The fragments imagine the nation? Minorities in the modern Middle East and North Africa [Guest editors]
Minorities in the Middle East have been a perennial object of scholarly attention. Minority politics have traditionally been considered as a problem: indeed, as one of the main reasons for the “unsuccessful” consolidation of the nation-state in the region. In recent years, with the events of the Ara...
| Published in: | British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies |
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| Main Authors: | , |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Taylor & Francis
2016
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/114535/ https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/114535/1/114535.pdf |
| Summary: | Minorities in the Middle East have been a perennial object of scholarly attention. Minority politics have traditionally been considered as a problem: indeed, as one of the main reasons for the “unsuccessful” consolidation of the nation-state in the region. In recent years, with the events of the Arab Spring and its aftermath, minorities have been figured at times as an obstacle to broader processes of democratization and liberalization, or at others as being threatened by those same processes—and the violence that has ensued as they stalled. This special issue of BJMES attempts to develop more nuanced approaches to minority politics in the Middle East and North Africa, taking our inspiration from the title of Sami Zubaida’s article on minorities in modern Iraq, ‘The fragments imagine the nation’. In a collection of articles from a range of disciplines—history, comparative literature, religious studies, and politics, but all with a strong historical sense—we look at the different ways in which groups now defined as ‘minorities’ have understood themselves not in opposition to but as part of larger political identities. |
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