Ethnicities and Values in a Changing World

Ethnicities and Values
in a Changing World

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Ethnicities and Values
in a Changing World
Edited by
Gargi Bhattacharyya
Aston University, UK

© Gargi Bhattacharyya 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Gargi Bhattacharyya has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as the editor of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Ethnicities and values in a changing world.
1. Ethnicity. 2. Social values. 3. Cultural relations.
4. Racism.
I. Bhattacharyya, Gargi, 1964-
305.8-dc22
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bhattacharyya, Gargi, 1964-
Ethnicities and values in a changing world / by Gargi Bhattacharyya.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-7546-7483-2 (hardback) 1. Group identity. 2. Cultural pluralism. 3. Values.
I. Title.
HM753.B43 2009
305.8009’051--dc22
2009015714
ISBN: 978-0-7546-7483-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-7546-9775-6 (ebk.V)

Contents
1 Introduction: Ethnicities, Values and Old-fashioned Racism 1
Gargi Bhattacharyya
2 Teaching Race and Racism in the 21st
Century:
Thematic Considerations 35
Howard Winant
3 Diaspora Conversations: Ethics, Ethicality, Work and Life 45
A conversation between Parminder Bhachu and Gargi Bhattacharyya
4 Migrant Women’s Networking:
New Articulations of Transnational Ethnicity 65
Ronit Lentin
5 ‘The people do what the political class isn’t able to do’:
Antigypsyism, Ethnicity Denial and the Politics of Racism
without Racism 83
Robbie McVeigh
6 Violent Urban Protest – Identities, Ethics and Islamism 103
Max Farrar
7 Beliefs, Boundaries and Belonging:
African Pentecostals in Ireland 119
Abel Ugba
8 On Being a ‘Good’ Refugee 135
John Gabriel and Jenny Harding
9 Narrating Lived Experience in a Binational Community
in Costa Rica 155
Carlos Sandoval García
10 Conclusion: Ethnicity and Ethicality in an Unequal World 169
Gargi Bhattacharyya
Index 181

Chapter 1
Introduction:
Ethnicities, Values and Old-fashioned Racism
Gargi Bhattacharyya
How do we know how to be good?
How do we decide what we believe?
How do we form our identities in a rapidly changing world?
How do we achieve a sense of belonging and community against a barrage of
global forces and influences?
In recent years these questions have taken centre stage in a range of debates at both
local and international levels. Questions of identity, ethics, values and community
continue to animate the most violent of political contexts. Old questions about
the articulation and enforcement of social values and the need to be connected to
others continue to circulate, with a few positive responses to the central question
of how can we live together? (See for example, Appiah, 2004; Benhabib, 2002;
Parekh, 2000.)
After the violent racial histories of the 20th
century, there appeared to be a
brief moment when the more optimistic of commentators dared to suggest a post-
racial future (Eze, 2001). No longer trapped in a world divided by the colour line
or the formal racial states of earlier times, the racial politics of the 21st
century
promised to be more unpredictable than that of the 20th
– although not necessarily
less bloody or painful.
Unfortunately, the longed-for post-racial future has emerged as a time of new
forms of racialisation, often over-written by older and more familiar structures of
racialised inequality. The twenty-first century seems destined to be riven by ethnic
divisions and animated by ethnic performance, an unhappy outcome that can be
seen in the first decade of this new century and the ethnically-inspired violence
that has cut across conflicts in Darfur (Flint and De Waal, 2005), Kenya (Baldauf,
2008), Iraq, Indonesia (Sidel, 2006) and elsewhere. Although each of these recent
conflicts has been shaped by the changing politics of its own context, each also
represents a reassertion of absolutist notions of ethnic identity, albeit for a variety
of politically expedient ends.
Against this, this collection seeks to challenge the contention that ethnicity is
static or that ethnicity necessarily represents traditional values and cultures.
Instead, this volume considers how ethnicity is mobilised as a political
identity in response to a changing world. This includes discussion of, among other

Ethnicities and Values in a Changing World
things, the formation of religious communities, responses to media racism, the
interplay between state racism and everyday choices, and the struggle of racialised
communities to both be good and be seen to be good.
The debate about ethnicity and values has taken place in a number of arenas,
with slightly different directions and emphases. These debates range from:
discussions of the philosophical conception of the other and our duty to this other
(Benhabib, 2004); the ethical assertion and burden that is declared in any taking
of identity and implications of this for our ability to live together in any kind of
peaceable manner (Sen, 2006); the allegation that some ethnic identities are tied
irretrievably to backward, violent and exclusionary values (Moller Okin, 1999);
the suggestion that allegiance to some ethnic identities means an abdication of
ethical judgement (Gove, 2006).
This volume considers all of these assertions, in varying degrees. Some pieces,
such as that by Howard Winant, argue that the ethical obligations that occur with
the taking of ethnic identity also shape the responsibilities of scholars in the field.
The majority of case studies here reveal the extent to which the ethical claims of
ethnic identity are staged in response to popular demonisation or state racism. In
some instances, as shown by Abel Ugba, this defensive response can itself take on
a rhetoric of exclusion and judgement.Anumber of chapters describe the strategies
that are employed by those facing exclusion, strategies that include reasserting the
benefits and strengths of the ethical values of their ‘community’. However, overall,
the pieces taken together reveal a world of changing and constantly renegotiated
values. This process of ongoing negotiation unsettles the terms of some other
recent debate about ethnicity and values.
Ethnicity as an Expression of Values
Much of the debate surrounding the issue of ethnicity and values implies that the
world is divided into discrete groups of people who can be adequately described
through ethnic naming. The allegation that some groups remain tied to practices
and beliefs that cannot be reconciled with our ethical duty to each other rests on
the belief that culture, in this sense, is stable, inherent in each member of the group
and is immune to the appeals of reason or argument (for a summary of competing
accounts of ethnicity, see Jenkins, 2008).
This work argues that such a conception of ethnicity in the world transforms
all human disagreement into inter-ethnic conflict. Although wary of the dangers
of cliched constructivism, as described by Brubaker, overall this volume seeks
to argue that ethnicity is deployed in part as an expression of values and a model
of ethical practice. This does not assume a solidity to ethnic identity, or that the
consolidation of ethnic identity is an inevitable outcome of ethnically framed
social turbulence. In some of the instances discussed here the ethical claims of
ethnic practice are linked to highly diverse groups (see, for example, pieces by
Gabriel and Harding and by Sandoval-Garcia). The point is that the articulation

Introduction: Ethnicities, Values and Old-fashioned Racism
of ethical judgement and values serves here as an explicit refutation of the racist
allegation that some people have no values.
More generally it can be argued that the performance of ethnicity is always
a kind of ethical display, if we take the ethical to be a statement of intent about
our relations to others. If ethnicity is above all an affirmation of groupness, then
there must be a confirmation of sanctioned behaviour within the group and the
demonstration that group norms can be observed. This is ethics as part of the lived
contract of belonging. The display of ethnicity represents both that assertion of
identity and a statement about way of life, sense of entitlement and manner of
connection to others.
The pieces in this volume span discussions of the manner in which marginalised
or demonised groups take up the rhetoric of moral worth as an element of their
resistance to the demeaning slurs of the dominant. This is a consideration of
ethnicity as a response to changing circumstances and perceived threats and as a
code for ethical behaviour.
This can be seen through a range of recent examples. The much-discussed
politicisation of religion represents one instance of this phenomenon and the
manner in which social actors combine religion and politics and everyday contexts,
including the mundane context of resisting the banality of everyday racism, could
be regarded as a key indicator of the role of ethicality in ethnic articulation. It is
worth noting that these forms of ethical assertion can accompany the re-emergence
of exclusionary identities in both majority and minority communities. Ethical
claims here have no necessary relation to practices of coexistence or tolerance.
In fact, the strength of the ethical claim may be precisely its ability to divide
the world into good and bad and to challenge notions of coexistence that appear
unworkable.
The volume as a whole seeks to place these developments within the wider
context of adaptive and resurgent state racisms and the controversial and varied
political mobilisation that has occurred around the concept of ‘diversity’. The
question of divisions and antagonisms between minority ethnic communities
inevitably has led to a reappraisal of analysis in this field. These are issues that
are not easily confined to models of majority-minority relations or the formal
mobilisation of ethnic nationalism (Kyambi, 2005). Instead, the debates around
community cohesion have sought to acknowledge both structural inequality and
the dangers of exclusionary identities (Worley, 2005; Eatwell, 2006) – although
this discourse brings its own pitfalls, as outlined in pieces by Farrar and by Gabriel
and Harding.
Taken together, the pieces here share some common themes. Firstly, all
contributors share an understanding of ethnicity in which the articulation of ethnic
identity is an ongoing and creative process that can reveal innovative ethical codes.
Although the influence of civilisational clash models of social understanding
clearly impacts on everyday experience, contributors describe the manner in
which those facing racism and exclusion take up the language of values and ethical
codes in order to articulate less absolute and constraining models of identity. Such

