Description
Book SynopsisFollowing the collapse of international communism and the ending of the Cold War, the decade of the 1990s has seen international conflict replaced by internal, largely ethnic, conflict both of a violent and of a nonviolent nature. As a result, ethnicity has become one of the most important issues of the day. The social sciences and development studies have been slow to adopt new theoretical and practical perspectives with which to address this fundamentally changed situation. In traditional modernisation theory, ethnicity has been seen as an obstacle and claims to ethnic identity as anti-developmental. This book seeks to contribute towards a re-thinking of this position by focusing on the question of how policies of material improvement can be made compatible with the maintenance of fundamental ethnic identities which, in some senses, can even be considered a human right. Its argument is developed in two ways: firstly through a series of geographical studies, which examine the politica
Table of ContentsPartial table of contents:
CONCEPTS OF ETHNICITY AND DEVELOPMENT.
Ethnic Identity and Language Issues in Development (C. Williams)THE POLITICAL CONTEXT.
Ethnicity and Political Development in South Africa (A. Lemon)Nationalism, Democracy and Development in Ethiopia (A. Zegeye &D. Abate).
THE ECONOMIC CONTEXT.
Cultural, Puralism and Economic Development: Perspectives From20th-Century Mexico and the Caribbean (C. Clarke).
The People of Isan, Thailand: Missing Out on the Economic Boom (M.Parnwell & J. Rigg).
Index.
