January 30, 2014

Recommended Reading Summaries

Ezra Riley

Brubaker, Rogers, and David D. Laitin. 1998. Ethnic and Nationalist Violence. Annual Review of Sociology 24(1): 42352. Brubaker and Laitin review the literature on ethnic and nationalist violence, making the point that research on the topic is emerging from the separate fields of ethnic conflict study and study of political violence. The result is two distinct approaches that treat ethnic and nationalist violence without any coherent theoretical underpinnings or agreement about what ethnic and nationalist violence is. The key point for Brubaker and Laitin is that ethnic violence needs to be treated as a distinct phenomenon rather than with the theoretical confusion with which ethnic conflict and political violence studies have provided. According to the authors, ethnic conflict researchers have tended to treat ethnic violence merely as an extreme degree of conflict while political violence scholars have approached ethnicity inadequately and inconsistently. This evaluation is based on the provided overview of the intersection of these literatures which broadly divides them into categories of inductive-based data driven research, theory-driven research and culture-focused research. Brubaker and Laitin close by calling for a new research approach that recognizes the greatly varied instances ethnic violence in order to reach a more nuanced understanding of related phenomena that have been grouped together.

Neufeldt, Reina C. 2009. Tolerant Exclusion: Expanding Constricted Narratives of Wartime Ethnic and Civic Nationalism. Nations and Nationalism 15(2): 20626. Neufeldt explores exclusion during wartime, examining the experience of Mennonite communities in Canada and the United States during the First and Second World Wars. The author compares the experiences of Mennonite communities across the US-Canadian border and in the two historical periods, finding support for exclusion based on both ethnic and civic markers. Neufeldt provides support to the argument that nationalisms are not static by showing how a minority group can at one point in time face exclusion while later forming a part of the majority nationalism. According to this analysis, Mennonites faced exclusion during World War I in both Canada and the US that was largely based on ethnic markers that associated them with German; this remained more or less the same in Canada during World War II, but in the US exclusion shifted to civic markers based on many Mennonites conscientious objector status that was viewed as an abdication of civic duty. Neufeldt argues that this was due to shifting nationalism in the US that was moving away from narrow Anglo-Saxon definitions to broader categories that emphasized Caucasian identity. A similar shift occurred in Canada, but only following World War II. These cases show how both ethnic and civic nationalism can shift to alternately exclude or adopt minority groups.