alternative articulations of value offer a critique of the idea that there are absolute
divisionsbetweenculturesandservetointerrogateconceptsofcommunitycohesion
and inter-ethnic interaction in a manner that can propose models of shared values
that do not rely on static conceptions of identity. Alongside this, the pieces in
this volume identify a framework for understanding the processes through which
individuals create innovative ethical codes that inform their relations to others.
Are Values Like ‘Glue’?
Recent debates about national identity, belonging and community cohesion appear
to be based on a conception of ethnicity as a static entity. This conceptualisation
posits ethnic difference as a source of conflict in itself and, therefore, presents
models of mediation and revamped nationalism as essential components of shared
citizenship (Brown, 2006). This volume presents an alternative account of ethnicity
as a mobile process that is under constant renegotiation. Such a conception of
ethnicity calls into question models of community cohesion that present ethnicity
as the source of antagonisms and differences that must be overcome and instead
suggests that ethnicity is itself multiple and changing and is unlikely to be a
basis for articulating shared values. The debate about modernity, reflexivity and
post-traditional societies has been influential in recent analyses of contemporary
society (see Beck, Giddens and Lash, 1994). These debates raise key questions
about the manner in which individuals conceive of ethicality and make day-to-
day ethical choices. Individuals may not shape their lives according to so-called
traditional values, however the conduct of everyday life continues to demand an
understanding of ethicality and corresponding code of behaviour.
These questions take on urgency in the current climate. We are undergoing a
widespread re-examination of the nature and extent of our bonds to each other as
human beings (Appiah, 2006) – be this in the form of debates about global poverty
and global warming, terrorism and war or anti-social behaviour and community
cohesion. Political debate, from the most violent and international to the most
local, is focused on the question of how we define our ethical values and how these
values shape our behaviour in relation to others.
The concept of ethnicity is tied intimately to the idea of value – who we believe
ourselves to be and how we choose to relate to others are issues that are shaped
through the prisms of ethnicised cultures. This volume considers again these
debates about the articulation of ethnic identity, the nature of our relation to each
other and discussions of everyday ethics. This volume offers a review of recent
reappraisals of the concept of ‘ethnicity’ and the accompanying insertion of ideas
of belief and value in this discussion. Individual chapters consider how ethnic
identities shift and adapt, in particular in response to the pressures of global forces.
Overall it is argued that ethnic identities are improvised and reveal one method
of retaining a narrative of ethical values in individual lives. Such narratives may

utilise a variety of resources, ranging from those of traditional religion to those of
popular culture.
The textbook account of the term ethnicity suggests that this is a description of
a conscious community (Jenkins, 2008). Whereas race is presented as an external
imposition, a powerful categorisation that descends upon a group from the outside,
ethnicity demands some degree of identification. If race is a practice that is done to
us, ethnicity is something we do to ourselves, in part at least.
It is this demand for active participation that makes ethnicity so susceptible
to the claims of religion and belief. There is nothing new about the political
mobilisation of religious identity (Hastings, 1997). It is true that in previous
centuries religious divisions were not couched in terms of identity. However,
many regions of the world have a long history of enacting social division through
religion. The recent upsurge of interest in religious mobilisation appears to be a
response to the perception that religion is becoming a more, not less, significant
component of social division (Jurgensmeyer, 1993; Mandaville, 2007) and a
particular concern in the West that political Islam represents a threat to global
order and so-called western values. Pieces here consider the impact of this anxiety
about religion (Farrar; Ugba), but the volume is framed around the more general
issue of the impact of globalisation on the articulation of ethnic identities and the
concurrent improvisation of ethnic identity that has become so familiar across
locations.
The Context of the Values and Ethnicity Debate
In common with other locations, Britain has undergone a number of years of public
debate about the nature and resilience of national identity. For example, Gordon
Brown heralded his ascent to the role of British Prime Minister by giving a public
lecture on the nature of Britishness. At the same time, the widespread critique of
multiculturalism, much of it international and much of it implying that it is the
British model which has failed, has given rise to an overenthusiastic reclaiming of
national pride and heritage as the supposedly essential underpinning to a cohesive
society. It has been suggested that it is the failure to articulate such a basis of
commonality that is at the heart of Britain’s social problems,
one of the major problems faced by British society today: the failure to produce a
discourse that integrates various ethnic groups under the umbrella of a common
British identity. (Ansari et al. 2008, 1)
Perhaps inevitably, these debates have become more heated and aggressive in
the aftermath of the London bombings of 2005. This event, where four young
British Muslim men carried out a series of deadly bomb attacks on London public
transport, killing themselves in the process, has had a profound impact on British
public debate. After this attack from within, there was a highly public expression

of doubt about the viability or desirability of multicultural co-existence. With little
reference to evidence, although in a continuation of earlier reports about the need
for community cohesion, there was a widespread acceptance that British versions
of multiculturalism were to blame, at least in part, for the emergence of British
residents who wished to launch terrorist attacks at home. This was a critique of
multiculturalism that suggested that the tolerance of difference allowed alien
value systems to be nurtured undisturbed, with an outcome of serious divisions
within the nation (for an extreme example of this argument, see Phillips, 2006).
Predictably, this too continued a longer-running theme in policy debate.
In Britain much of the public anxiety about national identity and the allegedly
corrosive influence of multiculturalism has revolved around a sense of some more
fundamental crisis, a suggestion that the very basis of civilised life may be under
attack. Bannister summarises this as,
the myth, articulated by successive generations of press and politicians, that
the ‘British way of life’ is under threat by an unruly minority (Bannister et al.,
2006, 919)
This account goes beyond narratives of ethnic belonging to include concerns
about youth, disorder, public display and, that most nebulous and yet most
anxiety-inducing of contemporary afflictions, anti-social behaviour. Alongside the
attempted retrieval of national identity and culture, the dying days of Tony Blair’s
government instituted an ill-considered ‘Respect’ agenda, explicitly targeting the
varied incarnations of anti-social behaviour. This was not an initiative that sought
to mobilise a politics of race, or, at least, not in any obvious sense. Those themes
received plenty of government comment (and media releases) through initiatives to
harden immigration control, to increase the punishment of immigration offenders,
to celebrate prescriptive and narrow accounts of national culture and to enforce
integration of minorities on terms that pandered to the prejudices of the majority.
The Respect agenda was introduced alongside such explicitly racialised initiatives,
but as a reminder that an unethical minority threatened majority values.
the Home Office’s Respect Action Plan … seeks to empower majority groups
to enforce respectability in public spaces of all kinds by removing forms of
‘intimidation’ and ‘tyranny’. (Bannister et al., 2006, 920)
The appeal to majority values is a tactic that can move between a variety of
populist agendas, from law and order to anti-immigrant rhetoric. The extensive
public concern and government campaign against antisocial behaviour operated
through an appeal to a set of majority values that remained unspecified. What was
important was the sense that this majority, silent, long-suffering, was under attack
by an unruly minority. This sense that social problems were caused by an alien
group and that the response should be to fight back from this besieged position

