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Finland’s Right to Return policy for Ingrian Finns (1990-2010) presented Russian and Estonian citizens who qualified as having Finnish ancestry the legal means to resettle in Finland. The policy was initially driven by Finnish President Mauno Koivisto, who spoke publicly of his belief that the Ingrian Finnish minority in Russia was Finnish because it was Lutheran rather than Orthodox. However, Finnish politicians increasingly abandoned the view of a common Lutheran identity between Ingrian Finns and Finland, and shifted the discussion to language, ancestry and historical memory, which were used to both endorse and disendorse Ingrian Finns’ Finnishness. We argue that the disappearance of religion from the Right to Return discourse was a strategic - if not necessarily conscious - choice that emphasized the more primordial aspects of Finnish identity (and the Ingrian Finns’ lack of those), which in turn enabled stricter restrictions and, ultimately, the discontinuation of the policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how Japanese immigrants in Canada understood themselves and conceptualized their community during the first half of the twentieth century. Using vernacular texts in Japanese language, I scrutinize their self-expressions and expand the discourse of Japanese-Canadian history beyond a frame centred upon white racism and exclusionary policies. I start by suggesting the need to relativize normative ideas about the individual to contextualize immigrants' cognitive and discursive practices. Next, I outline notions about the self and collective, morality, and language as intricate components of nationhood in Japanese modernity. Then I turn to immigrant texts. Focusing on debates concerning language education of the second generation (Nisei), I examine how constitutive elements of the Japanese nation affected diasporic subjectivity and self-understanding. As I argue, immigrants claimed their space in Canada by asserting Japaneseness and navigated a hostile world by deploying cultural tools of Japanese modernity. Hegemonic epistemology of Western modernity, however, prevents their history from being assessed on its own terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Home is a central and contested emotional, imagined and physical location that is meaningful for every person. Using personal narratives and scholarly essays, this special issue works through the negotiations of history and belonging with topics from sexuality, immigrant status, ethnicity, and religion to class. The volume features personal reflections by Évelyne Trouillot, Lisa Outar, and Isis Semaj-Hall and critical essays by April Shemak, Lyneise Williams, Belinda Deneen Wallace, and Tanya L. Shields. Each contributor considers the implications of complicated homes, identities, and geographies—particularly the Caribbean and US South—and provides new shadings on this always relevant issue by juxtaposing the personal and the academic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The naturalization policies of Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway differentiate between non-Nordic and Nordic citizens. Nordic citizens can obtain citizenship in other Nordic countries by notification, and the residency requirement for naturalization by application is considerably lower for Nordic citizens than it is for non-Nordic applicants. The privileges of Nordic citizens in the naturalization policies of the Nordic countries is a heritage of nineteenth-century pan-Scandinavianism, continued and expanded upon with post-war Nordism. Nordism, the idea of a common Nordic culture and community, has ideologically underpinned the establishment of a pan-national Nordist citizenship regime that constructs ethno-culturally close Nordic brothers as more belonging in the Nordic countries than alien, ‘non-Nordic’, others. The article explores change and continuity in pan-national Nordic boundary making by analysing the historical interplay between ideas on Scandinavian and Nordic kinship and naturalization policy in the Nordic countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This manuscript reviews the literature on race and ethnicity in the political context. It discusses the most important scholarship on international migration, political mobilization, and the welfare state to date, to identify current gaps and emerging lines of inquiry. Future studies are needed to better understand the mobilization of immigrants by political parties, the role of local politics for a national electoral mobilization, and the relationship between local and national political areas for policy development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that a two-tier system has evolved dividing intra-UK/EU marriages from extra-UK/EU marriages. For the former, marriage is a contract between two individuals overseen by a facilitating state. For the latter, marriage has become more of a legal status defined and controlled by an intrusive and obstructive state. I argue that this divergence in legislating regulation is steeped in an ethnicized imagining of ‘Britishness’ whereby the more noticeably ‘other’ migrants (by skin colour or religion) are perceived as a threat to the national character. The conceptualization of women as legally ‘disabled’ citizens (1870 Naturalisation Act) for whom a state must act as responsible patriarch, is a fundamental part of this imagining of the nation. The paper therefore examines the social (gendered and ethnicized) assumptions and political aims embedded within the legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines the fact of representation of ethnicity in the People’s Republic of China. The present ethnic configuration, centred on a re-categorization of the population, came to be accepted by ordinary people in Chinese society as the result of the multiple projects in association with state-making and nation-building. This paper delineates how the projects in question came about, especially the one focused on the