Historicity and citizenship as conditions for national minority rights in Central Europe: old principles in a new migration context

Having a historical presence in a country and citizenship of that country are two basic conditions under which national minority rights are granted in many countries, but increasing international migration has started to pose a challenge to this conception. Like other countries of Central Europe, the Czech Republic has adopted the two conditions for granting rights to traditional ‘national minorities’ and has developed a separate policy for the ‘integration of foreigners’; however, the emergence of the second generation of Vietnamese has presented a special challenge to this two-tier policy system. Recent renegotiation of the historicity of this immigrant group has resulted in its ‘official recognition’ as a national minority. This paper discusses this case in its wider Central European context, and addresses the question of whether we are observing an erosion of the two-tier policy system or a reconsideration of the distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ minorities. Finally, the paper touches upon the question of the role and usability of ‘old’ minority language rights, considering the lack of interest among the traditional minorities vs. the linguistic situation of the migrants’ second generation.     

论民族经济法学经济分析方法的必然性

作为以民族经济法律现象及其发展规律为研究对象的一门交叉学科 ,民族经济法学的基本研究方法是经济分析的方法。从历史必然性和逻辑一致性两方面来看 ,经济分析是必要的。从民族经济法调整对象的经济性、民族经济法公平的世界观和经济的世界观的统一性、民族经济法律规范的相对稀缺性方面看 ,经济分析具有可能性。经济分析的具体方法是成本—效益分析法和规范分析与实证分析相结合的方法     

Between a ‘student abroad’ and ‘being from Latvia’: inequalities of access,prestige, and foreign-earned cultural capital

ABSTRACT

This paper visualises tertiary-level students who study abroad as simultaneously both international students and members of an emerging diaspora. Coming from a country (Latvia) which is peripheral and relatively poor by European standards, students go abroad for multiple reasons not necessarily directly connected with study (e.g. family reasons, labour migration); yet their evolving diasporic status is instrumentalised by the Latvian government which wants them to return and contribute to the country’s development. Based on 27 in-depth interviews with Latvian students and graduates who have studied abroad, our analysis focuses on three interlinked dimensions of inequality: access to education at home and abroad; the varying prestige of higher education qualifications from different countries and universities; and the inequalities involved in getting recognition of the symbolic and cultural capital that derives from a non-Latvian university. Within a setting of neoliberal globalisation and conflicting messages from the homeland, students and graduates are faced with a challenging dilemma: how to balance their materialistic desire for a decent job and career with their patriotic duty to return to Latvia.     

扩大的市场——基于对青海黄南藏族自治州“唐卡”市场的分析

市场是经济学核心概念之一。本文通过田野工作的方法,以黄南藏族自治州唐卡市场分析为个案,对西方经济学理念中的市场提出质疑。认为"市场"不仅仅是经济学意义上的经济资本运作的时空,而是一个包含经济资本、政治资本、文化资本、社会资本与象征资本运行和相互转化的"扩大的市场"。由此对目前中国市场转型理论及实践提出反思。     

Arrivals and Arrivals: Royal Travel at Botany Bay

This article looks at how the sites of the beach and the airport have functioned as chronotopes of 'arrivalism' in Australian history. I suggest that narratives surrounding Queen Elizabeth's 1970 royal tour of Australia, initiated and terminated at Sydney Airport, drew on existing structures of primitivism and modernity at the site of the beach. A re-enactment of Cook's landing at Botany Bay on Australia Day 1970 thus re-inscribed the nation within global space: it showed aboriginal people bearing witness to the (re-)arrival of the colonists. This narrative of national progress linked the British colonial project and Australian economic development — just as Cook 'discovered' Australia, the Queen's flight 'discovered' anew the international space of air travel and trade. A second re-enactment by trade unions and environmental protestors nearby on Australia Day 1976 contested this narrative, and offered an alternative nationalist vision at the site of the beach.     

