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Most countries around the world exhibit a long history of exclusion and discrimination directed against ethnic, racial, national, religious, or ideological groups. The underlying justifications for these forms of exclusion have been increasingly discredited by the post-war human rights revolution, decolonization, and by contemporary norms of liberal-democratic constitutionalism, with their commitment to equal rights and non-discrimination. However, even as these older practices and ideologies of exclusion are discredited and repudiated, they continue to have enduring effects. The legacies of exclusion can still be seen in a wide range of social attitudes, cultural practices, economic and demographic patterns, and institutional rules that obstruct efforts to build genuinely inclusive societies of equal citizens. Finding ways to overcome this problem is a major challenge facing virtually every society around the world. The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies focuses on two parallel intellectual and political movements that have arisen to address this challenge: the 'politics of reconciliation', with its focus on reparations, truth-telling and healing amongst former adversaries, and the 'politics of difference', with its focus on the recognition and empowerment of minorities in multicultural societies. Both the politics of reconciliation and the politics of difference are having a profound impact on the theory and practice of democracy around the world, but remarkably little has been written about the relationship between them. This book aims to fill that gap. Drawing on both theoretical analysis and case studies from around the world, the authors explore how the politics of reconciliation and the politics of difference often interact in mutually supportive ways, as reconciliation leads to more multicultural conceptions of citizenship. But there are also important ways in which the two may compete in their aims and methods. The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies is the first attempt to systematically explore these areas of potential convergence and divergence.
This book examines claims for recognition of cultural difference from immigrant and Indigenous minorities, highlighting the ways in which they intersect with ideas of national community. Busbridge argues that there is an important, albeit under-explored, relationship between nation and multicultural politics of recognition. Drawing on the Australian context, the book explores how nation features as a productive, if somewhat ambivalent, discursive resource in contemporary Muslim and Aboriginal struggles to be recognised. In demanding recognition, minorities enter into the business of ‘making the nation’ by positing alternative conceptions of national identity, culture and belonging that are more attentive to their differences and claims. This dynamic is engaged as an expression of ‘postcolonial citizenship’. Postcolonial citizenship is imagined in terms of the ways in which minority groups actualise multicultural realities through rewriting ideas of national community. It underlines the critical importance of revising the power relations that deem some groups ‘more national’ and others less so – and which, in Western multicultural societies, are typically tied to notions of the ‘West’ and its ‘others’. This book is an important conceptual, theoretical and political intervention that brings postcolonialism and multiculturalism into dialogue on the increasingly potent issues of nation and national identity. It will be of great interest to scholars and students of sociology, politics, postcolonial studies, culture, identity and nation.
Public opinion in recent years has soured on multiculturalism, due in large part to fears of radical Islam. In Multiculturalism without Culture, Anne Phillips contends that critics misrepresent culture as the explanation of everything individuals from minority and non-Western groups do. She puts forward a defense of multiculturalism that dispenses with notions of culture, instead placing individuals themselves at its core. Multiculturalism has been blamed for encouraging the oppression of women--forced marriages, female genital cutting, school girls wearing the hijab. Many critics opportunistically deploy gender equality to justify the retreat from multiculturalism, hijacking the equality agenda to perpetuate cultural stereotypes. Phillips informs her argument with the feminist insistence on recognizing women as agents, and defends her position using an unusually broad range of literature, including political theory, philosophy, feminist theory, law, and anthropology. She argues that critics and proponents alike exaggerate the unity, distinctness, and intractability of cultures, thereby encouraging a perception of men and women as dupes constrained by cultural dictates. Opponents of multiculturalism may think the argument against accommodating cultural difference is over and won, but they are wrong. Phillips believes multiculturalism still has an important role to play in achieving greater social equality. In this book, she offers a new way of addressing dilemmas of justice and equality in multiethnic, multicultural societies, intervening at this critical moment when so many Western countries are poised to abandon multiculturalism.
