Ethnicity & Ethnic Conflicts

Between 1984 and 1996, public health authorities in Israel maintained a secret policy of discarding blood donations made by Ethiopian-Israeli citizens and immigrants. Officials later attempted to justify this policy on the grounds that immigrants from Ethiopia were subject to high rates of infectious disease (especially HIV). In 1996, this led to an explosive and violent confrontation between Ethiopian-Israeli protestors and agents of the state, including police and public health authorities. This essay explores the cultural and political context of that confrontation, including the discourse of political violence which it occasioned. The conflict between Ethiopian-Israelis and the state was located within a wider set of political contexts, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which was linked to it through a shared trope of “spilled blood” common to both. Cultural analyses which ignore this dynamic political context are in danger of seriously misrepresenting the meaning of the “Blood Affair” to its participants. At the same time, this essay also engages a critical analysis of the public health policies which led to the crisis. Public health and nationalist discourse reinforced one another at the expense of Ethiopian immigrants in general, and so-called “Feres Mura” Ethiopians in particular.

One of the most salient features of the Medieval Mediterranean is that it was a zone of intense interaction and long-term co-habitation of members of various ethno-religious communities whose relations are usually conceived of as fundamentally adversarial. Nevertheless, Christians, Muslims and Jews not only lived alongside each other but amongst each other in both the Christian- and Muslim-ruled Mediterranean, even during the era of the Crusades. Typically, such relationships have been presented as either fundamentally hostile, or cordial, and as related to the “tolerance” that host cultures were inclined to demonstrate as a consequence of their own religious orientation. By contrast, this paper takes a phenomenological approach by focusing on a specific manifestation of this interaction: the emergence of out-group political elites in confessionally-defined societies. Through the medium of three case studies – a powerful Jew in Islamic Spain, a powerful Muslim in Norman Sicily and a powerful Coptic Christian in Fatimid Egypt – it demonstrates that the status of minority elites was related to concrete political circumstances grounded in the particular environment of the region, and that, in spite of cultural differences that might have distinguished them, these societies developed near-identical strategies for engaging with minority elites. The language of religious polemic, exclusion and marginalization was not absent, but it tended to serve as a post factum rationalization for repression, rather than a cause, and tended to be deployed decisively only in certain circumstances. This provides new insights not only into Muslim-Christian-Jewish relations, but the nature of Mediterranean history and society.

"    Statistical analyses of the voting results from all national parliamentary and presidential elections held between 1991 and 2006 and survey data concerning attitudes towards major historical issues confirm the existence of strong and persistent regional cleavages in post-Soviet Ukraine. Western Ukrainian regions, which differ significantly in terms of their historical legacies
from regions in Eastern Ukraine, are much more supportive, compared to Eastern Ukraine, of pro-nationalist and pro-Western parties and politicians, and they are much less supportive of pro-Communist and pro-Russian parties and politicians.
        Similarly, Eastern Ukrainians, compared to Western Ukrainians, express much more favorable attitudes towards the incorporation of Eastern Ukraine by Russia in the seventeenth century, the Bolshevik Revolution, the whole period of Ukraine’s inclusion in the Soviet Union, the past Communist political system, Russian tsars, and Soviet political leaders. People from Western Ukraine are much more likely than the residents of other regions to
regard the artificial famine of 1932/1933 as a result of deliberate Soviet policy directed against ethnic Ukrainians. Western Ukrainians demonstrate much more favorable views than their Eastern Ukrainian counterparts towards the UPA and historical Ukrainian nationalist and pro-independence leaders.
        Regression analysis shows that historical legacies, linked to different historical experiences before Soviet unification, have the largest effect, compared to other factors, on electoral behavior and on attitudes towards historical issues. Keeping other factors, such as ethnicity and the level of economic development constant, the history of Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, and Czechoslovak rule is the biggest determinant of the regional pro-nationalist/pro-Western vote index, the pro-Communist/pro-Russian vote index,  and individual attitudes towards the past Soviet political system. Catholic religion and Ukrainian ethnicity also affect the regional electoral behavior indexes but to a lesser extent and less consistently than the historical legacy does. Age, education, Catholic religion, and gender are significant
determinants of attitudes towards the Soviet political system. However, their effects are weaker compared to the effects of historical legacy variables.
    This study concludes that the regional political cleavages in post-Communist Ukraine reflect primarily cultural differences that emerged as a result of distinct historical experiences in Ukrainian regions in the periods before World War I and World War II. These findings imply that the regional differences in electoral behavior and attitudes towards major historical issues will not disappear in Ukraine in the near future.
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"Abstract
Iran is facing a serious domestic challenge. Non-Persian ethnic minorities are mobilizing to claim their rights under an Islamic Republic, which minority activists claim is systematically neglecting and discriminating against them. Yet contemporary Iranian ethnic politics is severely understudied and media coverage rarely engages with it. This article explores the ways in which ethnicity play into Iranian domestic politics in subtle, intricate and highly important ways. For this purpose, it focuses on how the interconnected factors of ethnicity, regionalism and tribalism figured in the 2013 combined presidential and local council elections in Iran in a particular province that has a history of ethnic tensions. Incidentally, these elections brought Hassan Rouhani, a moderate cleric, to power as president. Amongst his electoral promises was to end the securitization of the minority issue. This article serves to illustrate some of the barriers to a transformative ethnic politics -- barriers that the new president will have to overcome to enact real change.



Keywords: Iran; minorities; elections; securitization; tribalism; regionalism

In January 2014, newly incumbent president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, was busy implementing a historic deal with Western powers over Iran’s controversial nuclear program. Yet in the middle of this demanding situation, Rouhani took the time to visit a province in Iran’s south-western corner. Meeting with local officials, he stated that ‘domestic politics, with all of the complications that come along with it, is more difficult than international politics’. Apart from an allusion to his domestic conservative adversaries who are wary of his rapprochement with the West, Rouhani also hinted at tensions marring Iranian society. While much attention is paid to external relations and foreign policy, crucial domestic challenges are often overlooked and understudied in the coverage of Iran.

Indeed, why was it so important for Rouhani to visit a province in the periphery? Bordering Iraq, the province of Khuzestan is an extremely sensitive region that contains much of the oil industry generating vital state income. It is also home to ethnic minorities, including a significant and largely discontented community of Arabs. When framed ethnically, Iranian politicians view Arab expressions of discontent as a separatist threat.

Although Iran has been known historically in the West as Persia, non-Persian minorities make up a large segment of the population – about half, according to estimates commonly cited in Western works.  Ethnic minorities such as the Azeris, Kurds, Lors, Gilakis, Arabs, Baluch and Turkmen coalesce around shared notions of kinship, regional belonging and/or a language different from the majority’s Persian. Religious minorities such as Christian Armenians, Jews and Zoroastrians identify in religious terms different from the Muslim majority. The Sunni Muslims among the Kurds, Turkmen, and Baluch are both ethnically and religiously different than the Persian-speaking Shiite majority. Furthermore, several of these communities have historical bonds with co-ethnics in neighbouring countries.

A diverse and growing ethnic movement now challenges the socioeconomic, political and cultural hegemony of the Persian-speaking centre, claiming that the Islamic Republic discriminates against minorities. With its demands for decentralization and ethnic rights, this collective but unorganized ethnic mobilization is perceived as a threat by Iranian nationalists of both secularist and Islamist persuasions, who argue that the movement runs counter to Iran’s national identity, historic unity and territorial integrity. The state has reacted to minority activism with violence and repression. The minority issue, in short, constitutes a key site of contention in Iranian identity politics.

The present article explores the role of ethnicity in voter dynamics during the combined presidential and local council elections in 2013. Through a specific focus on these elections in the province of Khuzestan, I will anatomize the complexity involved in ethnic politics in Iran today.  I argue that apart from as a reflection of growing ethnic awareness, this complexity should also be read within the context of centre/periphery contestation, and with an eye to the role of tribalism. By adding to the preciously few studies of post-revolution Iranian provincial politics,  and by tentatively assessing the prospects of a transformative minority politics, the article will thus help broaden the discussion on obstacles to democratization in Iran."

