The Politics Of Ethnic Survival

The German-speaking inhabitants of the Bohemian capital developed a group identification and defined themselves as a minority as they dealt with growing Czech political and economic strength in the city and with their own sharp numerical decline: in the 1910 census only seven percent of the metropolitan population claimed that they spoke primarily German. The study uses census returns, extensive police and bureaucratic records, newspaper accounts, and memoirs on local social and political life to show how the German minority and the Czech majority developed demographically and economically in relation to each other and created separate social and political lives for their group members. The study carefully traces the roles of occupation, class, religion, and political ideology in the formation of German group loyalties and social solidarities.

This book investigates the role of ethnic federalism in Ethiopian politics, reflecting on a long history of division amongst the country’s political elites. The book argues that these patterns have enabled the resilience and survival of authoritarianism in the country, and have led to the failure of democratization. Ethnic conflict in Ethiopia stretches back to the country’s imperial history. Competing nationalisms begin to emerge towards the end of the imperial era, but were formalized by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) from the 1990s onwards. Under the EPRDF, ethnicity and language classifications formed the main organizing principles for political parties and organizations, and the country’s new federal arrangement was also designed along ethnic fault lines. This book argues that this ethnic federal arrangement, and the continuation of an elite political culture are major factors in explaining the continuation of authoritarianism in Ethiopia. Focusing largely on the last 27 years under the EPRDF and on the political changes of the last few years, but also stretching back to historical narratives of ethnic grievances and division, this book is an important guide to the ethnic politics of Ethiopia and will be of interest to researchers of African politics, authoritarianism and ethnic conflict.

This book models the trade-off that rulers of weak, ethnically-divided states face between coups and civil war. Drawing evidence from extensive field research in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo combined with statistical analysis of most African countries, it develops a framework to understand the causes of state failure.

From the moment of God's covenant with Abraham in the Old Testament, the idea that a people are chosen by God has had a central role in shaping national identity. This text argues that sacred belief remains central to national identity, even in an increasingly secular, globalized modern world.

This volume presents the personal accounts of African American, Asian American, and Latino faculty who use 'narratives of struggles' to describe the challenges they faced in order to become bona fide members of the U.S. Academy. These narratives show how survival and success require a sophisticated knowledge of the politics of academia, insider knowledge of the requirements of legitimacy in scholarly efforts, and resourceful approach to facing dilemmas between cultural values, traditional racist practices, and academic resilience. The book also explores the empowerment process of these individuals who have created a new self without rejecting their 'enduring' self, the self strongly connected to their ethno/racial cultures and groups. Within the process of self -redefinition, this new faculty confronted racism, sexism, rejection, the clash of cultural values, and structural indifference to cultural diversity. The faculty recounts how they ultimately learned the skillful accommodation to all of these issues. It is through the analysis of survival and self-definition that women and faculty of color will establish a powerful foothold in the new academy of the twenty-first century.