Labour migrants in post-Soviet Moscow: patterns of settlement*

This article explores the impact of the social and the spatial structures of Moscow on the patterns of settlement of labour migrants. It emphasizes the ways in which the structure of post-Soviet urban environment differs from the European and U.S. one, and uses interviews with guest workers from Central Asia to map out the strategies they employ in their search for accommodation in Moscow, as well as the barriers they encounter. Special attention is paid to the role played by ethnic networks in the lives of migrant workers, and the ways in which these networks are configured by the urban space. This article demonstrates how the absence of spatial segregation in the post-Soviet city, inherited from the Soviet period, affects the trajectories of social and economic integration of migrants and explains the absence of ‘ethnic areas’ in today’s Moscow.     

Regional migration governance – building block of global initiatives?

ABSTRACT

Regional institutions addressing mobility, asylum, migrant rights or migration control have proliferated all over the world and occupy an important space in recent UN initiatives to boost global cooperation on migration and refugees. Unlike Europe, where these different aspects of migration policy have come under the ambit of one institution, the European Union, regional initiatives in other parts of the world tend to emerge in different fora, with overlapping but incongruent memberships. Introducing a taxonomy of regional migration institutions, this article assesses regionalism's contribution to multilevel migration governance in two dimensions: the vertical interplay between regional and multilateral institutions on the one hand and the horizontal relationship between regional institutions on the other hand. The article concludes that regional (economic) integration frameworks like ASEAN, ECOWAS or MERCOSUR may prove fruitful anchors for more substantial regional migration governance.     

全球化视野下的社会凝聚:理论与实践探索

社会凝聚是一个国家社会和谐程度的重要体现和社会发展状况的本质表现,也是社会成员相互关系以及社会共同价值信仰、认同感、归属感、信任感的综合反映。在全球化背景下,尤其是近年来伴随国际局势的风雨突变、全球范围内社会和经济的多元发展变化,社会凝聚的理念受到越来越多的国家政府和国际组织的关注,对其研究渐成热点。从欧洲社会凝聚研究传统的延续到北美洲以加拿大为代表的指标操作化研究,都取得了卓有成效的成果,凸显了社会凝聚对国家协调发展的重要意义。     

Nuclear fetishism,the fear of the ‘Islamic’ bomb and national identity in Iran

The paper's focus is the concurrence in the Islamic Republic of Iran between the state's enrichment of uranium, internationally feared as a potential Islamic atomic bomb, and the identification of the radio-active material by many Iranians as a national cultural object. In contrast to the Islamic virtues imposed by the state that had created an autarkic image of Iranians in the global context, nuclear technology offered them the opportunity to become cosmopolitan consumers of nuclear energy, a global product that also represented the ‘excellence’ of Iranian scientists’ and engineers’ competence. Instrumental in this re-invention of national identity outside the political space was a reified (fetishised) conception of the nuclear object as a utility – nuclear energy. The enhanced utilitarian use of nuclear material mystified (metamorphosed) both the oppressive relation of Iranian people with their Muslim rulers and their incongruous relation with the rest of the world. The mystifying impact of nuclear production on their national and international relations served Iranians to draw on their role as internationally recognised bourgeois agents (burghers) by subsuming (neutralising) their brutalised relation with the Muslim rulers within the instrumental relation of producers/consumers of the nuclear product. Thus, in their exclusive demand for the right to emulate the non-Iranian producers/consumers of nuclear energy as a global product, Iranians acted in their capacity as burghers. A burgher is defined here, following Hegel, as the agent of civil society whose primary concern is to pursue his/her own interest by using the needs of others as the means to satisfy his/her own. The rationality that governs the action by burghers is ‘the suitability of means to their ends’. By adopting the rationality of a burgher, Iranians abandoned their quest for citizenship. The rights of citizen, in contrast with the cosmopolitan right of burgher to emulate producers/consumers, were geared to the exercise of individual autonomy within the political space, as a domain of contested representations. The paper examines the inadequate mediation of modern institutions that has historically postponed the nationalisation of Iranian society and has delayed the emergence of the Iranian nation as a political community. Looked at from this standpoint, nuclear production offered to Iranians the opportunity to avoid a hazardous route of taking part in a political construction of Iranian identity by acting as citizens and instead draw on their fragmented bourgeois identity to define the nuclear product as ‘national’. This identification matched their Muslim rulers’ interest to represent the enriched uranium internationally as a national, as opposed to Islamic, achievement without having to face the Iranian nation as a political community. The consequence was the Iranians’ failure to deal with nuclear technology and the question of public safety both as a national and international issue which could only be addressed if Iranians had acted in their capacity as citizens.     

