Minority Rights And Liberal Democratic Insecurities

This book addresses the impact of a range of destabilising issues on minority rights in Europe and North America. This collection stems from the fact that liberal democracy did not bring about the “end of history” but rather that the transatlantic region of Europe and North America has encountered a new era of instability, particularly since the global financial crisis. The transatlantic region may have appeared to be entering a period of stability, but terrorist attacks on the soil of Euro-Atlantic states, the financial crisis itself and other changes, including mass migration, the rise of populism, changes in fundamental political conceptions, technological change, and most recently the Covid pandemic, have brought increasing uncertainties and instabilities in existing orders. In these contexts, the book investigates the resulting difficulties and opportunities for minority rights. Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines who are engaged in work on various unstable orders, the book provides a unique and largely neglected perspective on present developments as well as addressing the pressing issue of the future of the minority rights regime at global, regional and national levels. This book will appeal to those with interests in minority rights, human rights, nationalism, law and politics.

The increasingly multicultural fabric of modern societies has given rise to many new issues and conflicts, as ethnic and national minorities demand recognition and support for their cultural identity. This book presents a new conception of the rights and status of minority cultures. It argues that certain sorts of `collective rights' for minority cultures are consistent with liberal democratic principles, and that standard liberal objections to recognizing such rights on grounds of individual freedom, social justice, and national unity, can be answered. However, Professor Kymlicka emphasises that no single formula can be applied to all groups and that the needs and aspirations of immigrants are very different from those of indigenous peoples and national minorities. The book discusses issues such as language rights, group representation, religious education, federalism, and secession - issues which are central to understanding multicultural politics, but which have been surprisingly neglected in contemporary liberal theory.

This book stems from the joint effort of 25 research teams across Europe, representing a dozen disciplines from the social sciences and humanities, resulting in a radically novel perspective to the challenges of multilingualism in Europe. The various concepts and tools brought to bear on multilingualism are analytically combined in an integrative framework starting from a core insight: in its approach to multilingualism, Europe is pursuing two equally worthy, but non-converging goals, namely, the mobility of citizens across national boundaries (and hence across languages and cultures) and the preservation of Europe’s diversity, which presupposes that each locale nurtures its linguistic and cultural uniqueness, and has the means to include newcomers in its specific linguistic and cultural environment. In this book, scholars from applied linguistics, economics, the education sciences, finance, geography, history, law, political science, philosophy, psychology, sociology and translation studies apply their specific approaches to this common challenge. Without compromising the state-of-the-art analysis proposed in each chapter, particular attention is devoted to ensuring the cross-disciplinary accessibility of concepts and methods, making this book the most deeply interdisciplinary volume on language policy and planning published to date.

This collection takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of gendered technology, an emerging area of inquiry that draws on a range of fields to explore how technology is designed and used in a way that reinforces or challenges gender norms and inequalities. The volume explores different perspectives on the impact of technology on gender relations through specific cases of translation and interpreting technologies. In particular, the book considers the slow response of legal frameworks in dealing with the rise of language-based technologies, especially machine translation and large language models, and their impacts on individual and collective rights. Part I introduces the study of gendered technologies at this intersection of legal and translation and interpreting research, before moving into case studies of specific technologies. The cases explored in Parts II and III discuss the impact of interpreting and translation technologies on language professionals, language communities, and gender inequalities, while stressing the future needs of gendered technology, particularly machine translation. Taken together, the collection demonstrates the value of a cross-disciplinary approach in better understanding how language technologies can be harnessed to address discrimination and contribute to growing discussions on gender equality and social justice at the intersection of technology and translation. This book will be of interest to scholars in translation and interpreting studies, gender studies, language technologies, and language and the law.

Securitization and Desecuritization of FARC in Colombia introduces a new dual framework for securitization, called “dual securitization,” which regards securitization as a whole process that ends after the desecuritization of the given issue. Başar Baysal examines this process in three phases: (1) definition, (2) construction, and (3) (in)securitization-in-action. Additionally, the dual securitization framework takes both bottom-up and top-down characteristics of the process of securitization into consideration and examines both macro-level decision-making processes and discursive efforts and micro-level security practices. This book looks at the Colombian Conflict, and the empirical part of the study examines the contextual factors that facilitated the dual securitization of FARC and the Colombian State; definition, construction and insecuritization-in-action phases of the dual securitization process; and the ongoing process of desecuritization in Colombia.

"Proceedings of the fifth Kobe lectures, Tokyo and Kyoto, December 1998."--T.p.

Populism and Liberal Democracy is the first book to offer a comprehensive theory about populism during both its emergence and consolidation phases in three geographical regions: Europe, Latin America and the United States. Based on the detailed comparison of all significant cases of populist governments (including Argentina, Greece, Peru, Italy, Venezuela, Ecuador, Hungary, and the U.S.) and two cases of populist failure (Spain and Brazil), each of the book's seven chapters addresses a specific question: What is populism? How to distinguish populists from non-populists? What causes populism? How and where does populism thrive? How do populists govern? Who is the populist voter? How does populism endanger democracy? If rising populism is a threat to liberal democratic politics, as this book clearly shows, it is only by answering the questions it posits that populism may be resisted successfully.

Right-wing nationalist populism poses direct attacks on social tolerance, human rights discourse, political debates, the survival of the welfare state and its universal services, impacting on the roles of social work. This book demonstrates how right-wing nationalist populism can and must be countered. Using case studies from around the world, this book shows how a revitalised radical social work where community organisation, building alliances, trade union commitment and social action can be used as political forces to speak up against discrimination and hate in accordance with human rights, social justice, and social work values. The rise of national populism signals that now is the time for social work to forge and reforge such networks and create links with civil society and challenge right-wing populist policies wherever they manifest themselves. It will be of interest to all social work students, practitioners and academics, particularly those working on critical and radical social work, green social work, anti-oppressive practice and community development.