investigation of ethnic minority social history. It examines the way in which narrating and representing ethnic minorities officially took place and how the representation of ethnic minorities functions in the construction of the Chinese nation. It argues that representation for ethnicities focused on how to locate each of them at a certain stage of social development, conceptualizing the Chinese nation in a framework of brotherhood in order to include those excluded by the mainstream throughout history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Enjoying a surge of national pride, the German media celebrated the 2010 German World Cup team's success in South Africa. A dominant theme in this coverage was the 'immigration background' of 11 of the 23 players on the team and their claim to German identity despite their ethnic diversity. Amid debate over the changing nature of German citizenship, the national team's 'multicultural kickers' became the focal point for those who wished to reframe German identity. This article examines German newspaper and magazine coverage of the national soccer team emphasizing the role that media played in constructing competing definitions of the German citizen and nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the social significance of the Alexandria, Virginia, Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) fundraising event the Scottish Christmas Walk during the 1960s and 1970s as a representation of the cultural, social, and economic issues that faced Alexandria, particularly concerning Scottish ethnic identity in the era of the U.S. civil rights movement, class identity and racism against African Americans in Alexandria, and the concepts of urban renewal and consumerism.

This paper examines civil activities to protect and conserve the underground war-related sites in contemporary Japan. Conservation movements rooted in local communities and centred on the Japanese Network to Protect War-Related Sites are making efforts to transform the dark heritage of war-related sites into cultural property in an attempt to integrate diverse wartime experiences. In delving into the heritage-making practices, I introduce local movements in Okinawa and Okayama. Okinawa hosts the first underground war-related site to become a cultural property, the Haebaru Army Hospital Bunkers, while Okayama struggles to create another one by making the Kamejima Mountain Underground Plant a dark heritage site. I argue that these conservation movements are challenging the homogenising national war memory by attaching ethnically diversified vernacular memories to the underground sites. In doing so, these underground war-related sites have become public spaces where new forms of social engagement are negotiated and contested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary discussion about race has a tendency to set off out without first checking the rear view mirror. InTheories of Race and Ethnicity: Contemporary Debates and Perspectives, in contrast, Murji and Solomos identify what has and has not been covered, and so appeal at the outset for a ‘more sustained’ account of changing research agendas of race and ethnic relations. Taken as a whole, the collection allows the editors to contemplate ‘what factors explain the mobilizing power of ideas about race and ethnicity in the contemporary environment?' and whether indeed ‘it is the “real” rather than race that should be placed in quotation marks’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In post-war Norway, only the 1970 national census has recorded ethnicity information about the indigenous Sámi, however restricted to those living in selected areas in the north. In this study, we combine replies about Sámi ethnicity given by the same individuals in Norway’s 1970 census and in the population-based SAMINOR study in 2003–04, to compare self-reported Sámi ethnicity at two points in time that encompass a period when the effects of a long-standing assimilation policy gradually lost ground in favour of upcoming Sámi revitalization. We found self-reported Sámi ethnicity – measured as (1) Sámi as home language in each of three generations and (2) the respondent’s self-identification as Sámi – to have remained generally stable, but some changes were observed. We argue that the results reflect interplays between societal and individual factors. We conclude that any statistical study involving an indigenous people, when clarifying the ethnicity measures, should also address the issue of ethnic mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The fighting in some civil wars primarily takes place in a few stable locations, while the fighting in others moves substantially. We posit that rebel groups that do not primarily fight for a specific ethnic group, that receive outside military assistance, or that have relatively weak fighting capacity tend to fight in inconsistent locations. We develop new measures of conflict zone movement to test our hypotheses, based on shifts in the conflict polygons derived from the new Georeferenced Event Dataset ( GED) developed by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program ( UCDP). Our empirical results provide support for the suggested mechanisms. We find that groups which lack strong ethnic ties and sufficient military strength to compete with government forces in conventional warfare fight in more varied locations. These findings improve our understandings of and expectations for variations in the humanitarian footprint of armed conflicts, the interdependencies between rebel groups and local populations, and the dilemmas faced by government counterinsurgency efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Versified slander, particularly that addressed to converted Jews orconversos, is best understood within a social exercise of rhetoric asars bene dicendithat channels ethnic and religious tensions through the practice ofmaldecir. Slanderous discourse ormaldeciris both a flexible and a dangerous tool in the hands of an author, who becomes aggrandized through the poet's ethical responsibility to denounce social evils. However, slander can destabilize authorship due to the required use of despicable language. The result is a complex interplay among slandered authors and their critics that shows the flexible uses of slander in the context of ethnic and social strife. