Workshop ‘Business and Minority Rights’
The relationship between minority rights and economic participation has gained increasing prominence in contemporary debates on inclusion, equality, and social cohesion. However, despite the growing recognition that effective participation in economic life is essential to the realization of minority rights, the conceptual and policy links between these fields remain underdeveloped. The ECMI workshop Business and Minority Rights, organised as one-day expert event on 12 June 2026, explored this intersection by examining how minorities participate in economic life and what structural barriers stand in their way.
The workshop opened with a panel on law and labour market participation, which set the conceptual and legal tone for the day. Balázs Kiss traced the evolution of minority participation rights under the ICCPR, arguing that the standard has shifted from formal consultation toward a more substantive principle of free, prior, and informed consent. By drawing on the case of Swedish-speaking communities in Finland, Norbert Tóth explored how AI tools might help companies meet their minority-language obligations, also enquiring whether under international law states could compel businesses to maintain minority-language services.
The second panel took an intersectional approach to labour market exclusion. Mary Drosopoulos presented the results of her qualitative research on Kurdish women who engage in informal, largely invisible labour in North Rhine-Westphalia, arguing that informality should be understood as a structured form of economic participation, rather than simply a marginal phenomenon. Shuma Talukdar focused on Sylheti women in Assam working in the global agarwood industry, finding that corporate sustainability frameworks may in practice reproduce the very inequalities they seek to address. Heman Das examined the compounded exclusion faced by Hindu Dalits in Pakistan's formal private sector, where the intersection of religious minority status and caste-based discrimination operates without any legal safeguard.
Between sessions, participants joined a guided tour of minority-owned and minority-linked businesses in Flensburg, led by Associate Professor Martin Klatt.
The afternoon's case study panel ranged from an anthropological analysis of Swabian ethnic identity and economic strategy in rural Hungary (Gyöngyi Schwarcz), to the exploration of precarious livelihoods of Crimean Tatar artists and activists in exile in Germany (Mieste Hotopp-Riecke), and to the role of ethnic social capital in sustaining Hungarian-minority businesses in wartime Transcarpathia, Ukraine (Katalin Kovály).
Bringing together perspectives from law, political science, sociology, anthropology, geography, and minority studies, the workshop sought to advance a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between business and minority rights. In doing so, it contributes to broader discussions on how economic structures can either reproduce exclusion or serve as vehicles for more inclusive and equitable forms of participation.
The workshop was convened by Dr. Andreea Cârstocea and Aziz Berdiqulov as part of the programme focusing on the social and economic participation of national minorities developed by the ECMI Equality and Inclusion Cluster.