worked to rally the electorate around a whole series of initiatives that purported to
defend the majority against a dangerous and intrusive minority.
The suggestion that majorities are under attack and that this requires a defence
and consolidation of national identity has been echoed in a range of ‘crisis’
measures across Europe. Bertossi explains that this propagation of the idea that
majorities are besieged has enabled a shift to the political right across Europe,
Migrants and ethnic and religious minorities have been identified as an
explanation for this integration crisis, to which governments have responded
with a return to the national. National identity is therefore being set up as a
form of ‘common belonging’ which is under threat from Islam and, at the same
time, as a solution to the crisis of ‘common belonging’, which is particularly
noticeable in the fact that themes which were traditionally held by far-Right
parties have now become commonplace. (Bertossi, 2007, 6)
Bertossi goes on to explain that this reveals the tension between maintaining ideals
of citizenship, a central plank in the mythologised self-conception of European
culture that has emerged, increasingly, in response to shifts in the global status and
internal composition of Europe, and other anxieties that the culture and status of
majorities is being undermined as a result of these same changes.
In short, the opposition between ‘national philosophies’ of citizenship and
integration policies is being played out in three areas: a crisis in the national,
but a resurgence of nationalist discourses to make sense of solidarity within
globalised, plural societies; a crisis in ‘integration models’, but calls from
minoritiesof immigrantorigin for full access to substantial,first-class citizenship;
and a crisis, in public opinion, in the sense of ‘common belonging’, but the use
of immigration and Islam to make sense of a global crisis whose only political
response that ‘pays’ is a return to national identity. (Bertossi, 2007, 6)
Although much of the mobilisation of majority anxiety has been focused on issues
of ethnicity, nationhood and belonging, the sense of disruption arises from a larger
array of changes, not least the unsettling impact of shifts in the global economy
on the security and sovereignty of the nation. Bertossi suggests that the array of
rediscovered popular nationalisms across Europe, in both minority and mainstream
political parties, are an indication that electorates suffering from anxiety on many
fronts, including those caused by the vagaries of the global economy, respond
most readily to a return to the familiar terrain of exclusionary nationalism. The
initial popular response to the enormity of global economic downturn seems to
confirm this – with workers’ movements proclaiming their demand of ‘British
jobs for British workers’ and parties across the political spectrum rushing to
demonstrate their support of this principle and public battles about the necessity
of ‘protectionism’ in many locations. The perceived dangers of the ethnic other
and the allegedly unwise accommodations of ‘multiculturalism’ fold into this

larger anxiety about global status, economic and political sovereignty and future
well-being, yet simultaneously become the most recognisable short-hand for this
generalised feeling of social unease.
The Alleged Crisis of Multiculturalism
Not all of the debate has been limited to Britain, or even to Europe or America.
Perhaps in another indication of the inappropriate influence of American trends in
social theory and policy (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999), Kuo writes of the take-
up of the language of multiculturalism in Taiwan. However, she, also, is doubtful
about the efficacy of the concept or practice.
Is multiculturalism possible? At least, multiculturalism is conceived as an
alternative vision of cultural strategy whose objective is to resist cultural
supremacy and to focus on the equality of different representations among
cultures. The concept of multiculturalism is much commented upon these days.
Increasingly today, the rhetoric of multiculturalism is in the air, as evidenced by
political debates and agendas. It has been considered as a capacious vehicle for
presenting cultural diversity in a transnational society. (Kuo, 2003, 223)
The varied use of multiculturalism as a ‘capacious vehicle’ that can be transported
across locations to meet the needs of any transnational society is connected to the
return to nationalism for locations facing a sense of social crisis. In both instances,
it is concepts of ethnic boundary and belonging that emerge as fixing techniques
for other uncertainties.
Modood and Ahmad suggest that the alleged crisis of multiculturalism, in fact,
is a sign of a necessary reassessment of the relationship between majority and
minority groups, particularly through a time of rapid social and economic change
for many locations. In particular, they argue that a multiculturalism that does not
encompass religion and religious identity cannot address the challenges of co-
existence in our time. They ask whether there is a need to think again about what
it is that,
a dominant culture which aspires to be liberal, democratic and inclusive may
require from minority cultures; whether we need a new extended concept of
racism which can incorporate hostility against Muslims; and about the place
of religion in the political culture and institutions. (Modood and Ahmad, 2007,
187)
Tariq Modood has argued for some time that concepts of racism and exclusion have
failed to recognise the role of religion and religious identity. In particular, he has
argued that there is a tension between the expressed values of secularism, which
have increasingly been proclaimed as a central aspect of Western culture and even

of liberal democracy, and the high levels of religious observance among minority
communities in the West, in particular amongst Muslim communities (Modood,
2007). To Modood, this oversight is at the heart of multiculturalist crisis talk.
Whereas earlier debates about the benefits of multicultural living could rely, to a
large extent, on the active participation and gratitude of minority communities who
expected no more than tolerance at best, the increasing politicisation of religious
identity unsettles this framework. At worst, those expressing an allegiance to
secular values may portray the proclamation of proud religious identity as itself
another version of exclusionary supremacism. The imagined idyll of multicultural
living had assumed that all participants would be persuaded, perhaps over time,
to tolerate and perhaps even value each other. To this extent, even quite weak
versions of multiculturalism adopt an ethical stance that prescribes the way of
living that is presumed to be better for all. However, such a conception has relied
on the assumption that assertions of group rights can be accommodated within
egalitarian frameworks. As Modood and Ahmad argue, religious groups and
Muslims in particular have not been regarded as participants in such quests for
equality,
In theory and in practice, then, while minority racial and ethnic assertiveness
(not to mention women’s movements and gay pride) were encouraged by
egalitarians, religious assertiveness, especially on the part of Muslims – when it
occurred – was seen as a problem: not as a strand within equality struggles but
as a threat to multiculturalism. (Modood and Ahmad, 2007, 189)
If multiculturalism has been in crisis, then this has been a result of the limitations of
multicultural thinking.The emergence of Muslim minorities across western nations
who are both observant and politicised tests the ability of a multiculturalism that
assumes secularism to accommodate all groups. Modood and Ahmad argue that
there must be a reconsideration of multiculturalism that can accommodate religious
identity and create a framework for public life that can allow participation and
entitlement for all, without demanding that groups prove their own multiculturalist
credentials and without assuming that multiculturalism can become a new
universalism that erases all difference.
Some other critiques of the conceptual framework of multiculturalism have
argued that this focus on cultural tolerance and appreciation cannot mediate
difference and inequality in any meaningful way. McClennan argues that an
excessive focus on the cultural makes multiculturalism unworkable,
Some multiculturalists are militantly culturalist, believing that, to have any value,
multiculturalism must involve the protection, and perhaps enhancement, of only
the sort of entrenched national, ethnic and religious forms of life that have a
manifestly profound and primary inﬂuence over their members. Apart from the
risk of exaggerating the ‘grip’ that such cultures have on their participants, an
obvious snare in this line of thinking is that within many strongly formative

Ethnicities and Values in a Changing World10
cultures there is little scope for serious accommodation to the fundamental beliefs
and practices of other, equivalent ‘deep’cultures. That being so, multiculturalism
itself would hold little promise of developing into a new metacultural ethic for
our times; indeed multiculturalism might well be seen as a deﬁnite threat to
strong cultures. (McClennan, 2001, 390 )
McClennan is sceptical about the overall social benefits of multiculturalism – in
particular its ability to bring together groups with divergent views and values.
As he suggests, the call to co-existence of a certain kind could itself come to be
regarded as a cultural imposition and threat. In an echo of Modood and Ahmad,
McClennan suggests that a multiculturalism that celebrates cultural autonomy
and mutual tolerance, but cannot adapt to the political context shaping relations
between minorities and majorities, will not be able to address the challenges
of transnational societies. However, unlike Modood, McClennan disputes the
assertion that cultural identity holds such a central role in contemporary life.
Whilst it might be accepted that all human beings are in some signiﬁcant way
culturally formed and culturally located, the notion that everyone inhabits deep,
coherent and relatively unchanging cultures is disputable. (McClennan, 2001,
390)
This view has brought together an unlikely alliance, including those who regard
multiculturalism as a diversion from the continuing structural inequality and
violence of many diverse societies, those who argue that granting such authority
and solidity to something as changeable as culture gives undue power to self-
appointed leaders of minority cultural groups at the expense of less enfranchised
group members such as women and sexual minorities, and those who feel that
multiculturalism has been used to undermine the shared value set that should
underlie any national political community. All three viewpoints are united in the
implication that multiculturalism and multiculturalists have been the cause of
social unrest and injustice, albeit unwittingly.
However, in the same debate, Peter McLaren defends critical multiculturalism
against these allegations, arguing that multicultural wars in the US represented an
important battle about access, entitlement and power,
Multicultural education also represents an early initiative to counter brutal
stereotypes of African Americans, Asians, and Latinos/as in school textbooks, to
challenge the disproportionate placement of students of color in special education
programs for ‘disturbed youth’, and to redress their lack of representation in the
media, and in key sectors of the government. (McLaren, 2001, 410)
For McLaren, multiculturalism in both liberal and critical forms, represents a
necessary corrective to the uncritical celebration of power and the powerful. As he
puts it, multiculturalism,

