Ethnopolitical Entrepreneurs presents the story of the Armenians of Glendale, California. Coming from Argentina, Armenia, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Russia, Syria, and many other countries, this group is internally fragmented and often has limited experience with the American political system. Nonetheless, Glendale's Armenians have rapidly mobilized and remade an American suburban space in their own likeness. In telling their story, Daniel Fittante expands our understanding of US political history. From the late nineteenth-century onward, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and several other immigrant populations in large American cities began changing the country's political reality. The author shows how Glendale's Armenians—as well as many other immigrants—are now changing the country's political reality within its dynamic, multiethnic suburbs. The processes look different in various suburban contexts, but the underlying narrative holds: immigrant populations converge on suburban areas and ambitious political actors develop careers by driving coethnics' political incorporation.

Despite a quarter-century of constructivist theorizing in the social sciences and humanities, ethnic groups continue to be conceived as entities and cast as actors. Journalists, policymakers, and researchers routinely frame accounts of ethnic, racial, and national conflict as the struggles of internally homogeneous, externally bounded ethnic groups, races, and nations. In doing so, they unwittingly adopt the language of participants in such struggles, and contribute to the reification of ethnic groups. In this timely and provocative volume, Rogers Brubaker—well known for his work on immigration, citizenship, and nationalism—challenges this pervasive and commonsense “groupism.” But he does not simply revert to standard constructivist tropes about the fluidity and multiplicity of identity. Once a bracing challenge to conventional wisdom, constructivism has grown complacent, even cliched. That ethnicity is constructed is commonplace; this volume provides new insights into how it is constructed. By shifting the analytical focus from identity to identifications, from groups as entities to group-making projects, from shared culture to categorization, from substance to process, Brubaker shows that ethnicity, race, and nation are not things in the world but perspectives on the world: ways of seeing, interpreting, and representing the social world.

This volume offers a major tour de force in bringing together for the first time key scholars, journalists, and policymakers from a variety of discipline perspectives to fully explore the wide range of issues involved in ethnic conflict and to offer concrete resolutions. The authors focus on prevention, intervention, and institutional regulation, but through it all, they bring a realistic perspective to bear on what is happening and what can be done. The wrenching circumstances of ethnic conflicts in Rwanda, Bosnia, Chechnya, or South Africa must never be forgotten or borne again, and the authors in this monumental work remind us-graphically, but groundedly-why. Visit our website for sample chapters! Published in co-operation with the Center for Development Research, University of Bonn.

This book offers an exciting new perspective on differentiation and inequality, looking at how our most personal choices (of sexual partners, friends, consumption items and lifestyle) are influenced by hierarchy and social difference.

Recent unrest and political upheaval in Iraq and Georgia have brought attention to the place of minority populations in both countries. Using Iraqi Kurds and the Abkhaz of Georgia as case studies, this book addresses how ethnic identities become politicized across boundaries by states and political entrepreneurs, leading to mobilization of ethnic populations. This book bridges Middle Eastern studies with Post-Soviet studies, exploring the commonalities of cases in these regions to draw out patterns in cases of ethnic mobilization. It also provides a theoretical framework to examine the process of ethnic mobilization. Building on this theoretical framework, the book provides a detailed empirical analysis of the case studies of the Kurds in Iraq and the Abkhaz in Georgia. Analysis of both cases shows several common variables in cases of ethnic mobilization, including ethnic entrepreneurs, political opportunity structure, ethnic identity politicization, and resource mobilization. These variables form the environment in which ethnic mobilization occurs, motivated by such factors as state policy towards ethnic groups and external intervention to support ethnic groups.

This book explores norm diffusion in non-Western contexts. It analyzes how norms transfer and what mechanisms or sources of leverage facilitate their diffusion. The individual chapters follow an interdisciplinary framework that analyzes social norms beyond the theoretical tradition of international relations, and focus on particular cases of diffusion—both successful and unsuccessful—across the non-Western world. In this way, the book challenges existing perspectives and advances critical norm research that diversifies the agency of norm entrepreneurs beyond processes of norm localization. It makes a twofold contribution—by deepening our theoretical understanding of norms and their dynamics and by broadening the geographical scope of norms research.

Romanian Germans, mainly from the Banat and Transylvania, have occupied a place at the very heart of major events in Europe in the twentieth century yet their history is largely unknown. This east-central European minority negotiated their standing in a difficult new European order after 1918, changing from uneasy supporters of Romania, to zealous Nazis, tepid Communists, and conciliatory Europeans. Migrating Memories is the first comprehensive study in English of Romanian Germans and follows their stories as they move across borders and between regimes, revealing a very European experience of migration, minorities, and memories in modern Europe. After 1945, Romanian Germans struggled to make sense of their lives during the Cold War at a time when the community began to fracture and fragment. The Revolutions of 1989 seemed to mark the end of the German community in Romania, but instead Romanian Germans repositioned themselves as transnational European bridge-builders, staking out new claims in a fast-changing world.