Ethnicity and Sociopolitical Change in Africa and Other Developing Countries (eBook)

A Constructive Discourse in State Building

Santosh C. Saha (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2008
266 Seiten
Lexington Books (Verlag)
978-1-4616-3340-2 (ISBN)

Infos

This edited book on constructive ethnicity argues that the modernizing state system in developing countries unduly denies a legitimate place to the linguistic and ethnic groups who, despite habitual attachment to ethnic groups, might meaningfully help the slow process of state building. Here ethnicity is characterized as positive, and as such, moral and pragmatic. Despite ethnicity's natural inclination to polarization, a national community can be reconstructed, as is exemplified by recent events in Rwanda, Cyprus, India, Palestine, and China.

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This edited collection of essays answers a basic question posed by contemporary discourse on state building: How might people's identification with a particular ethnic group matter? Essays in this book use an integrated, multi-disciplinary approach to understanding regional and local community culture and socio-political development in developing countries-especially in Sub-Saharan Africa-to argue that the state, as well as civil society, confers on cultural differences a legitimacy that can be achieved in no other way but by positive cooperation. Contributors from different countries look at local patterns in state building and modernization as they have unfolded over the course of the last fifty years. They claim that the people and ethnic groups in most developing countries adhere to a concept of popular sovereignty that testifies that aspects of positive and moral ethnicity can contribute to social change as in China, economic development as in India, or in a democratization process as in Rwanda and Burundi. The eventual methodological assumption made by these essays presumes that ethnic conflicts in such countries as Cyprus, Turkey, India, and Rwanda have no moral sanction; ethnicity has not assumed a political ideology. One conclusion reached by the contributors is that some form of accommodation between opposing ethnically diversified groups, as well as between state and ethnic elements, is feasible.

Autor

Santosh C. Saha is professor of history at Mount Union College in Ohio.

Inhalt

Part 1 African CountriesChapter 2 Moral Ethnicity in Sub-Saharan African National Identity Issues: Ethnicity and State-BuildingChapter 3 Reconstructing or Dismantling the Nation? A New RwandaChapter 4 Education for Social Change in Burundi and Rwanda: Creating a National Identity beyond the Politics of EthnicityChapter 5 Rwanda-Burundi's "National-Ethnic" Dilemma: Democracy, Deep Divisions and Conflict Re-RepresentChapter 6 Overstating the Connection between Ethnicity and Military Coups d'Etats in Africa: A Meta-analysisPart 7 Other Developing CountriesChapter 8 Third-Party Intervention in Ethnic Conflict: Turkey's Intervention in Cyprus and Role TheoryChapter 9 Ethnicity and the Role of Education as a Mechanism for National Unity in ChinaChapter 10 Ethnic and Civil Nationhood in India: Concept, History, Institutional Innovations and Contemporary ChallengesChapter 11 The Palestinians and the Kurds: A Comparative AnalysisPart 12 BibliographyPart 13 ContributorsPart 14 Index

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 7.3.2008
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Staat / Verwaltung
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• ISBN-10: 1-4616-3340-0 / 1461633400
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4616-3340-2 / 9781461633402