Threats to Minorities

Historically, minorities constitute disadvantaged groups in society. In the last three decades, a series of initiatives have helped to create greater visibility towards minority groups through the adoption of instruments and policies, which ensure that their rights are recognized and thus protected. These developments, however, may be compromised in certain occasions in which minorities find themselves in a very vulnerable situation. Examples include armed conflicts, smear campaigns, inflammatory speeches, etc. This bundle explores some of these situations and provide the reader with a wide spectrum of threats that minorities experience firsthand.  

Since the end of the Second World War, armed conflicts not of an international character (e.g. civil wars) have become prevalent as opposed to regular inter-State conflicts. In his contribution to JEMIE, Tim Dertwinkel analyzed in 2009 the phenomenon of civil wars in general and ethnic conflicts in particular, arguing that both fields of study are poorly understood. It is also in this context that Christian K. Højbjerg put emphasis on the social and cultural dimensions of war and unstable post-conflict situations. From an anthropological perspective, Højbjerg sustains that practice indicates that the consequences left by an armed conflict often turn into causes of war. 

Moreover, minority groups are often undermined by an arguably broad understanding of freedom of expression, as explained by Kyriaki Topidi. She claims that speech can result in a climate of prejudice and discrimination against minorities. In this scenario, inflammatory speeches might generate fear on the general population about the targeted groups, an approach thoroughly explored by Javaid Rehman in 2005 in the context of 11 September 2001. This commentator wrote an interesting contribution to the Yearbook that reminds us the number of issues that the world was facing shortly after the US experienced an unprecedented terrorist attack on its soil. Against this backdrop, Rehman points at Islamophobia as one of the consequences caused by the 9/11, which motivated an increase of fear against Muslim minority groups in North America and Europe. Whereas the same commentator relates to the case of Muslims in the UK to explain that these groups are historically in a disadvantaged and underdeveloped situation in today’s society, Marco Torresin refers to minorities in the Italian context.  

Torresin’s publication was written in a time of increasing far-right populist movements in Europe, which were characterized by a strong component of Euroscepticism and belligerent nationalism. This commentator pays special attention to certain Italian political parties whose political propaganda has been particularly hostile to minorities. In a similar context, Zlatko Šram deals more generally in his contribution to the JEMIE with the ambiguous concept of nationalistic inclinations, which encompasses certain elements of national affective attachment, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, perception of threat posed by some ethnic minority groups and national siege mentality. In a study carried out on a random sample of students at the University of Zagreb, Šram determines that these concepts are interrelated to the extent that they represent the theoretical background of nationalistic inclinations.  

 

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