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay underscores the many benefits that scholars can glean by bringing the histories and historiographies of Brazil and Germany into dialogue. It argues that such dialogues can help to decentre the nation state in our narratives of German history; they allow us to identify many parallels in German histories that took place in multiple places around the world; and they afford us a better understanding of the roles that many Germans' multiple subject positions and hybrid identities played in the histories of both Germany and Brazil. At the same time, such German histories, unbounded by the nation state, reveal the many localto- local and transregional interconnections that persisted across the most radical political ruptures of the twentieth century, but which are often obscured by naturalized national narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the question of how and in what terms states constitute ethnicity and citizenship around statistical categories when these categories lack explicitly ethnic principles of classification. It does so based on a qualitative content analysis of the way that the German statistical category of ‘persons with a migration background’ is deployed in parliamentary debates on education. We argue that state actors in organized politics, who are embedded in Germany's national cultural repertoire and integration policy repertoire, transform this nuanced statistical category into a homogenized social category that is defined in terms of language, class and exclusion from the imagined national community. Our findings demonstrate that, in order to understand how the state uses statistics to draw boundaries within a society, it is necessary to go beyond the content of statistical categories themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Banton's article provoked a number of reflections on working with John Rex in the 1960s. The idea of race has a long history both in human relations and sociological theory. But the possibility of there being a specific field of ‘race relations’ remains contested. Ideas of race and ethnicity are elided in public discourse, making the resolution of linguistic issues in the field especially difficult and as yet unresolved. These reflections touch upon the political environment in which John Rex's earlier writing on race was conducted and upon the breadth of influences upon a sociologist rooted in the classical tradition, especially the sociology of Max Weber. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the last two decades, lay and professional interest in Britain's ‘mixed-race’ population has markedly increased, following dramatic growth in mixing and mixedness. As is often the case with new phenomena, agencies in the sphere of popular culture have stepped in to offer the wider public interpretative representations of this ‘new’ group. Drawing on challenging concepts, like demographic growth rates and projections, the family ‘norm’, the ostensible benefits of heterozygosity, and the drawbacks of claimed ‘in-betweenness’, they have offered us a picture of the ‘mixed-race’ population that is sometimes at variance with lived experiences or the harder image of statistical reality. Social representation theory is used to explore the limitations of these representations and to offer a number of counter-narratives that are grounded in the evidence base. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the convergence among ethnic groups, narco-traffickers, insurgents, and terror organizations in Central Asia. It analyzes the lucrative business of drug trafficking and the diffusion of globalization, which have undoubtedly brought these once disparate groups together. It will explore how the increasing movement of illicit goods and people, proliferation of transportation technology, growing infrastructure, cooperative ethnicities, as well as a shared need for funding, have provided these groups with an opportunity to consolidate their efforts in ways that were not possible in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The neighbourhood of Kumkapi in Istanbul is a superdiverse space by all readings of the term. Having already been at the centre of varying migration flows for decades, its current residential population reveals substantial differences on innumerable fronts. In this article, I explore the role of space as both product and source in shaping the emergence and convergence of such multiple differences on the ground. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I examine the historic socio-spatial transformation of Kumkapi, reflecting on the emergence of commonalities beyond ethnicity. I further suggest analysing these at a different spatial scale, moving from the neighbourhood down to the living spaces that migrants inhabit, exploring how variable differences materialize and become entangled in processes of where and how migrants access, use and relate to housing. In conclusion, I argue that superdiversity as an analytical concept carries the potential to understand new complexities in relations formed with and through space in the contemporary era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A response is offered to the article "A Post-Genomic Surprise:The Molecular Reinscription of Race in Science, Law, and Medicine," by Troy Duster, which appears within the issue. The article discusses the relationship between race, ethnicity, genomics and genomics, including in regard to the morality of intentions in genomics. An overview of research in the social sciences on race and racism from the 1950s through the mid 2010s, including on racial inequality and in regard to the biological classification of race, is provided.