Introduction: Ethnicities, Values and Old-fashioned Racism 11
still serves as a counterweight to those expanding ranks of fundamentalists who
herald the United States’ blameless passage from sanctuary for the Pilgrims to
global capital’s Alpha Male as an act of Divine Providence. (McLaren, 2001,
410)
However, McLaren too discerns a reinvention of liberal multiculturalism as a new
assertion of supremacism – the only acceptable human values in the world.
Liberal multiculturalism needs to be understood often as having more to do
with maintaining the residual Pax Romana fantasies of a blood-thirsty Cartesian
imperialism – ‘I invade you therefore you exist’... than with defending the dream
of ethnic pluralism under a sun umbrella festooned with happy face symbols. ...
multiculturalism camouﬂages imperialist aggression and defends – through a
particular species of American Chauvinism and moral sangfroid – the imperial
domination of the West in various forms throughout our transculturalized planet.
(McLaren, 2001, 413)
In the end, it seems, McClennan and McLaren converge in the view that
multiculturalism is proving unequal to the challenges of globalised living. This
disagreement about the place of multiculturalism in a globalised world uncovers
a theme that informs much debate yet which is rarely addressed directly. In a
confirmation of Kuo’s view that multiculturalism has come to be regarded as a
technique for managing the challenges of transnational society, commentators in
other fields have suggested that issues of ethnicity, identity and racism have become
the nodal points between local debates about belonging and entitlement and an
international arena divided by violent conflict and wars of exploitation. For some,
this has been an opportunity to deride multiculturalism for bringing the excesses
of ethnic wars into the space of the liberal democratic state – in a confirmation that
some can never be inculcated in the values necessary for democratic freedoms.
However, in contradiction to the demonisation of multiculturalism and the
suggestion that this tolerance of difference has allowed the development of
enemy aliens within the nation, others have argued that the violent tensions of
contemporary political life must be understood within the framework of existing
national identities. Writing of ‘the construction of modern jihadi terrorists’, Stuart
Croft argues,
they are part of British society, and take their cues from us: in their attitudes and
behaviour, they are much more British than we British would like to believe.
(Croft, 2007, 318)
There are two points to note here – those who claim to wage a religious war
against the West from within both operate within the framework of values and
cultural references of that space, a view that is echoed by Max Farrar in this
volume, and their complaint is expressed in the terms of this shared culture.

Despite the much repeated fantasy of the dangerous alien, those who are accused
of attacking western culture and values are also its products, as seen in the often-
repeated observations that Bin Laden has benefited from a western-influenced elite
education, that what we know of the 9/11 bombers points to their deep immersion
in so-called western culture and practices and that the 7/7 bombers were ordinary
and unremarkable British lads, including among their number the son destined
previously to take over the family fish and chip shop.
It is the discomfort of this creeping realisation coupled with the framing of the
War on Terror as a battle between them and us that has led to new distinctions of
ethnic and national identity. Croft reminds us that,
Prior to 9/11, no-one spoke of the category: ‘British Muslim’. It is a category
entirely created by those attacks, by government, media and broader community
responses. (Croft, 2007, 319)
Ethnicity and Politics
Ethno-nationalism has been a key arena in which claims have been made about
the connection between ethnicity and ethics. Although it can be argued that the
modern notion of the nation-state already implies a connection between land,
belonging and ethnicity, recent mobilisations for the claims of ethnic nationalism
have led to a reinvigorated debate about these issues. The religious element of
some of these mobilisations heightens the sense that ethnic belonging is a matter
of (supposedly) ethical behaviour. The extensive discussion of the break-up of the
formerYugoslavia and the array of conflicts that arose from that shift has suggested
that we live in an era where religious and national identities blend into each other,
where contemporary conflict plays out the violent tensions of a centuries-old
historical conflict and that ethnic identity is made through this tortured memory,
and where the violence of inter-ethnic struggles for nationhood comes to animate
the global arena and international politics.
There is, of course, a long-standing and extensive literature discussing the
relationship between nationalist movements and religious identities (Hastings,
1997; Inglis et al., 2000). Coming to nationhood in a range of locations has been
a process deeply connected to the expression of religion and a number of modern
nations retain explicit or implicit reference to religious values in both the formal
processes of nationhood and in everyday narratives of national belonging. Nations
that have adopted an explicit prohibition on the public declaration of religion or
adherence to official secularism or separation of church and state also include
official narratives of shared values in public utterances on behalf of the state – this
is the appeal to secular tolerance that the Hindu right can misappropriate to suggest
that other religious traditions are alien to the Indian nation or the central role of the
values of the Republic in the public life and political discourse of France.

Despite the considerable scholarly and political attention that has been given
to analysis of the resurgence of exclusionary nationalist movements, not least in
terms of the possible threat to peace and stability of such movements, there has
been little attention given to the influence of other strains of religious nationalism
on the foreign policy decisions of ostensibly secular and non-racial states. Those
who wish to reinsert a consideration of ethnicity and racism into the analysis of
international relations have argued that all nationhood is ethno-national, despite the
various developments that try to accommodate diverse groups within one nation
(Chowdhry and Nair, 2004). The transformation of tests of blood and belonging
into tests of supposed ethical belonging serves to translate the logic of foreign
policy into domestic politics.
Dangerous and Endangered Migrants
To illustrate and extend these points, it is helpful to consider a recent instance of
state utterances that are shaped explicitly through an appeal to moral mission.
Recent developments in British law and public debate in the areas of prostitution
and forced marriage have presented a strong moral argument for state intervention
against the sexual exploitation of migrant and minority women. However, in both
the detail of proposals and in the presentation by government, immigration control
is the central focus and primary technique of intervention.
In effect, immigration control is reframed as a form of ethical intervention,
whether this is in the form of a ‘saving’ of trafficked women or a ‘protection’ of
young people from ‘forced marriage’. Liz Fekete has commented on the (mis)use
of feminism to legitimise state attacks on migrant and minority ethnic communities
across Europe (Fekete, 2006). The public presentation of policy changes in the
areas of prostitution and forced marriage in Britain could be seen as examples
of harnessing alternative progressive ethical codes, such as the need to prevent
sexual exploitation, for the purposes of immigration control.
The overall message is, it seems, that government is stemming the tide of
dangerous migrants – under the veil of an intervention against sexual exploitation.
There is no doubt that sexual exploitation exists, and that it is widespread,
including in minority and migrant communities. However, there also remains a
question about the work that the claim of effective immigration control performs
in this debate.
Shared Values?
Each Christmas in Britain the Queen issues an address to the nation at 3 pm – to
allow completion of the festive lunch and to signal the beginning of television
time. This ritual has a heavy element of self-parody, as, it could be argued, is
true more generally of the mediatised Royalty of Britain. However, it remains an

