A series of blog posts in partnership with H-Nationalism

The Catalan independence row, the persecution of the Rohingya minority in Burma, persistent problems for North-American indigenous communities to defend their lands, and violence against people of Baha’is religion in Yemen, all these and other similar situations bear witness to the still strained relationship between majorities and minorities in the contemporary world.

On the 100^th anniversary of the Versailles Treaty, H-Nationalism and the Myth of Homogeneity Project organise a series of blog posts entitled ‘Minorities in Contemporary and Historical Perspectives’ that aims to examine the issue of minorities from a varied disciplinary, geographical and chronological perspective.

The Versailles Treaty is widely deemed to have enshrined self-determination as one of the main principles of political legitimacy in international relations. As, according to this principle, the political and national community have to be congruent, two opposite dynamics have been unleashed: within the majority, a tendency to either exclude or assimilate those deemed not to belong to the ‘people’; within the minority, a tendency not to fully identify with the parent state. Both democratic and authoritarian states are confronted still today with the difficult task to manage these conflicting forces.

By means of a sequence of theoretical and empirical pieces, the series will explore, among others, the relationship between minorities, nationalism and democracy; the history of the concept of minorities; the nature of minority rights and their resurgence in the 1990s; the impact of globalisation on majority-minority relations; the evolution of minority policies in several geographic areas and throughout time. It will also take into account specific linguistic, religious and gender aspects of national/cultural minority issues.

The pieces will be posted monthly in order to leave ample room for discussion on the forum. All posts will also be publicly-viewable on the web and will appear simultaneously on the website of the Myth of Homogeneity Project and on H-Nationalism’s page. Blog posts will be open for civil, moderated comments from our academic subscribers.  

Scholars interested in contributing can contact:

Emmanuel Dalle Mulle: emmanuel.dallemulle-at-graduateinstitute.ch

Mona Bieling: mona.bieling-at-graduateinstitute.ch