A response is provided to the article "A post-genomic surprise. The molecular reinscription of race in science, law and medicine," by Troy Duster, which appears within the issue. The article discusses Duster's perspective on the relationship between molecular biology, DNA, genetics and race, including his opinion that rather than focus on alleged racial differences from genetics, social and culture histories of racial and ethnic groups should be researched. An overview of the relationship between health and race, including in regard to health disparities and the role that diet plays in causing diabetes, is provided.

Ethnic fractionalization (EF) is frequently used as an explanatory tool in models of economic development, civil war and public goods provision. However, if EF is endogenous to political and economic change, its utility for further research diminishes. This turns out not to be the case. This paper provides the first comprehensive model of EF as a dependent variable. It contributes new data on the founding date of the largest ethnic group in each state. It builds political and international variables into the analysis alongside historical and geoclimatic parameters. It extends previous work by testing models of politically relevant EF. In addition, this research interprets model results in light of competing theories of nationalism and political change. Results show that cross-national variation in EF is largely exogenous to modern politico-economic change. However, the data are inconclusive with respect to competing geoclimatic, historical institutional and modernist theories of ethnogenesis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Accounts of Tamil long-distance nationalism have focused on Sri Lankan Tamil migrants. But the UK is also home to Tamils of non-Sri Lankan state origins. While these migrants may be nominally incorporated into a ‘Tamil diaspora’, they are seldom present in scholarly accounts. Framed by Werbner's (2002) conception of diasporas as ‘aesthetic’ and ‘moral’ communities, this article explores whether engagement with a Tamil diaspora and long-distance nationalism is expressed by Tamil migrants of diverse state origins. While migrants identify with an aesthetic community, ‘membership’ of the moral community is contested between those who hold direct experience of suffering as central to belonging, and those who imagine the boundaries of belonging more fluidly – based upon primordial understandings of essential ethnicity and a narrative of Tamil ‘victimhood’ that incorporates experiences of being Tamil in Sri Lanka, India and in other sites, despite obvious differences in these experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To secure his reelection, President Richard Nixon tried to dismantle the New Deal coalition and form a new Republican majority; to do so, he attacked the monopoly Democrats had on racial and ethnic votes. Nixon's racial and ethnic politicking represented a rupture with past Republican ignorance of minorities; it was going to be one of his key legacies to his party. This article shows that, driven by consecutively defined electoral goals, his administration systematically favored group-specific measures over universalistic policies addressing common ethnic claims, and that these measures were accompanied by a divisive rhetoric and implemented in an antagonistic fashion. It argues that Nixon broke his promise to reunite the country, and used racial and ethnic politics as an instrument of electoral engineering rather than as a way to correct legacies of past discriminations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines tensions between the transnational realities of the extensive forced migrations that accompanied the end of the Second World War in Europe and the nationally focused public portrayals of those forced migrations that have prevailed in individual European countries since the war. The article does so through a case study of West Germany, which became home to some eight million forced migrants defined as ethnic Germans. It argues that a nationally oriented, highly selective public narrative of the forced migrations soon emerged in the Federal Republic, a narrative that stressed German suffering, relativized German crimes, and, crucially, elided differences among the forced migrants as well as between them and the rest of the West German population. The narrative had various useful societal functions, at least in the short term, but in the longer term it imposed significant costs on West Germany, both domestically and internationally. These costs related not only to foreign relations, especially vis-à-vis Eastern Europe, and to memory politics, but also to even wider challenges that contemporary Germany continues to face. These include the ongoing attempts to reconcile the reality of the Federal Republic as a multi-ethnic society of large-scale immigration with the myth of Germanness as an ethnically homogeneous and exclusive category, a myth that the post-1945 public narrative of German forced migrants helped to uphold. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Chechen Conflict is the most fatal and protracted conflict in the post-Soviet space. While it is the most discussed conflict there, it is also the least understood. Many contradicting accounts of it exist, and still many questions remain unanswered. One reason is that the nature of this conflict has changed over time. Unlike what many - particularly Western - analysts think, it is not a religious conflict. It began as an ethno-nationalist separatist conflict but only later was it infiltrated by extremist Salafis/Wahhabis. At this moment a war is going on between the local Chechen and the central Russian governments against the Salafi/Wahhabi Emirate of the Caucasus. Chechnya is the only autonomous region in Russia in which a separatist movement had been successful. The possible reasons are the peculiarities of the Caucasus; especially its mosaic type of ethnogeographic configuration and the traumatic past of many of its peoples. Another