identifiable marker of banal nationalism and is an indication of official accounts of
the year’s events and challenges.
In response, Channel 4, an independent television channel, for a number of
years has issued an alternative Christmas message, scheduled to compete with the
BBC broadcast of the Queen.At some times this has been played for entertainment,
at others speakers have been chosen to give voice to a key political issue of the day.
For example, previous addresses have been given by Doreen Lawrence, mother of
murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence and Ru Paul, drag queen and media
personality.
In 2008, in a significant shift of focus and after a year of intensive international
activity and threat in relation to the allegation that Iran is developing nuclear
capabilities , President Ahmadinejad of Iran presented this alternative Christmas
message. His message was to assert the shared morality defined through religions
of the book.
All Prophets called for the worship of God, for love and brotherhood, for the
establishment of justice and for love in human society. Jesus, the Son of Mary,
is the standard-bearer of justice, of love for our fellow human beings, of the
fight against tyranny, discrimination and injustice. (Timesonline, 24 December
2008)
As UK commentators were quick to point out, this alternative Christmas message
was most notable for its anodyne quality. This was almost a parody of War on
Terror rhetoric. There is a familiar appeal to the shared roots of Abrahamic faiths.
There is some speculation about what Jesus would have done, where he would
have stood.
If Christ were on Earth today, undoubtedly He would stand with the people
in opposition to bullying, ill-tempered and expansionist powers. If Christ were
on Earth today, undoubtedly He would hoist the banner of justice and love for
humanity to oppose warmongers, occupiers, terrorists and bullies the world over.
If Christ were on Earth today, undoubtedly He would fight against the tyrannical
policies of prevailing global economic and political systems, as He did in His
lifetime. (Timesonline, 24 December 2008)
Despite the all too obvious rhetorical moves of the Ahmadinejad statement, each
aspect of its construction can be seen as a direct response to the moral claims
made in defence of the War on Terror and the escalating demonisation of Iran in
international arenas. If proof were needed of the existence of a shared framework
of understanding and common values, this demonstration of similarity in structure
of argument and rhetorical reference points should serve to remind us all that Bush
and Ahmadinejad have inhabited a shared space of theatricalised international
politics. Far from being unable to converse because of their radically opposed
world views, these public pronouncements employ highly similar language. In the

sphere of grand-standing, appealing to the shared and world-changing values of
the Abrahamic faiths has become a standard indicator.
Of course, Ahmadinejad’s address is most of all a response to a War on Terror
rhetoric that assumes the moral centrality and superiority of western interpretations
of right and religious obligation. The absolutist tendency of Bushisms throughout
recent years has painted enemies as incarnations of evil, the ‘bad men’who deserve
to be detained indefinitely in Guantanamo.
This continues the larger framing of the War on Terror in that it places morality
at the centre of international affairs. However, as well as the abstract claims of
good and evil, this has been a conflict or set of conflicts that has placed a particular
focus on gender roles and sexuality. This discussion returns to these more particular
debates about values, gender and sexuality and the manner in which such terms are
circulated in the service of securitisation. A number of writers have commented on
the misuse of feminist rhetoric in the War on Terror. Zillah Eisenstein designates
this as a strategy of deploying sexual decoys in order to allow a continuation of the
dehumanising practices of supremacist thinking, but under the cover of a veneer of
gender equality or tolerance of sexual diversity (Eisenstein, 2007). Not for the first
time, women, bodies and sexuality have taken on a heightened symbolic role and
complex narratives have been constructed that link all three and in turn link this
assemblage to the responsibilities and choices of states. In common with others
(Eisenstein, 2007; Shepherd, 2006), I have argued that this utilisation of concepts
of women’s place, proper bodies and free and unfree sexuality is not unique but that
there are distinctive features in their take-up in our time (Bhattacharyya, 2008).
The exploitation of an appeal to feminism, however insubstantial and uninformed
such an appeal might be, is one aspect of this distinctiveness.
The parallel narrative to this misuse of feminism is a demonisation of Islam that
rests on key elements of alleged ‘extremism’: attitudes to women, homosexuality
and sexual freedom, refusal of democratic culture in favour of authoritarianism
and violence, intolerance towards other faiths, allegiance to a world-wide Islam
and refusal of any local or national civic responsibility. In this context, there is a
continuity between foreign policy, security talk and more local state initiatives
that focus on the supposed cultural dangers of migrants when formulating policy
responses.
Black feminists have argued against this misappropriation of an idea of
women’s rights for many years. In particular, the suggestion that an otherwise
racist state may develop a sudden interest in defending the rights of black women
when, and only when, such rights are threatened by the actions of black men has
been critiqued (Mirza, 1997).
However, in the absence of any sustained black feminist movement in the
UK in recent years, the state and some women’s organisations have started, once
again, to proclaim the need for authoritarian state intervention against the gender-
oppressive practices of some communities. At worst, this has taken the form of
developing highly racialised forms of law, such as prohibitions against ‘forced
marriage’. Amrit Wilson analyses this rediscovery of the ideology of ‘white men

saving brown women from brown men’as a symptom of the wider surveillance and
criminalisation of black communities through the War on Terror (Wilson, 2007).
Unfortunately, this critical stance, which was once much debated and respected in
progressive circles in Britain, now appears to be almost unspeakable. The horror
of ‘forced marriage’ has re-entered popular imagination and serves as an exciting
counterpoint to the scare stories about terrorists under the beds.
Forced Marriages – Symbolic Prohibition and the Politics of Race
The issue of forced marriage has been highlighted as one of a number of key
practices that exemplifies the alleged tension between multiculturalism and
feminism (Moller Okin, 1999). In popular discourse, the repeated suggestion that
these people behave in these despicable ways towards their women has been a
central refrain in the discrediting of multiculturalism. However, as has been noted
by Phillips and Dustin, forced marriage is not a practice that is defended in the
name of any culture.
although some form of arranged marriage is still practised in Britain’s minority
communities (particularly those of South Asian origin), and some parents in
these communities will have particularly strong expectations of filial obedience,
none of their spokespeople claims forced marriage as part of their cultural or
religious heritage. All officially share in its condemnation. Forced marriage then
stands apart from other standard topics of multicultural debate, the issue being
not so much whether public authorities have a right or responsibility to eliminate
a particular practice, but how best to achieve this. (Phillips and Dustin, 2004,
533)
Despite the staged dilemma between the need to defend universal rights while
respecting the identities of cultural minorities, this is not an instance of a cultural
practice that a minority community wishes to defend and continue in resistance to
the homogenising force of mass or majority culture. Instead, this is an example of
a shared value – something that all parties agree is undesirable. The only issue of
debate is whether the state should intervene and what the nature of that intervention
should be.
Given this context, my interest is in understanding why forced marriage
continuestoappearasanexemplarytropeindiscussionsoffailingmulticulturalism.
My argument is that forced marriage appears as a focal point of public debate and
state activity around delegitimising multiculturalism precisely because it is an issue
that cannot be defended as a cultural practice that defines community. Instead, this
is an issue that allows space for the state to institute show-piece legislation with
minimal controversy and present an appearance of disciplining unruly cultural
minorities to a wider electorate.

Despite the early pronouncements suggesting that attacks on Afghanistan were
a response to the oppression of women, in recent years UK media has displayed
a fitful and uneven coverage of issues of women’s rights in any community. In
common with many other globalised media forms, UK media has increasingly
presented women as hyper sexualised beings whose agency is best expressed
through consumer activity. Mainstream press and television is characterised by
a surfeit of reality shows, plastic surgery exposes, dieting and dating tips and
an endless parade of transformative promises through makeovers, physical and
mental challenges, canny shopping, psychological reflection and other highly
commodified techniques of self. Inevitably, the shift to so highly individualistic
an account of fulfilment shapes discussion of feminism and women’s rights
(McRobbie, 2007). If some women in some communities or in some locations
are regarded as oppressed, this tends to be presented as a lack of access to such
consumer-based agency. Although these narratives are not so crass as to suggest
any equation between freedom and shopping, the horrors of sexual exploitation,
for example, in popular accounts become the tragedy of lost romance.
Media accounts of forced marriage can fall into this framework. Forced
marriage appears as a cruel parental response to separate young lovers, abduction
steals victims away from the pleasures of girlhood, romance is crushed. Overall
the press interest contrasts the barbaric cultural beliefs that disregard the feelings
and freedom of women with the unspoken ideal of romantic choice, agency and
the right to choose a life path. Whatever attempts are made to highlight an abuse
of rights, popular presentation continues to perpetuate an opposition of free and
unfree that is identified with West and East.
Such an approach can be discerned even in statements from high-profile
campaigners such as Jasvinder Sanghera, co-ordinator of a centre and help-line
for women facing forced marriage and someone who has become a favourite
interlocutor for government. In an article arguing that forced marriage will be the
issue of 2009, because a tipping point has been reached, Sanghera’s own battle
to escape a forced marriage is introduced as an old-fashioned clash of cultures
– that is, a clash between backward migrant culture and liberal western values as
opposed to the more recent suggestion of a clash between civilisations.
Sanghera’s autobiography, Shame, published in 2007, became a bestseller
because it so tellingly reflected the dilemmas of many teenage girls, born in liberal
Britain but expected to follow suffocatingly strict Asian customs at home. ‘To my
family I was wild, but I was just a teenager,’ she says. ‘I wanted to perm my hair
and have a paper round to earn some money.’
But my parents had come from a village in India and they wanted to continue
that life. We were told white people were dirty, we weren’t allowed to have
white friends. But I loved everything about the white girls at school. They had
what I wanted – freedom. (Sunday Times, 4 January 2009)

