Specialist
Group on Ethnic Politics
Newsletter Autumn 2002
Dear Members,
We hope this finds you all well. Despite
the summer break that at least those of us in the Northern Hemisphere
enjoyed over the past couple of months, the Specialist Group has
continued in its activities. Below you find a round-up about what
has happened since the last newsletter and some plans for the future.
We are always keen to expand the range and scope of our activities,
so please let us know if you have any ideas regarding new projects.
Group Activities
The
Global Review of Ethnopolitics, our
international journal, continues to be a source of
pride: over 5,000 thousand people accessed issue 4 (June 2002).
The first issue of Volume 2 (September 2002) is now available
and can be accessed at www.ethnopolitics.org. It contains contains articles by David Smith, Ulf Hansson, Barbara Dietz and Maya Chadda; a forum discussion
on the recent Macedonian elections with contributions from Colin
Irwin, Stefan Troebst and Jenny Engström;
a research note by Denise Helly; a review
essay by Angela Hegarty; a website review by Sean Martin; and more
than a dozen book reviews.
Our
first international conference – “Forced Migration: Causes, Consequences
and Responses” – was also a great success, thanks not least to
our co-sponsors: the Political Studies Association of the UK, the
European Research Institute at the University of Bath and the university’s
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and Department of European
Studies. Over sixty delegates attended sixteen panels, 5 plenary
sessions and 50 paper presentations by academic and practitioner
participants from all but one continent, thus making the conference
a very enjoyable, productive and intellectually stimulating event.
Apart from Alan Kuperman, we had a
number of other prolific keynote speakers, including Arthur Helton
from the Council on Foreign Relations, New York, Geoff Gilbert
from Essex University, and Amikam Nachmani from the Begin-Sadat Centre
at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. Several
follow-up initiatives have been planned and some of them have already
been set up, ensuring that our group will continue to be recognised
as an important centre for both scholarly and policy-orientated
research on the important political issues of our time. The full
programme of the conference is still accessible at www.bath.ac.uk/~mlssaw/fm_conference.
We also had a presence at the Annual Meeting of the American
Political Science Association, which this year took place in Boston. The panel “Transcending
Traditional Approaches to Self-Determination”, organised by the
group featured James Gow as Chair, Roberto Belloni (Harvard),
Wolfgang Danspeckgruber (Princeton), Brendan O’Leary
(UPenn) and Stefan Wolff (Bath) as speakers, and
Maya Chadda (William Paterson, NJ) as discussant. Even though we
were unfortunate in the allocation of a slot (Sunday morning 8.45)
we had quite a good turnout and a good response from the audience.
As for the nearer future, we are planning to be present
at next year’s PSA conference in Leicester in April and will
shortly send out a call for papers.
Conference Announcements by Members
Karl & Stefan
will be running a panel at the forthcoming ECPR General Conference
in Marburg, Germany next
September. The panel is
entitled: German-Czech, German-Polish Relations in the Twenty-First
Century: A Comparison. The overall aim of this panel is to assess
comparatively contemporary German-Polish and German-Czech relations. Analysis
of this ‘triangle of fate’, will be made
within the framework of the wider geopolitical background, including
the enlargement of Western institutions into Central and Eastern
Europe. If anyone is interested in
submitting a paper, please contact Karl Cordell via email k.cordell@plymouth.ac.uk.
Daniele Conversi would like to inform you all of the international
symposium “Ethnonationalism in the Contemporary World”, October 4-5, 2002 Middlebury College Middlebury, Vermont Co-Sponsored by
The Ford Foundation “Crossing Borders” Program and Middlebury College. The URL for the
conference web site is: http://www.middlebury.edu/~cfia/symposium.
Publications by Members
Karl Cordell recently presented a paper
entitled ‘The Creation of a ‘Multicultural Estonia and the Decline
and Disappearance of the last of the Baltic Germans, at the International
Conference ‘Multicultural Estonia’, Tallinn, Estonia. If
anyone would like a copy, just e-mail k.cordell@plymouth.ac.uk.
INCORE have recently published ‘Single
Identity Work: An approach to conflict resolution in Northern Ireland’ by Cheyanne Church, Anna Visser and Laurie Johnson. The paper can be downloaded at
http://www.incore.ulst.ac.uk/news/updates/ Hard copies are available
directly from INCORE, e-mail:incore@incore.ulst.ac.uk, Tel:+44
(0)28 7137 5500.
Eben Friedman has recently completed
and defended his Ph.D. dissertation, at the Department of Political
Science at the University of California, San Diego, USA. The title is “Explaining the Political Integration
of Minorities: Roms as a Hard Case,” Eben
can be contacted as follows: University of California, San Diego
Department of Political Science, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA
92093-0521, USA: Telephone: +1 619 497 0823, Fax: +1 858 534 7130,
e-mail efriedma@ucsd.edu
Professor Peter Gatrell and Dr. Nick Baron of Manchester University, UK,
are proud to announce the launch of a new book series “Population
Displacement and Political Space” to be published by Anthem Press,
London. For brief information, please see http://www.art.man.ac.uk/HISTORY/ahrbproj/anthem/series.htm.
There you will also find a downloadable flyer for the series which
you are invited to print out, circulate among colleagues or post
on your departmental notice board, as well as an extensive set
of guidelines for authors who wish to submit proposals to the series.
James Jupp has
recently published: From
White Australia to Woomera:
the story of Australian Immigration, Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, pp. xi +
243.
Petra Kovacs of the LGI Managing
Multiethnic Communities Project (http://lgi.osi.hu/ethnic/) is
pleased to announce publication of Local
Governance and Minority Empowerment in the Commonwealth of Independent
States by Valery Tishkov and
Elena Filippova, 330 pages, ISBN: 963
9419 38 9. Please direct orders to LGIpublications@osi.hu.
Graham Fox of the MRG announces
the following publication: Religious
Minorities in Pakistan by Iftikhar H. Malik. Published by Minority Rights Group International,
ISBN 1 897693, September 2002, A4, wirebound,
pp, £6.70 per copy inc.P&P (£6.95/US$11.75
outside the UK/EIRE).
Vanessa Pupavac has
just published “Therapeutising refugees, pathologising populations: international
psycho-social programmes in Kosovo”, New
Issues
in Refugee Research, Working Paper No. 59. Geneva: UNHCR Evaluation and Policy
Analysis Unit. Available at http://www.unhcr.ch
A special issue of Patterns
of Prejudice on asylum and xenophobia, guest edited by Liza Schuster,
will explore the link between xenophobia and attitudes towards
asylum. Contributions are invited from a variety of social science
disciplines, ideally leading to an issue that offers a discussion
of how this link operates at both policymaking and local levels.
Among the questions that might be explored are: Does xenophobia have an
impact on the formulation and implementation of asylum policy?
To what extent can the popular rhetoric of the defence of ‘our’ security
and nation, or of burdensome asylum-seekers, be construed as
racist or xenophobic? Does the media play a role in relation
to attitudes to asylum-seekers? What have been the effects of
the increase in hostility towards asylum-seekers? Papers addressing
these and related questions should be submitted in two (2) copies
by 1 February 2003. They should be no longer than 7,000
words with documentation. Please see the journal for a style
sheet. Submissions and queries should be sent to: Liza Schuster,
Department of Sociology, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, England, l.k.schuster@lse.ac.uk
RoutledgeCurzon have recently published Mon Nationalism and Civil War in Burma: The Golden Sheldrake - a study of ethnic politics and
insurgency in Burma by Ashley South.
Keep us posted.
Best wishes,
Karl & Stefan