Networks beyond nationalities? Relationships amongst Eastern European women workers in Italy facing the economic crisis

ABSTRACT

This article explores the intricate relationship between Georgian, Ukrainian and Polish women working as live-in elderly caregivers in the province of Reggio Emilia, Italy. Their case shows how both elements of competition and of support can articulate the relationship between national groups that, on the one side, have in common some cultural, linguistic and historical legacies, but, on the other, have a different legal status in the European Union and positions in the Italian labour market for elderly care. In so doing, this article contributes to the debate on migrants’ social networks by pointing to the necessity of further exploring the boundaries that define people’s participation to the same circle of contacts and relationships that constitute their network of reference. From the analysis of 36 in-depth interviews with women of these nationalities, the article shows how the three groups have overlapped through time in the same Italian areas and how they have emulated each other in their migratory trajectories as well as in their employment strategies in the elderly care sector, but it will also underline how in some cases they have competed and been divided, especially beginning in 2008 as a consequence of the economic crisis.     

Tareq Oubrou's Geotheology: Shari'ah of the Minority and the Secularization of Islamic Theology in the European Context

This article introduces the work of the French imam-theologian Tareq Oubrou as a prominent voice of the emerging “European Islamic thought”. It argues that the imam uses Islamic classical jurisprudential devices (such as fatwas), contemporary hermeneutics and critical thought, and personal communion with the divine (spirituality) to renew the understanding of God, Man, and the Qura'n in the European context. In so doing, he (1) “relativizes” shari'ah law by emphasizing the questions of ethics and meaning, (2) “minoritizes” Islam as a religion in a pluralist liberal milieu, and (3) “localizes” its norms, “nationalizes” religious authority, and “institutionalizes” its manifestations. His work is synthesized in this article in three concepts: (1) “geotheology,” (2) “shari'ah of the minority” which are Oubrou's own terms/concepts, and (3) “European Islam”.     

复线逻辑:“行动”中的壮族习惯法及其未来面向研究——以贵州省N自治县为表述对象

以时间为自变量,空间为他变量,辅之田野方法,方可促成对壮族习惯法演化机制的立体解构。就实践表征而言,壮族习惯法并非静止不变,它既与本民族在区域社会中的生存状态、经济活动、社会地位、文化生活息息相关,又体现出族群在面对不同政治经济环境时所做出的竞争、协商与妥协。"国家在场"对壮族习惯法的形塑,采取的是一种复线逻辑,并聚焦于载体重构、机制再造、属性蜕变三重维度。在壮族习惯法的未来发展面向上,应实现三个转变,即支配逻辑层面的"效力外溢"到"效力紧缩",传承策略层面的"单一型范"到"兼容并蓄",生存契机层面的"法律一元"到"多元司法"。     

Youth sport and community segregation: a study of kids’ participation in Australian rules football and soccer clubs in an Australian community

ABSTRACT

This research addresses the appeal for more empirical-based research on exclusionary practices in local community sport that often go unchallenged within dominant discourses. By examining how organised community sport clubs can uphold systemic segregation of various ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious and socioeconomic groups, this study also draws attention to the importance of research on race, ethnicity, and education in primary school age children; a population group often ignored in both racism studies and studies of sport. Using interview and focus group data from school principals and students (aged 9–12), including students from refugee and asylum seeker migrant backgrounds, collected over 3 years from two schools in the same multicultural community in Melbourne, Australia, this paper challenges the depiction of sport as an uncontested inclusive space in national and educational discourse, and instead demonstrates the continued existence of exclusion through systemically mediated segregation in organised community youth sport.     

