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Skip to content. Toggle navigation. A majority of constitutions in the region explicitly prohibit political parties to organize on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, region and other socio-cultural attributes. More than a hundred political parties have been dissolved, suspended or denied registration on these grounds. This book documents the experience with ethnic party bans in Africa, traces its origins, examines its record, and answers the question whether ethnic party bans are an effective and legitimate instrument in the prevention of ethnic conflict. This book was published as a special issue of Democratization.

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Effects of ethnic-based politics in Africa - Part 1 Ethnic Identity And Ethnic Conflict In Africa

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Open Collections. UBC Theses and Dissertations. Featured Collection. Recent social movement scholarship, including work on ethnic groups and conflict, has legitimized non-state actors in world politics, through a reexamination of nationalism, ethnicity, ethnic conflict, and violence. This approach links comparative and international politics. By identifying the nature and role of nationalism in its current context, this paper addresses some of the ways in which the ethnicity-nationalism link has been misconstrued by work on ethnic conflict and violence.

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Although nationalism gives ethnicity a political direction, it is necessary to understand the discourses that are created during this process. I argue that sustained attention needs to be paid to the form and dynamics of ethnonationalism in the contemporary context, using a discursive approach. Examining the narrativizing structures embedded within nationalist movements would help to Conflictt our understanding of contemporary ethnonationalisms, accounting for intra-group fractionalization and conflict. The case of Kurdish nationalism in Turkey will be used to examine how treating nationalist movements as a violent conflict motivated primarily click here ethnicity and ethnic identities reifies ethnonationalist movements, treating them as unproblematically homogeneous.

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By adopting a discursive approach in an examination of contemporary ethnonationalist movements such as the Kurds in Turkey, this thesis facilitates the development of a more nuanced and insightful analysis of the role and function of nationalism today. More generally, I argue that these theories rest on an understanding of certain terminologies, including nation, ethnicity, and ethnonationalism, all of which are still contested within scholarly work on nationalism and Conflidt conflict. Recent literature on new forms of nationalism will be used to demonstrate that a discursive approach should be used in order to better understand these relationships.

Particularly, I argue that a reexamination of ethnonationalism is key to understanding how nationalist movements form, how they survive, and the goals they seek to achieve. Nationalism is best understood not in terms of its relationship to the state or the nation, Ethnic Identity And Ethnic Conflict In Africa these concepts are constantly being constructed and re-constructed.

Rather, nationalism should now be understood as a discourse that can operate in a variety of non-traditional contexts. The Kurdish case provides both an example of, and demonstrates the necessity of this Contlict approach, illustrating the highly fragmented and variable nature of Kurdish ethnonational identity within the political space of the Turkish state. Ultimately, it is concluded that the limitations imposed by terminologies in both international relations and comparative literatures on their own fail to properly address recent shifts and divergences within contemporary ethnonationalist movements.

Variations in the formation and articulation of sub-state nationalist movements have led to a number of arguments concerning Ethnic Identity And Ethnic Conflict In Africa role and function of ethnonationalist movements. Many 2 have focused on ethnonationalism in particular, but have misinterpreted nationalism as loyalty to the state, while loyalty to an ethnonational group is often considered under the banner of primordialism, tribalism, regionalism, communalism, parochialism, and subnationalism. I then turn to a discussion of how those definitions and relationships are often used by Identjty traditional literature on violence and ethnic conflict, arguing that although nationalism gives ethnicity a political direction, it is necessary to understand the discourses that are created during this process, as well as how they are maintained.

Furthermore, traditional theories of nationalism, ethnic conflict, and violence have relied on the belief that political elites, actors, and the leaders of ethnic parties provoke violent conflict by managing the identities they claim to represent. These theories rely on the belief that all nationalisms are state-seeking, and thus unified in preference and goals. Click, I explore the idea that ethnic identities are strategic and discursively constituted, adopted selectively by both elites and masses in Etthnic to achieve recognition and establish legitimacy, in variable and distinct ways.

My discussion then turns to an examination of some of Arica key shifts in political opportunity structures that are often examined in the literature, including the role of elites and other external actors in framing ethnonationalist movements and conflicts. The role and function of identity plays an important part of this process, and I discuss the contributions of 1 Connor, Walker, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding Ethnic Identity And Ethnic Conflict In Africa Princeton University Press, p. I then turn to a discussion of some recent changes to the political opportunity structures and the subsequent shift in discourses of Kurdish nationalism, from Kurdish nationalism in Turkey is emerging at the popular level that is beyond the control of established political parties, terrorist groups, or other non-state actors.

Having demonstrated that the link established between ethnic identity and political violence is questionable at best, it allows us to understand Kurdish nationalism in Turkey as non-homogeneous, contextual, and highly variable. Afrifa features illustrate some of the distinct features of contemporary ethnonationalist movements, as well as highlight the necessity of a discursive approach when examining these groups.

Traditional understandings of nationalism represent an ideology that puts Ethnic Identity And Ethnic Conflict In Africa nation first before all other forms of social and political organization. However, despite extensive theorizing on the relationship between nationalism and ethnicity, the nation as a political entity remains under-theorized in the literature itself. Ernest Gellner, for example, one of the most influential theorists of nationalism, has been criticized for offering a typology of nationalisms without first establishing a clear concept of nation. Recognition of nations, however, is much more problematic than the recognition of states, leading us to the difficult issue of self- determination, the recognition of peoples, and their possible right to statehood.

It has been argued that in the case of ethnically divided states, for a political community to form there must be a transcending bond of national unity, such as shared values, religious affiliations, shared 2 Bryant, Christopher G. Hall ed. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. This suggests that the nation is imagined, invented, or reconstructed, stressing the relevance of self-definition. Subjectively, members of a nation must feel bound by a sense of solidarity, common culture, and national consciousness.]