This is a narrative that pre-dates multiculturalism – the young Asians caught
‘between cultures’, the exclusionary racism of the Asian community, the desire to
enjoy the same freedoms as white friends. It is an agreeably complimentary account
of ‘white’ culture as an object of aspiration and desire, a cause for understandable
envy. There is no space to think about racism or the exclusions faced by migrants
in such a story, because all of that is the cause of suffocation. Elements of this
account remain in other contemporary discussions of forced marriage, but,
increasingly, this is intertwined with a commentary on multiculturalism and the
responsibilities of minority communities. It is in this context that Baroness Warsi,
an Asian Muslim from Yorkshire who has been elevated to the House of Lords and
the Conservative front-bench under David Cameron’s leadership,
has called for such marriages to be treated as crimes to send a clear signal that
they are intolerable. (Express, 11 March 2008)
The performance of such a statement by a high-profile right-wing Asian Muslim
woman serves to restate one element of the ongoing case against multiculturalism
– tolerance is not a social virtue in the face of practices that are intolerable. The use
of ‘intolerable’works to summon up this wider debate about the limits of tolerance
and the politics of race that has been expressed through this formulation. Warsi
goes on to expand her comment,
‘As a society we draw a line in the sand,’ she said. Baroness Warsi continued:
‘This is not a culturally sensitive issue, this is an abhorrent act which we must
stand together on ...’ (Express, 11 March 2008)
A repeated theme in the popular demonisation of multiculturalism has been the
suggestion that the good-natured tolerance of host societies has been abused and
stretched to its limits by migrants and minorities who are addicted to backward
and barbaric customs and who have no appreciation or respect for the values of
liberal democracy. The line in the sand is the not-so-coded bottom-line beyond
which the majority cannot be pushed, the place where spurious claims of cultural
sensitivity no longer hold sway. This is a reassertion of the claims of majority
values as the glue that can hold us together. Such assertions of the need for shared
majority values to shape understandings of social responsibility have come from
both major political parties in Britain and have served as both the respectable
compromise that allows diversity within the limits of shared key values and an
element of more strident protests against the impact of multiculturalism. This
doubleness allows Warsi and others to express their concern that alien practices
are overwhelming common values of decency and to remain within the boundaries
of respectable politics, while others, with less invested in electoral consequences,
can resurrect the more explicitly racist rhetoric of being swamped or invaded. The
appeal to majority values – even the consensual appeal to that ‘which we must

stand together on’ – becomes another coded reference to popular fears that the
majority is under attack by migrant intrusion.
The comment page that follows the web version of this article demonstrates
how easily these connections are made. One comment combines racist venom with
the observation that political parties pretend concern for the welfare of minority
women only when they wish to distract attention from other issues,
‘You really are as stupid as you look and act ?
Labour always bring up a touchy subject to take the heat of the real issue?
they really dont give a monkeys about “forced marriages “
If you choose to follow 4th Century ideology then tough !
put up with it !
You chose the hard way ! stop whinging (muslim women) put up with it!
MORE FOOL YOU
– Posted by: BratislavaUK’
Another contribution blames the supposed multiculturalism that tolerates some
cultural practices but not others, before asserting that immigration is the real issue
for all parties.
‘WHY BOTHER
11.03.08, 4:59 pm
If it’s ok to pay for his four wives then a Muslim man wouldn’t expect any
opposition to him forcing his daughter into marriage.
Why does the gov. think it can cherry pick which Muslim customs to turn a
blind eye to.
Wake up you labour scum ,they are living in and off Britain and should be
forced to comply with British law.
You could always prevent the entry of these unwanted husbands into our
country, which let’s face it ,is the whole object of the excercise. Entry to benefit
Britain and the gravy train that runs parallel to the Westminster one.
– Posted by: thewarlord’
None of the comments engage with debates about forced marriage or express
any concern for women suffering forced marriage. Another recognises the
importance of the speaker’s identity – because this is seen to silence lobbyists for
multiculturalism. Again this contribution argues that immigration is at the heart of
this problem.
if this statement had been made by anyone other than a muslim woman the
bbc would have been crying racist and inflicting that awful chakrabati woman
on us to tell us its there cultural right to marry their children (for that is what
they are,children)of to their cousins,uncles,friends etc.in exchange for a dowrie

they get a teenage wife and a fistful of visas and benefit claim forms. if the
new husband and his extended family were refused entry to the uk i think this
practice might disappear overnight
– Posted by: sexpistol’
Allowing for the strong possibility that such contributions are co-ordinated by
groups who have an explicit interest in whipping up racism and transforming
all political issues into debates about the dangers of immigration, it is still note-
worthy that the debate about forced marriages can be framed as a problem of
illegal immigration so easily. It is likely that the racist claims of commentators
will be comprehended by readers immediately, and that the implicit message of
the respectable call to stand together will be understood to be that we are standing
together against alien practices and aliens who push us too far.
Earlier David Cameron, young leader of the Conservative Party, had
described the practice of forced marriage as ‘bizarre and unacceptable’ (Express,
21 February 2008). Cameron has worked hard to ‘detoxify’ his party, who still
suffer from the negative legacy of Thatcherism. As a result, he has reinstated a
‘caring conservatism’, characterised by green sensibilities, a concern for social
cohesion and a move away from racism, homophobia and other attitudes that had
been associated with the ‘nasty party’, as the conservatives had been regarded
previously. The appointment of Baroness Warsi to a frontbench position is itself
a demonstration of this desire to alter the public image and audience of the party.
However, Cameron, too, makes a decision to intervene in this debate in order to
make a point about border control,
He will commit a future Conservative government to a series of measures to
tackle the problem - include a requirement that both would-be brides and grooms
coming to Britain to get married and their partners in the UK are at least 21.
British nationals going abroad to marry would have to register in the UK
beforehand if they want their marriage to be recognised for immigration
purposes.’ (Express, 21 February 2008)
Cameron’s proposals clearly borrow from other initiatives in Europe, such as the
Danish requirement that both parties in a transnational marriage must be at least
twenty-four years old. His suggestions also fall within the range of responses that
Phillips and Dustin characterise as ineffective because discriminatory and therefore
unlikely to foster co-operation among minority communities. After this article, the
comment board included a discussion of whether Cameron was stealing policy
from the BNP (British National Party – a far right party) and whether it was only
the BNP who were willing to ‘stand up’ to such unacceptable practices.
Anonymous comment boards in response to British media often display this
descent into racism and it is impossible to judge the extent to which such discussion
reflects more general opinion in Britain. However, in both of these examples

comment-makers understand immediately that this is a story about immigration
and the politics of race. The issue of forced marriage is so heavily racialised in
popular (and policy) understanding that all interventions in this debate can be
interpreted as statements about racial politics. Attempts by mainstream parties to
demonstrate their commitment to upholding the supposed values of the majority in
the most careful and coded of manners become replayed as weak echoes of the real
resistance of racist parties. The assertion of the values of rights is understood as
a comment on the need to safeguard national borders. Groups that adhere to alien
practices threaten to corrupt the internal coherence of the nation – more than a
threat to the rights of minority women, here forced marriage is redrawn as a threat
to vulnerable white Britain.
Intimately linked to this sense of purported threat is the much asserted
foreignness of the practice. There are two levels to this. Firstly, the alleged
adherence to forced marriage is taken as an indication of the failure of some
communities to integrate, or even to adapt to their new homes. The fact that such
homes are often far from new, and that forced marriage is alleged to take place not
only among new migrants, only increases the force of condemnation. Continuing
such practices is an indication that some people do not wish to stop being foreign,
despite having opportunities to lose this hated status. Choosing not to integrate
is regarded as a worse crime than failing to integrate. The allegation of forced
marriage dramatises this refusal for public consumption.
The other important sense of foreignness in accounts of forced marriage is
the constant reference to overseas contacts. Although a marriage may be forced
between any two parties, much of the public debate has assumed that British or
British-based women are forced to marry overseas. Phillips and Dustin identify
this trend as continuing in policy initiatives. They write that,
Although A Choice by Right [government report examining the issue of forced
marriage] had not presented forced marriage as an exclusively transcontinental
affair, subsequent initiatives have largely focused on what is known as ‘the
overseas dimension’. Two months after publication of the report, the Home
Office and the Foreign Commonwealth Office (FCO) announced a joint action
plan to ‘tackle the overseas dimension of forced marriage (Phillips and Dustin,
2004, 535)
Phillips and Dustin describe the concrete activity that has taken place through this
initiative, including a community relations desk in the FCO’s consular division,
collation of statistics, the strengthening of links with police forces overseas, and
provision for female victims of forced marriage to be seen by trained female
members of staff in overseas consulates (Phillips and Dustin, 2004, 535).
These measures, all laudable, mirror other developments in policing and
security. Over a period of time, with escalating intensity and political patronage
with the advent of the War on Terror, transnational co-operation in key aspects of
security practice has become a marker of participation in the civilised world. In

relation to forced marriage, the focus on overseas marriage helps to transform the
issue into one of border control. As Phillips and Dustin comment, such a focus
implies that ‘families only set up these marriages in order to facilitate access to
the UK’ (Phillips and Dustin, 2004, 545). Inevitably, such presuppositions lead
to a discriminatory focus on migrant communities – it is marriages with overseas
partners that are subject to scrutiny and suspicion and spouses from places of
continuing migration that are likely to be questioned. This link to larger anti-
immigration agendas compromises the effectiveness of initiatives against forced
marriage, making it less likely that minority communities will be willing to co-
operate with law enforcement agencies. It also confirms suspicions that even long-
settled communities continue to be regarded as problematic immigrants (Wilson,
2007).
Trafficked Women and the Impossible Test of Consent
The figure of the trafficked woman forced into sexwork is unlike the representation
of the victim of forced marriage in that one is regarded as absolutely foreign and
with an uncertain agency in her own migration while the other is potentially British
(if able to take up the freedoms of white girls) but also associated with a stigmatised
minority group. Both tropes place women as the embodiment and carrier of
dangerous foreign practices even as it is confirmed that it is women who suffer.
In the UK, debates about the status of trafficked women have gained publicity in
relation to changes in the legal framework around prostitution. Although there is
a recognition that undocumented migrants are vulnerable to the exploitation of
forced labour more generally (Commission on Vulnerable Employment, 2008), it
is the indignity of sexwork that has captured public imagination. Television serials
have focused on the underworld existence of the trafficked sexworker. Well-
publicised raids on massage parlours and brothels have highlighted the nationality
and questionable immigration status of the women arrested (‘Sex slaves’ rescued
in massage parlour raid, Telegraph, 1/10/2005). Anti-prostitution campaigners
have publicised the horror of trafficked women who have been raped and then
sold into prostitution, in order to influence wider debates about the future legal
framework for sexwork (Cowling, 2008). As a result the phrase ‘trafficking’ has
taken on a sexualised connotation in popular usage and far older terms, such as
the ‘white slave trade’ (ignoring that many of those trafficked are not white), have
returned to public debate. Jo Goodey summarises the misapprehension in popular
debate about the ‘innocence’ or ‘guilt’ of the trafficked woman,
The trafficked woman can be cast as innocent victim of evil transnational forces
– but only if she has not ‘consented’ to enter prostitution, consent to work as
a prostitute, as the UN protocol stipulates, is not an issue as women will not
have consented to the ‘slave-like’ conditions under which they are held at their

destination, nor will they have consented to the abuse they may incur en route.
(Goodey, 2003, 420)
The debate about trafficked women returns all too easily to a discussion of innocent
virgins or guilty whores – in popular debate, knowingly entering prostitution wipes
out any concern for the treatment and welfare of migrant women. In practice, this
uncertainty about who, in fact, is the offender and who is the victim has hampered
initiatives against traffickers. Despite the manner of their entry, trafficked women
have not been recognised as legitimate asylum-seekers. The POPPY project, who
support women trafficked into prostitution, found that all of their clients who
claimed asylum were refused, although 80% then went on to win their cases at
appeal if supported by the project (Richards et al., 2006). One outcome of this
policy is that potential witnesses against traffickers face deportation and are
unlikely to testify.
The sanctuary provided by a grant of asylum is critical for the protection
of victims of trafficking for two reasons. First, it prevents the risk of repeat
trafficking by not returning the victim to her country of origin. Second, it
affords her the opportunity for a period of security, recovery and rehabilitation
in the UK. This in turn enables her to become involved as a witness in criminal
proceedings, and may make it more likely that she will be prepared to provide
evidence against her traffickers. (Richards et al., 2006, 6)
The POPPY Project go on to explain the consequences of this approach, not
least in the confusion felt by trafficked women. They argue that there is a central
contradiction in viewing trafficked women as both ‘victims and potential witnesses’
and as committers of ‘immigration offences’ (Richards et al., 2006, 21).
In relation to both interventions against forced marriage and attempts to save
women trafficked into sexwork, the common theme is the return to issues of
border control. Both issues embody particular fears about insecure borders – with
overlapping anxieties about state sovereignty and cultural integrity combining to
inform official responses. However, whereas forced marriage has been represented
as an indication of the continuing threat to national integrity that resides within
settled migrant communities, concerns about the exploitation of trafficked women
seep into a different set of fears about leaky borders. Although the two issues have
been connected indirectly in the formulation of UK government announcements
and the wish to demonstrate an authoritarian kick against the exploitation of
women, in wider debates trafficking has tended to be linked to a wider concern
with transnational movement. Jo Goodey warns against this too easy association
between trafficking and security.
The connections that are readily made between migration, crime and security do
not, on closer examination, provide a complete picture of the migration–crime
experience. In particular, recent emphasis on the role played by (transnational)

organized crime (TOC) in human smuggling/trafficking has, arguably, over-
played the importance of organized crime and, in doing so, has allowed
governments to legitimate their security efforts against this ‘new’ threat.
(Goodey, 2003, 418)
Goodey is speaking generally of the move towards securitisation and the role played
by particular depictions of people trafficking in legitimising the augmentation of
state powers. However, the British instances discussed here fit this model very
well. Jacqui Smith attempted as Home Secretary to revitalise a flagging interest in
authoritarian state initiatives, with a well-planned media campaign that included
a week of saturation coverage of new prostitution laws and laws against forced
marriage (for an example, see Bindel, 2008). This comes on the back of an
ongoing campaign to keep the fear of terrorism alive in a somewhat sceptical
British public. It may be that Smith and others have reached the understandable
conclusion that fears of immigration are a more reliable motivator of support for
state authoritarianism than fears of terrorism. If so, this emphasis is echoed in the
political responses of other nations, particularly in Europe. Friesendorf outlines
the place that anti-trafficking initiatives occupy in a wider policy context.
Actors’ motivations to ‘fight’ trafficking varies. Governments are primarily
concerned about links between human trafficking and other forms of crime, such
as money laundering, drug trafficking, the illegal weapons trade, and document
forgery, as well as the risk of profits from human trafficking financing terrorist
activities. These fears are exacerbated, particularly in wealthy countries, by
concerns about illegal migration. (Friesendorf, 2007, 382)
In contrast to this, NGOs and campaigning groups argue that trafficking is a human
rightsviolationand,Friesendorfarguescontroversially,‘Internationalorganizations
play a prominent role in anti-trafficking not least because of significant funding
opportunities’ (382). He concludes his list of actors and factors with the point,
moral outrage about sexual slavery and/or prostitution has also contributed to
pushing human trafficking onto the security agenda. (Friesendorf, 2007, 382)
This appears to be the framework in which the UK has introduced the criminal
offence of purchasing sex from a trafficked woman forced into sexwork – an
offence that reinstates the division between the innocent and the guilty prostitute
and which introduces a law that appears almost impossible to enforce. Allan
Gibson, Head of the Metropolitan Police’s Human Trafficking Unit, has stated in
evidence to the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee,
that it was very difficult even for police to estimate the numbers of women
trafficked into the UK for prostitution or precisely which ones were working
against their will. (Telegraph, 10 December 2008)