Latin America as political science’s other

ABSTRACT

This article develops a decolonising critique of contemporary Latin American focused Political Science (LAPS) demonstrating the complicity of its politics of knowledge in the reproduction of the logic and rationalities of coloniality. These logics and rationalities are premised upon the dehumanisation of the raced and gendered other who is denied rationality, agency and political subjectivity. I demonstrate the monological and dehumanising epistemological consequences of this through deconstruction of the foundational myths and disciplinary boundaries of the discipline; the legitimate subject of the political; and the knowing-subject of political analysis that foreground contemporary LAPS. I end with a question and a challenge: how might we learn to create a political science otherwise?     

Media Representations of Islam in Britain: A Sojourner Perspective

This paper presents findings from a qualitative study in Britain on international Muslim students’ perceptions of media portrayals of Islam. Eighteen international students were interviewed; they came from a range of countries so that a diversity of opinion could be gathered. The paper reveals that participants perceived the representation of Islam in the British media to be negative, being associated with conservatism, economic backwardness and terrorism. Participants criticised the media’s tendency towards the homogenisation of Muslims and of Muslim communities and countries. They also called on media organisations to balance the negative portrait of Islam with positive news stories and to be more responsible in their reporting of terrorism. Interestingly, it could be observed that their direct consumption of UK media was limited, pointing to the possibility that their views were either “discursively” driven or were the product of “passive media consumption”.     

Post-agreement societies and inter-ethnic competition: A comparative study of the Protestant community of Londonderry and the white population of Pretoria

The arrival of thousands of international students from Asia and the Pacific after the Second World War has reshaped the social and political texture of Australian life by helping undermine long-held suspicions of inferiority, racial pollution and political disruption. This article examines the transnational experience of sponsored and private overseas scholars in relation to the growing body of transnational theory and suggests why scholarly discourse and Australian museums have largely omitted non-permanent migrants, such as student sojourners. It also suggests how museums might avoid the pitfalls of the multicultural or pluralist imperatives that guide migrant heritage collection and exhibition practices.     

Exploring the intersection of transnationalism and critical race theory: a critical race analysis of international student experiences in the United States

International student mobility to the United States (US) has increased over the past two decades. Despite the increase in numbers, international students may experience racism, nativism, and other forms of discrimination within the US context. Much of the existing literature focus on how international students can assimilate and cope with these issues rather than interrogating the systems of oppression that create negative student experiences. Thus, we utilized critical race theory (CRT) as a framework for interrogating how international student experiences are portrayed in current literature. Although CRT is grounded in US-based legal theory, we argue that CRT must move beyond the rigid confinement within US borders and expand to consider how transnationalism and global exchange contributes to the fluidity and applicability of this theory. We also provide recommendations for critical race praxis, with an emphasis on implications for practice, theory, and future research.     

Contested control at the margins of the state

ABSTRACT

While the fact that the implementation of migration policies fails to perfectly manage migration is well known, the actual dynamics of policy implementation have received little attention to date. A serious engagement with this phenomenon requires a move beyond policy texts and political intentions, and towards a ‘migration regime’ perspective that pays attention to the inherent contradictions, conflicts of interest and competing logics within migration control practices. This collection posits a multi-actor perspective that includes state agents, migrants and non-state actors alike and proposes three key factors that require a closer examination: competing institutional logics, discretionary practices and migrants’ agency. Based on original empirical research, the contributions of this collection ‘zoom in’ on specific asymmetrical negotiations over the right to enter or remain in Europe, and focus on the institutional logics and interplay between the different actors involved.     

欧洲安全防务政策的人类学与政治学分析

欧洲安全防务政策(ESDP)是欧洲一体化进程的重要一环。本文试图从人类学与政治学的角度分析ESDP产生与发展的内在逻辑与动因,采用了将几种主要的欧洲一体化理论分别对ESDP进行解释并相互比较的方法。结果证明,主要立足于“欧洲联邦”政治理念的联邦主义和立足于国家中心思想的政府间主义都无法充分揭示并说明ESDP的基本逻辑,而新功能主义拥有的独特原理——“功能需要引起结构变化”与其核心概念——“外溢”机制可以对ESDP的内在逻辑与基本动因做出合理的解释。