This book develops an account of 'inclusive multicultural governance' which is contrasted with assimilationist and separatist/differentialist approaches to the political management of and accommodation of multicultural diversity in liberal democracies.
Since the end of the Cold War, the concept of reconciliation has emerged as a central term of political discourse within societies divided by a history of political violence. Reconciliation has been promoted as a way of reckoning with the legacy of past wrongs while opening the way for community in the future. This book examines the issues of transitional justice in the context of contemporary debates in political theory concerning the nature of 'the political'. Bringing together research on transitional justice and political theory, the author argues that if we are to talk of reconciliation in politics we need to think about it in a fundamentally different way than is commonly presupposed; as agonistic rather than restorative.
The Ashgate Research Companion to Multiculturalism brings together a collection of new essays by leading and emerging scholars in the humanities and social sciences on some of the key issues facing multiculturalism today. It provides a comprehensive and cutting-edge treatment of this important and hotly contested field, offering scholars and students a clear account of the leading theories and critiques of multiculturalism that have developed over the past twenty-five years, as well as a sense of the challenges facing multiculturalism in the future. Key leading scholars, including James Bohman, Barbara Arneil, Avigail Eisenberg, Ghassan Hage, and Paul Patton, discuss multiculturalism in different cultural and national contexts and across a range of disciplinary approaches. In addition to contributions, Duncan Ivison also provides a comprehensive Introduction which surveys the field and offers an extensive guide to further reading. This is a key volume for anyone interested in multiculturalism and its political premise.
Truth and reconciliation commissions and official governmental apologies continue to surface worldwide as mechanisms for coming to terms with human rights violations and social atrocities. As the first scholarly collection to explore the intersections and differences between a range of redress cases that have emerged in Canada in recent decades, Reconciling Canada provides readers with the contexts for understanding the phenomenon of reconciliation as it has played out in this multicultural settler state. In this volume, leading scholars in the humanities and social sciences relate contemporary political and social efforts to redress wrongs to the fraught history of government relations with Aboriginal and diasporic populations. The contributors offer ground-breaking perspectives on Canada’s ‘culture of redress,’ broaching questions of law and constitutional change, political coalitions, commemoration, testimony, and literatures of injury and its aftermath. Also assembled together for the first time is a collection of primary documents – including government reports, parliamentary debates, and redress movement statements – prefaced with contextual information. Reconciling Canada provides a vital and immensely relevant illumination of the dynamics of reconciliation, apology, and redress in contemporary Canada.
Postcolonial Justice addresses a major issue in current postcolonial theory and beyond, namely, the question of how to reconcile an ethics grounded in the reciprocal acknowledgment of diversity and difference with the normative, if not universal thrust that appears to energize any notion of justice. The concept of postcolonial justice shared by the essays in this volume carries an unwavering commitment to difference within and beyond Europe, while equally rejecting radical cultural essentialisms, which refuse to engage in “utopian ideals” of convivial exchange across a plurality of subject positions. Such utopian ideals can no longer claim universal validity, as in the tradition of the European enlightenment; instead they are bound to local frames of speaking from which they project world.
This book considers the ethics and politics of state apologies made to Indigenous peoples. The prevalent tendency to treat an apology as a speech act has maintained the focus on the state leader making the apology and not on the victims’ claims. This book demonstrates the inherent shortcomings of this approach through an examination of apologies delivered to Indigenous peoples in Australia and Canada. Contrasting the texts of these apologies with Indigenous peoples' responses, the book develops an understanding of apology as a relational process. This involves engaging indigenous peoples in dialogue, the aim of which would be to address past injuries by fulfilling the apology's transformative promise of 'never again' to indigenous peoples' satisfaction. The book concludes by examining more recent developments in Australia and Canada that highlight the contunuing need for government accountability to fulfil this promise and ensure indigenous people's rights and interests are upheld. This book will be of considerable interest to scholars and students in the fields of law and politics , Indigenous studies; forgiveness studies; transitional justice and reconciliation; settler colonialism and decolonisation.