1st Edition
Minority Rights and Social Change Norms, Actors and Strategies
Minority movements tirelessly continue to engage in the process of social change, trying to promote and enforce minority protection norms and to have their worldviews, cultural practices and norms recognized by the State. Through an examination of selected cases, this book problematizes how collective identities are not structurally guaranteed but rather constructed in dialectically interrelated positions and identity layers. The authors show the kind of impact that these processes can, or fail to, have on minority norms, actors and strategies.
Going beyond abstract normative principles, this collection reflects both Global North as well as Global South perspectives and examines through a variety of angles the role that race and ethnicity, culture or religion play within social mobilization towards social change. The volume offers global insight on actor and strategy attempts to foster social change through the instrumental use and interpretation of minority rights as norms. This book will be of interest to those researching minority rights broadly understood within the disciplines of Law, Anthropology, Sociology and Political Science.
List of Contributors
FOREWORD: Carlos Gomez Martinez, Member of the UN Human Rights Committee/ Judge
I. Miority Groups at the crossroads of social change: A socio-legal framew Kyriaki Topidi and Eugenia Relaño Pastor
II. Nationalism and Social Movements – Vello Pettai
III. The National Minority as a right-holder and an actor -Boriss Cilevics
IV. Forging Unlikely Alliances: The Power of Social Cohesion in Reducing Gender Discrimination in Traditional Leadership Positions in South Africa - Christa Rautenbach and Rufaro Emily Chikuruwo
V. Cultural Citizenship and the Indonesian Buddhist Community in Postcolonial Indonesia - Martin Ramstedt
PART II: NORMS
VI. Indigenous people and the Mother Earth: can the language of “rights” really capture their claims? - Silvia Bagni
VII. Slavery, Silence, and Rights in the Quilombola communities in Brazil - Shirley A de Miranda/ Stavroula Pipyrou/ Débora Rodrigues Azevedo
VIII. Roma educational discrimination in the Czech Republic and Slovakia: Patterns and tactics of social mobilization to overcome it – Hanna Vassilevich
IX. Claims for Recognition among Muslim minorities in Spain- Johanna M. Lems
PART III: STRATEGIES
X. The Minority Safe Pack Saga – Katharina Crepaz
XI. Religious Pluralism, Minority Protection and Communitarianism in Singapore: An Alternative Model to Actor-based Agency - Li-ann Thio
XII. Xakriabá participation in indigenous movements: youth agency from the local to the global - Ana Maria R. Gomes / Matheus Machado Vaz
XIII. Kurdish Linguistic Rights in Modern Turkey: Category of Minority Rights in-between a Strategical Mechanism of Absorption and a Tactical Tool for Recognition – Cansu Bostan
Biography
Kyriaki Topidi is Head of the Research Cluster on Culture and Diversity and Senior Researcher at the European Centre for Minority Issues, Flensburg, Germany
Eugenia Relaño Pastor is Professor of Law in Complutense University, Madrid, Spain and a cooperation partner at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany
