Ethnicity and International Law

Shahabuddin, Mohammad

doi:10.1017/cbo9781316156452

Cited by 29 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Western European states were exempted from the burden of minority protection on the grounds that they either had no minorities on their territories or were sufficiently “civilised” to manage such ethnic differences. A similar framing has informed the two‐track structure of European minority rights discourse in the post‐Cold War era: A universal justice‐based track championing liberal individualism has been paralleled by a security‐based track that places additional obligations on certain Eastern European states on the grounds that minorities in those states constitute a threat to European security (Kymlicka, 2001, p. 369–387, 2015; Shahabuddin, 2016, p. 98–216). Traditionally, this international hierarchy has been seen as the quintessential illustration of the Kohn dichotomy at work: The civic nationalism of Western Europe is opposed to the ethnic nationalism of Eastern Europe (Bugge, 2022; Jutila, 2009).…”

Section: The Nation Form and The “Fantasy Of Congruency”3mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mind the gap: The nation form and the Kohn dichotomy

Heiskanen

2023

Nations and Nationalism

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The dichotomy between civic Western nationalism and ethnic non‐Western nationalism (also known as “the Kohn dichotomy” after the historian of nationalism Hans Kohn) remains one of the most influential frameworks for understanding nationalism. It is also one of the most controversial: The binary schema has been criticised not only for its conceptual inconsistencies but also for entrenching an ethnocentric hierarchy that depicts Western nations as fountains of civic virtue. This article enriches these longstanding debates by excavating the neglected inverse side of the Kohn dichotomy. Since the late nineteenth century, the idealised Western nation is imagined not only as a civic polity united by common political traditions but also as an organic community blessed with natural boundaries. In short, Western nations are depicted as both civic and ethnic. Meanwhile, non‐Western nations are denied the privilege of being contradictory and deemed to suffer from a perennial mismatch between civic and ethnic elements: Non‐Western nations are depicted either as ethnic communities lacking civic traditions or as artificial political constructions lacking organic roots. Without taking into account this intricate dialectic between the civic and ethnic poles of the nation form, critics of the Kohn dichotomy will struggle to fully grasp its ideological functions or historical longevity.

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Section: The Nation Form and The “Fantasy Of Congruency”3mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mind the gap: The nation form and the Kohn dichotomy

Heiskanen

2023

Nations and Nationalism

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“…The word ethnicity is derived from the ancient Greek ethnos, which means group of people of the same race or nationality who share a distinctive culture (Shahabuddin, 2016), and implies "a range of situations in which a collective of humans lived and acted together" (Ostergrad, 1992, in Jenkins, 2008. Ethnicity is a complex and multifaceted concept (Meer, 2014), which is difficult to define, and has many interpretations depending on the context in which the term is used.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethnicity and Occupational Differences in the Transforming Homogenous Culture: The Case of Lithuania

Minelgaitė

Blažytė

Littrell

2017

PED

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This article presents empiric research on respondents’ self-identification of ethnicity in such culturally homogenous country as Lithuania and comparisons among three occupational sectors: education, healthcare and business. The results reveal the difficulty when attempting to self-identity ethnicity resulting in high nonresponse rate. Furthermore, results indicate effects of occupational background of the respondent and influence of EU membership on the perceived ethnicity. The contextualisation of results within social and historical context of the country is outlined, as well as methodological implications.

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“…66 Through these means, a Eurocentric international legal order constructed a distinct 'Other within Europe.' 67 As the interwar system of conditional sovereignty and minority protection broke down, largely as a result of its appropriation by the Third Reich, the Second World War rendered Eastern Europe a vast 'bloodland' hosting some of history's greatest acts of violence. 68 What followed was an international legal response where, through developments that included the Nuremberg judgment; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the Genocide Convention; and the Fourth Geneva Convention, this violence was portrayed in universal and individualistic terms in a manner that sought to transcend regional specificity and its politics.…”

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confidence: 99%

In search of Paulus Vladimiri: Canon, reception, and the (in)conceivability of an Eastern European ‘founding father’ of international law

Loefflad

2023

Leiden Journal of International Law

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While many international lawyers are familiar with Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546), very few have even heard of Paulus Vladimiri (1370–1435) – a Polish priest and jurist who made striking similar arguments to Vitoria on legal universality and the rights of non-Christians a full century before Vitoria. This divergence of consciousness, I argue, provides a unique opportunity to explore questions of canon, reception, and the role of ‘founding fathers’ within international legal thought. Centring Vladimiri as an ‘Eastern European’ figure, I argue that his non-reception is largely the result of how Eastern Europe implicitly functions as a distinctly liminal space within international legal thought that makes any possible ‘founding father’ from this region immensely difficult to imagine. I examine this dynamic through the differing postwar efforts of the Polish jurists Kazimierz Grzybowski and C. H. Alexandrowicz to include Vladimiri within the international legal canon. In examining the background structures of twentieth-century international law, I conclude that, in a manner directly connected to the liminality of Eastern Europe, neither Soviet nor Third World nor Western imaginations could easily receive Vladimiri within their fundamentally political narratives of normative order that shaped their international legal approaches. However, despite this historic non-reception, I argue that Vladimiri, and the question of Eastern Europe more generally, holds great promise in our current global moment. Particularly, engaging Eastern Europe’s liminal character offers a more sociologically grounded alternative to the reductionist Schmittian view of international law as a product of inescapable conflict in a world of exclusionary ‘greater spaces’.

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Ethnicity and International Law

Cited by 29 publications

References 0 publications

Mind the gap: The nation form and the Kohn dichotomy

Mind the gap: The nation form and the Kohn dichotomy

Ethnicity and Occupational Differences in the Transforming Homogenous Culture: The Case of Lithuania

In search of Paulus Vladimiri: Canon, reception, and the (in)conceivability of an Eastern European ‘founding father’ of international law

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