This is from the description on the OUP website: "This Commentary provides the reader with a review of international standards and practice relating to the political participation of minorities. Political participation has been increasingly recognized as a foundational issue in the debate about minority rights. It is argued that minorities are more likely to feel co-ownership in the state if they have the opportunity to participate freely and effectively in all aspects of its governance, and that sustained and meaningful engagement will guard against the sense of alienation and exclusion among minorities that often emerges in ethnically divided societies."
On 14 and 15 January I'm participating in a conference on "Romani Mobilities in Europe: Multidisciplinary Perspectives", organized by the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. The programme can be found here. My paper is called "Between Europeanization and Discrimination: The Roma as a Special Focus of EU Policy". And this is the abstract:
Since the accession of ten post-communist countries to the European Union (EU), various EU institutions have expressed their concern about the precarious social position of the Roma in these new member states. The EU has singled out this group for extra attention. This strategy is based on the assumption that the Roma need support "from above" because they - in contrast to other minorities in this region - have no clear national lobby or external homeland to defend their interests. The EU is thus considered to be the Roma's best ally. This paper sets the benefits of such special EU concern against the problem of its politicization. The EU has managed the put the Roma on the political agenda by considering them a category of people who are exceptionally vulnerable and therefore in need of special attention; but this EU attention - although well intended and, in certain aspects, not unlikely to produce some positive effects - can have problematic unintended consequences once it becomes politicized in the domestic arenas of countries where politicians try to mobilize voters on an ethnic basis and seek to win the support of Euroskeptic citizens.
July 6, 2009: Marginality, Advocacy, and the Ambiguities of Multiculturalism: Notes on Romani Activism in Central Europe. Activists who take up the cause of marginalized and discriminated cultural groups often find themselves in an ambiguous position in relation to the very people whose interests they seek to represent. Inspired by the ideas of multiculturalism, minority advocates turn the cultural identity of marginalized and discriminated minorities into the central focus of a political struggle for recognition. By so doing, however, they tend to construct a particular sectional minority identity that not only fails to give full expression to individual identities, but is usually also “stigmatized” in the sense that it is popularly associated with stereotypical images and negative characteristics. In this session focus is on this ambiguity in contemporary projects of minority rights advocacy aimed at redressing the social and economic grievances of the Roma in Central Europe. We will explore how activists in the articulation of their claims rely on essentialist assumptions of Romani identity. While these minority rights claims resonate well in international forums, they also run the risk of reifying cultural boundaries, stimulating thinking in ethnic collectives, reinforcing stereotypes, and hampering collective action. By reviewing some of the recent literature on multiculturalism in social and political theory, we will also examine ways of dealing with this ambiguity. Can minority advocacy for the Roma avoid the tacit reproduction of essential identities by contesting the essentializing categorization schemes that lie at the heart of categorized oppression and by foregrounding the structural inequality that drives political mobilization?
July 7, 2009: Romani Mobilization and the Role of Frames Students of social movement have frequently focused their research on 'framing processes'. These are the actions of movement actors to disseminate their understanding of social reality among a wider audience with the purpose of appealing to and mobilizing a constituency. The concept of framing provides a useful contribution to the study of ethnic minority mobilization since it directs attention to cognition and persuasion. According to the framing approach, the boundaries of an ethnic minority identity are continuously reconstituted in the light of the present (political and institutional) circumstances, even in cases where there are seemingly ‘objective’ historical and cultural foundations of this identity. Thus, an ethnic minority is not simply a group of people that differs from the rest of society in terms of language, tradition and so forth, but rather the result of a process in which such differences are made socially and politically meaningful and are acted upon. By employing the concept of framing to the subject area of ethnic mobilization, an opportunity is created to examine the element of choice in the construction of an ethnic identity (the use of intentional frames) as well as the element of designation (the presence of countermobilizing frames or the (in)ability of a particular frame to resonate in a given context).
July 8, 2009: Romani Mobilization and International Opportunity Structures Students of social movements and scholars in international politics have increasingly been interested in the study of 'international political opportunity structures'. In this session we will discuss the value and the constraints of a research perspective that focuses on political opportunity structures in the study of Romani politics. In the context of internationalizing norms for ethnic minority protection the treatment of the Roma became to some extent an element in the construction of a country’s international reputation. From the perspective of a political opportunity approach one would expect national Romani movement actors in certain countries to have welcomed the critical interference of both international governmental organizations and international NGOs in domestic affairs. But have Romani activists indeed experienced IGOs and international NGOs as their allies? Has this new international context indeed provided new opportunities? Has this international involvement been conducive to the formation of a Romani movement in Central Europe? Have processes of Europeanization in this particular region really increased institutional access points for Romani activists?
My article on "National Minorities and International Change: Being Ukrainian in Contemporary Poland" has appeared in the May 2009 issue of Europe-Asia Studies. The paper explores how interstate relations affect domestic processes of minority mobilization. It focuses on Ukrainian minority activism in Poland against the background of the changing relations between Poland and Ukraine. I argue that the influence of interstate relations on national minority activism is more complex than a traditional view of kin-state politics might make us assume. There is not always a direct link between national minorities activists and "their" external homeland. In case of the Ukrainian minority in Poland, for example, it is clear that activists not always want to base their actions on the idea that they "belong" to Ukraine. Although these minority activists oppose assimilation - they seek to maintain and even revive Ukrainian culture - they confine their action largely to issues that relate to the Polish public arena, and they want to present themselves as loyal Polish citizens. They seek to construct themselves as migrants, not from Ukraine, but from the past. They are a minority from another Poland, a multiethnic country that does not exist in the same way anymore.
On April 23 I'm presenting the paper "Along ethnic lines: minority organizations in Europe and the limits and opportunities of institutional representation" at the 14th Annual World Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN), Columbia University, New York.
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