"""During the "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine, the second largest country in Europe came close to a violent break-up similar to that in neighboring Moldova, which witnessed a violent secession of the Transdniestria region. Numerous elections, including the hotly contested 2004 presidential elections in Ukraine, and surveys of public opinion showed significant regional divisions in these post-Soviet countries. Western parts of Ukraine and Moldova, as well as the Muslim Crimean Tatars, were vocal supporters of independence, nationalist, and pro-Western parties and politicians. In contrast, Eastern regions, as well as the Orthodox Turkic-speaking Gagauz, consistently expressed pro-Russian and pro-Communist political orientations. Which factors ? historical legacies, religion, economy, ethnicity, or political leadership ? could explain these divisions? Why was Ukraine able to avoid a violent break-up, in contrast to Moldova?
This is the first book to offer a systematic and comparative analysis of the regional political divisions in post-Soviet Ukraine and Moldova. The study examines voting behavior and political attitudes in two groups of regions: those which were under Russian, Ottoman, and Soviet rule; and those which were under Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, and Czechoslovak rule until World War I or World War II. This book attributes the regional political divisions to the differences in historical experience. This study helps us to better understand regional cleavages and conflicts, not only in Ukraine and Moldova, but also in other cleft countries."""

This study analyzes policies and public attitudes concerning the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) after the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine. The issue of the political rehabilitation of these nationalist organizations, which relied on terrorism and were involved in Nazi genocide and ethnic cleansing of Poles during World War Two, became one of central political issues in this post-Soviet state. The question is which factors determine attitudes towards the OUN and the UPA in contemporary Ukraine. The hypothesis is that regional factors are the main determinants of the public opinion concerning these organizations. This paper uses analysis of historical studies and archival data to examine policies and controversies concerning the OUN and the UPA. It employs comparative and regression analyses of the 2009 Kyiv International Institute of Sociology survey to determine effects of regional factors, compared to other factors, such as ethnicity, language, and age, on attitudes towards the Stepan Bandera faction of the OUN and the UPA. The paper shows that that regional factors and perceptions of the involvement of the Bandera faction of the OUN and the UPA in mass murder are strongest predictors of views concerning these nationalist organizations.

"Two decades after their leaders signed the Oslo Peace Accords in Washington, new polls show that barely one-third of Palestinians and Israelis now see a badly-needed “two-state” solution as feasible. The seemingly intractable difficulties in coming up with a sustainable framework agreement means that key issues of land, faith, recognition and rights need to be reexamined. A paradigm shift towards a cogent analysis of issues of national identity, self-determination and nationalism is urgently required, accompanied by another, similarly imperative, fundamental change in approach and underlying assumptions in public opinion, the latter also required for the making of lasting peace. To date, a backbench yet debilitating use of the indigenous perspective by both sides in the Palestinian-Israeli debate appears meant to incite anger, rather than to understand the opposing sides’ common concerns, those that could ultimately bring the warring nationalities together. By turning the current acrimonious debate on its head using reality-based indigenous approaches, the prospect of badly needed and currently scarce confidence-building measures— on core issues such as borders, Jerusalem, security and refugees— unfolding in a timely fashion would be greatly advanced.

If presented as part of a more hopeful framework, the indigenous perspective offers a unique examination of concepts such as the “right of return” and the right to live on ancestral lands. It carries with it demands for honest recognition of how, as Brookings scholar Khaled Elgindy has correctly noted, a current lingering reliance on “constructive ambiguity,” has “prolonged—and ultimately doomed—the Oslo process for more than twenty years… producing confusion and eroding trust between the parties.” The common indigenous language necessary to jump-start post-Oslo negotiation is based on ancient perspectives and modern understandings. While seemingly still outside the toolkits of the Washington establishment, it could provide Secretary of State John F. Kerry with what he needs to turn the tide as the April deadline for a peace agreement approaches, eviscerating the feeling that both Israelis and Palestinians now share, that: “Americans could have done more.” …
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This article is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Robert A. Pastor, a prophetic teacher and brave defender of democracy and the human rights of peoples around the world.

© Martin Edwin Andersen, 2014. All rights reserved."