credits the raise of a mass vernacular print media and its effect on the emergence of a unified “national” identity as the key component of the great transformation. The vernacular media created the context through which individuals imagined themselves members of mass, national communities beyond their immediate locale. The great transformation was a process of dislocation that allowed peasant to become industrial worker and make the individual “cog in the wheel”. A new sentimental attachment to the nation provided a communal association to replace the familiar agrarian life left behind. The nation become the focal point of music, artistic representation and public commemoration. Without this public remaining the nation could not have achieved its role as the basic organizing idea of modernity. 2. Primordialist position Adrian Hastings, Walker Connor and Anthony Smith. They see the nation as a social category of long durée. They reject the core modernist assumption that nations emerge from the “great transformation”. Anthony Smith in his “Warwick debate” with Ernest Gellner said: just in the context of pre-modern ethnic identities and communities, antecedent ethnic ties, is that modern political nationalism can be understood. The primordialist position on the origin of nations can be traced back to the German Romantic philosophers such as Fichte and Herder and their emphasis on an ancient and inherited social practices, above all language, as the source of authentic “national” community. From this view the modern ideology of nationalism adopt a new dimension: linguistic affinity and vernacular speech are not just means to and end (functioning of industrial economy, society, and politics) but an end in itself (the basis for a popular sovereignty). Whereas modernist theories postulate a decisive break btw the pre-modern agrarian past and industrial present, primordialists emphasis the importance of continuity over change. **James Mayall refers to “Sleeping Beauty thesis” nations have always existed but to be reawakened into modern political consciousness. Contemporary scholars sympathetic to the primordialist position accept the ideology of nationalism as an adjunct to the doctrine of popular sovereignty, but they challenge the modernist claim that the mergence of the ideology precedes the formation of the “nation” qua identity and community. -Adrian Hastings: England (the prototype of both, nations and the nation-state) manifest itself long before the “great transformation”. threat to popular sovereignty. National survival is dependent upon the survival of the ethnie within its historical homeland. It assumes that political stability in an ethnic nation-state cannot tolerate ethnic diversity as such division will undermine the integrity of the overarching political order by calling into question the myth if common descent upon which it rests, This perspective views ethnicity in zero-sum terms such that coexistence btw ethnic groups within the same jurisdiction is not an option. The consequence: those unsuccessful in the race to capture their own nation-state have to confront 2 options: assimilation or accepting a permanent position of minority with the risk of discrimination and persecution. The alternative is to engage in a politics of secession or irredentism to overcome the unpalatable minority position. *But: international society is biased in favour of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of existing states. Conclusion: National identities are malleable rather than fixed and they can and do conflict. Nation is a contested concept. The academic controversies on the origin of the nations are intrincately entangled in current political controversies on the future of nations. Milan Kundera: “struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. T1. W8: Gender and Nationalism Miranda Alison. Theorizing women- and-peace, nationalism and females combatants: There is no all-inclusive singular feminist approach to issues of war and peace, or women´s relation to and role in them. About women´s involvement in nationalism: women can do and do participate in ethnic and national processes in a number of ways: - as biological reproducers of the ethnic community, - as reproducer of the boundaries of ethnic or national groups, - as key actors in the transmission of the community´s values, - as markers of ethnic or national distinctiveness and - as active participants in national struggles. Even in this case, women are left holding the wrong end of citizenship stick, which is itself “gendered and racialised”. Differences of class, status and ethnicity exert varying influences upon discrete categories of women, not least in relation with labour market. Moghadam. The balance btw women an nationalism can be likening to an unhappy marriage. According to Pettman, whether nationalism is understood as progressiveor reactionary, liberal o illiberal, racist or multi-cultural, democratic or undemocratic.. “Nationality and citizenship, like race and ethnicity, are unstable categories and contested identities. They are all gendered identities and the construction of “women”, inside and outside their borders, are part of the processes if identity formation”. Nationalism and Masculinity: Enloe asserts that Women haven´t had a n easy relationship with nationalism. They “have often been treated more as symbols than as active participants by nationalist movements organized to end colonialism and racism”. Women as symbols, women as workers and women as nurturers have been crucial to the entire colonial undertaking. Nationalism typically has sprung from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation and masculinized hope. Anger at being “emasculated” or turn into a “nation of busboys” is the fuel for igniting a nationalist movement. “Colonialism is specially fertile ground for nationalists ideas because it gives an otherwise divided people such a potent shared experience of foreign domination”. Some nationalism have been the victims of racism and colonization; others have been the perpetrator of racism and colonialism. to Enloce the following assumptions: 1. the community´s, or nation´s, most valuable possessions; 2. the principal vehicles for transmitting the whole nation´s values from one generation to the next; 3. bearer of the community´s future generations- crudely, nationalist wombs; 4. the member if the community most vulnerable to defilement and explotation by oppressive alien rulers; and 5. ,ost susceptible to assimilation and cooption by insidious outsiders. All the assumption have made women´s behavior important in the eyes of nationalist men. “The history of a nationalist movement is almost always a history filled with gendered debate”. “But every time women succumb to the pressures to hold their tongues about problems they are having with men in a nationalist organization, nationalism becomes that much more masculinized”. Nationalism has provide millions of women with a space to be international actors… Furthermore, nationalism, more than any other ideologies, has a vision that includes women, for no nation can survive without culture being transmitted and children being born and nurtured”. Nationalism, by definition, is a set of ideas that sharpens distinctions btw “us” and “them”. It is, moreover, a tool for explaining how inequities have been created btw “us” and “them”. 23/03/13 01:19