important factor in the explanation of such a separatist conflict in Chechnya - and nowhere else in the North Caucasus - is the fact that only in Chechnya has a titular minority enjoyed a dominant demographic position. This paper also discusses issues such as the nature of Islam in Chechnya and the Russian geopolitical codes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the meaning and use of generation in migration studies. It argues that the term is useful to examine how migrants create linkages between their pre- and post-migration lives. The article draws on Mannheim's notions of ‘generational units’ and ‘fresh contact’ to scrutinize how Peruvians engage resources from their previous lives in Peru to achieve social mobility in the USA, Japan, Spain and Argentina. In particular, the article focuses on the role of education, ethnicity and conflict in Peruvians’ efforts to create support networks and form migrant institutions. It suggests that generational units grow out of migrants’ shared experience of mobilizing the same resource to establish fresh contact with their receiving society. The article concludes that while generational belonging can generate a strong sense of solidarity among some groups of migrants, this often happens at the cost of the unity and inclusion of the migrant community at large. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Empire Strikes Back made a landmark and sometimes controversial intervention in the scholarship of ethnicity and race when it was first published. This article considers both the continuities and breaks that linked and separated the volume from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies' work and tradition that preceded it. It also suggests that the balance between ethnographic engagement and critical scholarship sets up a necessarily iterative process that values both but also recognizes the differences between the two. Such iteration speaks also to the manner in which the study of contemporary migration and its consequences demands both more self-conscious links between the study of migration and the scholarship of racial formation and ethnic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1990s, Singaporean state authorities have been increasingly marketing the city state as a knowledge-based hub between mainland China and western societies. Their focus on Mandarin-speaking mainlanders contrasts with Singapore's historical Chinese roots. By investigating the daily activities of Hokkien and Teochew community associations, I argue that these associations are finding ways to adapt to state initiatives that market a China-centric identity and target mainlanders. These dialect-based associations try to profit from state designs, while at the same time reclaiming their own historical distinctiveness. Drawing on qualitative work, I document the temporal practices of local dialect-based associations in reaction to neoliberal state initiatives that reduce Chineseness to a de-historicized skill set and stress how state–community interactions shape evolving Chinese ethnicities of the city state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the new second generation has paid much attention to testing one of the hypotheses posed by segmented assimilation theory – downward assimilation into America's underclass – and has neglected to examine other possible outcomes. In this paper, I address a much understudied pathway – assimilation by way of the ethnic community – based on a case study of Chinese immigrant children in the USA. I show that the children of Chinese immigrants have made inroads into mainstream America through educational achievement, not only because of the strong value their parents put on education but also because resources generated in the ethnic community help actualize that value. The Chinese American experience suggests that, in order to advance to the rank of middle-class Americans, immigrant parents have chosen the ethnic way to facilitate children's social mobility and achieved success. Paradoxically, ‘assimilated’ children have also relied on ethnicity for empowerment to fight negative stereotyping of the racialized other. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Focusing on ethnic Chinese as cultural citizens of the nation, this paper examines national identity in the context of generational change. In so doing, it connects to colonialist conceptions of identity the dominant framework of ethnicity that operates in Malaysia. It argues that this framework allows for the nationalist imagining of ‘Malaysian-Chinese’ as ‘outsiders’. In probing the complex conceptual relationship between ethnicity, national identity and cultural citizenship, this article asks: How does ‘ethnicity’ enter into negotiations over the ‘national’ in the cultural realm? What are the notions of cultural difference and national otherness that operate in the negative dualisms by which nation and ethnicity are defined? How are these dualisms tied to notions of authenticity and cultural citizenship? Using the novel The Harmony Silk Factory by Malaysian author Tash Aw to address these questions, this paper argues the need to rethink current policies and narratives of ethnic and national identity in Malaysia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the ways that plebeian women confessed to concubinary relationships in seventeenth-century Lima. Part One reviews complaints brought by casta and enslaved concubines to enforce matrimonial promises. Part Two analyzes the imprecise laws and policies of the canonists on concubinage. Part Three considers the Church’s inquisitorial function in policing interethnic intimacies, given the virtual synonymity of illegitimacy and concubinage. The article assesses the marriage–concubinage dichotomy from the perspective of women who, given their ethnic and social position in colonial society enjoyed limited legal standing vis-à-vis elite women, but conversely exercised greater sexual freedom in forming and dissolving partnerships. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]