Minorities within Minorities: Equality, Rights and Diversity

Description

Most discussions of multiculturalism and group rights focus on the relationship between the minority and the majority. This volume advances our understanding of minority rights by focusing on conflicts that arise within minority groups and by examining the different sorts of responses that the liberal state might have to these conflicts. Groups around the world are increasingly successful in maintaining or winning autonomy. In light of this trend, a crucial question emerges: what happens to individuals within groups who find that their group discriminates against them? This volume brings together distinguished scholars who examine this question by weaving together normative political theory with case studies drawn from South Africa, the United States, India, Canada, and Britain. Classical liberalism, deliberative democracy, feminism, and associative democracy are among the theoretical frameworks used to offer solutions to the complex set of issues raised by minorities within minorities.

Avigail Eisenberg is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Victoria. She is author of Reconstructing Political Pluralism and co-editor of Painting the Maple: Essays on Race, Gender and the Construction of Canada. Jeff Spinner-Halev is the Schlesinger Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science at the University of Nebraska. He is the author of The Boundaries of Citizenship: Race, Ethnicity and Nationality in the Liberal State and Surviving Diversity: Religion and Democratic Citizenship.

"...a valuable and much welcomed contribution to studies in contemporary phenomenology and Husserl scholarship." --Christopher McTavish, Loyola University of Chicago: Philosophy in Review