A Tale of Two Crises: Migration and Terrorism after the Paris Attacks

By Thomas Nail

Volume 16, Issue 1, pages 158 – 167

This paper argues that the figure of the migrant has come to be seen as a potential terrorist in the West, under the condition of a double, but completely opposed, set of crises internal to the nation‐state. The refugee crisis in Europe can no longer be understood as separate from the crisis of terrorism after the Paris attacks on 13 November 2015. In fact, the two crises were never really separate in the nationalist imaginary to begin with. The difference is that, with such a quick shift of attention between crises, we now see what was only implicit in the European response to the Syrian refugees has now become explicit in the response to the tragic attacks in Paris: that migration is understood to be a form of barbarian warfare that threatens the European Union.

Read the full article here.

Challenges to Power‐Sharing in the Post‐Uprisings Arab World

Volume 20, Issue 2

This special feature grew out of a workshop which gathered together experts on consociational power‐sharing from a comparative perspective. Our aim was to reflect theoretically and normatively on this specific type of democratic power‐sharing – in contrast to centripetalism, multiculturalism, and territorial pluralism (O’Leary 2013), take stock of its empirical record in Lebanon and Iraq, and interrogate its potential utility for other postwar states and societies in the Arab World after the popular uprisings. Consociational power‐sharing’s main institutional features to promote peace and stability in plural societies or postwar divided places consist of a grand coalition, mutual veto, proportionality, and segmental autonomy (Lijphart 1977).

What this parsimonious formula means in practice in different contexts is 1) any variation of a cross‐community executive gathering political elite representatives along ethnic, religious, or sectarian lines, whether of the grand coalition, concurrent executive, or plurality executive types; 2) specified or unspecified veto power on decisions that may affect the political balance of power or infringe on the cultural identity of the different ethnic or sectarian groups; 3) some form of proportionality in the distribution of public offices and resources, and hence a preference for Proportional Representation (PR) electoral laws; and, finally, 4) territorial or non‐territorial community self‐governance particularly on matters pertaining to cultural identity and family law (McCulloch and McGarry 2017; O’Leary 2013).

Read the editor’s introduction here.

Read the full issue here.

Is Nation ‘One of the Most Puzzling and Tendentious Items in the Political Lexicon’?

By Cyril Jayet

Volume 19, Issue 2, pages 152-169

The aim of this paper is to clarify the meaning of the concept of nation, which has often been described as a puzzling concept. I propose first to analyse various definitions of nation, focusing on whether they imply that nations exist and what this means if so, or in what sense they exist. I distinguish four ways of approaching this. I evidence the shortcomings of each approach, and argue that the best one is that proposed by Brubaker: to focus on nationalization as a process and on nationness as a variable, rather than on ‘nations’ as discrete groups. Second, I show how this approach can benefit from Rosch’s theory of categorization, Gellner’s definition of nationalism, and Mann’s theory of the centralization of the state. Finally, I argue that what Gellner called the ‘weakness of nationalism’ explains the puzzle of ‘nations’: although nationalization contributes to shaping society according to the principle of nationalism, it only succeeds to a certain degree, leaving nations always unfinished and impossible to identify clearly.

Read the full article here.

‘My Brother’s Keeper’? Inter‐ethnic Solidarity and Human Rights

By Alison Brysk and Daniel Wehrenfennig

Volume 10, Issue 1, pages 1-18

Why and how do communities that have been victims of human rights abuse advocate for new, unrelated victims of ethnic persecution? Scattered but persistent inter‐ethnic solidarity challenges materialist views of ethnic communities as interest groups, and highlights the importance of social learning and communicative action. In order to trace some promising pathways of inter‐ethnic solidarity, we examine human rights campaigns on behalf of other beleaguered groups by American Jews, Northern Irish Catholics, and African‐Americans. We find that necessary conditions of a structural base and social capital are activated by bridging narratives of human rights that promote Other‐identification among unrelated groups. Analysis of such campaigns has the potential to improve our understanding of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ as an alternative to competitive nationalism and a situated basis for universalist humanitarianism.

Read the full article here.

Education as an Instrument of Nation‐Building in Postcolonial Africa

By Redie Bereketeab

Volume 20, Issue 1, pages 71-90

The article examines the role of education in nation‐building in postcolonial Africa. The postcolonial African nationalist leaders faced formidable challenges in building new nations out of disparate ethnic, religious, cultural, and linguistic groups, particularly as regards the two intimately related processes of deconstruction and construction. While deconstruction entailed dismantling the structures, institutions, and power relations of the colonial period, construction entailed replacing them with relevant national institutions, structures, authorities, and mechanisms. Education was to advance the process of construction and transformation as a pedagogical instrument for cultivating a national identity by fostering integration and cohesion. One of the nationalist leaders’ biggest mistakes, however, was to adopt a homogenizing strategy of nation‐building. The paper subscribes to the conception of heterogeneity as a nation‐building strategy, where ethnic and civic (sub‐national and national) layers constitute the nation. The overall focus of the article is a conceptual and theoretical analysis of the nexus between education and nation‐building in postcolonial Africa. The central argument is that education plays a decisive role in nation‐building in Africa. Eritrea is selected as an empirical case study to advance this argument.

Read the full article here.