The distinction between innocent and guilty prostitutes continues to render this
law unworkable. Others view the overall proposals as increasing the potential
dangers faced by prostitutes, without offering effective counter-measures that
lessen sexual exploitation (Cowling, 2008). Instead, we see a resurrection of
the figure of the dangerous foreign sexworker – this time as an embodiment of
the violent exploitation of prostitution and as a confirmation that these luckless
creatures are not part of the nation. If the goal is to persuade the British public that
prostitution causes the trafficking of women, then, it seems, the government may
also believe that erecting further barriers against the movement of undocumented
women will end prostitution. Despite the apparent focus on the ‘demand side’,
there is an implication that, once again, everything comes down to effective and
unyielding border control. Trafficking represents a crisis because it reveals the
fictionality of this central test of state sovereignty and power. The combination of
this border anxiety and the complicated outrage about sexual slavery (as opposed
to other forms of contemporary slavery or the dangers of sexwork that is not the
result of trafficking) shows a particular set of anxieties on the part of a government
that wishes to demonstrate both authoritarian intent and liberal values (of a sort).
Petersen argues that the representation of the ‘Baltic’ sexworker similarly
revealsparticularpoliticalanxietiesforDenmark.OverallPetersenarguesthatthere
is a tension between Danish commitments to extending co-operation with Baltic
neighbours and defending its borders against the dangerous in-flow of foreign
prostitutes, Here also the trafficked woman is central to public imagination,
thedebateoverBalticprostitutionevolvesaroundaconstructionoftheprostituted
subject as both gendered and ‘Baltic’. The gendered subject is constructed
through a discussion of whether prostitution is forced or voluntary and whether
the woman in question is responsible or a victim. The ‘Baltic’ element of this
construction situates the subject within a particular symbolic geography and it
provides a link to the realm of foreign policy. (Petersen, 2001, 214)
Petersen describes the construction of a particular public mythology of ‘Baltic’
prostitution in Denmark, and highlights the link between the media focus on
this issue and wider fears of drug-trafficking and ‘Russian’ organised crime. In
this context, the term ‘Baltic’ signals the particular boundary fears of the Danish
state in this moment, at once eager to consolidate the potential benefits of greater
co-operation with Baltic neighbours and simultaneously anxious that a shadow
globalisation may overrun its borders.
However this also represents an attempt to bolster increasingly fragile
borders against the perceived threats of shadow globalisation, corrosive cultural
difference and terrorist outrage. That these disparate folk demons should become
so intertwined in both policy and popular representation is itself an indication of
the particularity of this era of securitisation.

Immigration Control as Determinant of All State Legitimacy
In some accounts, immigration control retains its central role in the armoury of
the state that wishes to demonstrate authority precisely because borders have
become so uncontrollable. Although debate has moved on to reach the conclusion
that nation-states do not crumble away in the face of global integration, there is
also some agreement that previous markers of state sovereignty have undergone
significant change,Assertive control of state borders, accompanied by much public
fanfare, appears to have become an important demonstration of sovereignty.
The transformation of initiatives against sexual exploitation into yet further
reiterations of this border authority may be an attempt to inject additional authority
into both projects. The unquestionable moral imperative to combat sexual slavery
gives legitimacy to (yet another) augmentation of immigration control. The
popular authoritarianism of anti-immigration initiatives enables the pursuit of
policies against women’s exploitation, policies that may not garner a great deal of
popular interest or support without the mobilising pull of xeno-racism. The wider
context of War on Terror rhetoric gives credence to government initiatives against
‘foreign’ practices of sexual exploitation and allows an integration into the (more
sexy and monied) field of security. All round, strident reassertions of the benefits
of ‘our’ values and the requirement that migrants and minorities accommodate
themselves to the ways of the majority are resurrected in the name of security,
because the internal dissonance represented by the alien practices of foreign
cultures threatens ‘our’ values, and in turn, undermines the basis of ‘our’ moral
and political authority in local and international arenas. In the face of this need
for a multi-level reassertion of authority, it does not seem to matter if the much-
publicised initiatives are ineffectual, poorly conceived or out of touch with the
immediate concerns of those most affected. In the global battle of good and evil,
western values confirm their status as ‘good’ – and the antipathy of many western
citizens to migrants and foreigners is justified as no more than good moral sense.
War on Terror and Racialising IR
The War on Terror was heralded as a defence of western values but not on ethnic
grounds. Much of the presentation by key players in the early days following 9/11
stressed the decidedly non-racial nature of the conflict (see Croft, 2006). This
concerted disavowal of racism could be regarded as a central element of the public
discourse of the War on Terror. Although much of the political controversy within
national spaces has centred around the dangers represented by ethnic diversity
in a time of terrorism, the over-arching narrative of the conflict has presented
terrorism as an attack on multiculturalism and co-existence. The ability to tolerate
and even celebrate diversity is presented as one of ‘our’ values. Such a claim
greatly complicates the process of establishing a new racial enemy, because
familiar methods of creating and consolidating racial mythologies must be framed

as a defence of multicultural living. However, the pursuit of a series of highly
racialised military campaigns that mobilise popular support through reference to
the dangerous culture and values of the enemy (however often it is declared that the
enemy is not Islam) and are conducted through the processes of dehumanisation
familiar from other wars of occupation has created another version of the ‘racism
without racism’ that Lentin and McVeigh identify as a new technique of the racial
state. Much of this volume analyses the manner in which the components of this
technique are translated to local contexts. In some instances, this includes explicit
reference to a global context of conflict. More often, in the manner of legitimising
all state interventions as aspects of an immigration control that seeks to exclude
those who cannot or will not adhere to ‘civilised’values, the chapters here describe
how ideas of the uncivilised or of those with problematic or lesser values operate
in particular examples of exclusion and demonisation.
Some of the debates here about the relationship between values and ethnicity
may appear parochial to some readers. In Europe there has been a period of
intensive activity relating to such issues as national identity and culture, the
apparent threat of alternative allegiances and belief systems and the impact of
these differences on such diverse matters as the status of women, adherence to
law and order and the cohesion of disadvantaged neighbourhoods. However, this
range of concerns about the coherence of national communities in the face of (in
fact quite longstanding) ethnic diversity reflects a particular moment in European
political debate. Elsewhere similar issues have taken on their own local political
colour (see Madan, 2009; Lindow and Perry, 2008). This volume does not attempt
to compile a comprehensive overview of such developments across locations.
However, each contribution seeks to use a particular case-study to suggest some
transferable lessons for analysis of a world where the imputation of certain values
to certain groups has become a theme of much local and global political life.
This volume was being compiled as one section of the US population attempted
to construct its own particular version of post-racial politics, while another
struggled to defend racialised divisions using the language of racial equality. The
presidential candidature of Barack Obama played out the question of ethnicity
and values in a manner that linked debates about community cohesion at a local
level and the possibility of diplomacy internationally. In popular debate, there has
been an understandable and loudly proclaimed desire to view this event as the
confirmation of our resolutely post-racial era. The ascent of Obama provided an
opportunity for the discomfiture of anti-racism to be replaced by an insistently
deracialised public rhetoric in which hope replaced any revisiting of long-held
grievances about social and economic injustices.
Some of the contributors in this volume identify a similar optimism and will
to overcome the barriers of racism through the force of concerted good behaviour.
However, at the same time, the accounts here of how racialised communities
respond to demonisation and articulate alternative visions of values and human
worth also confirm that the systematic disadvantage and everyday disrespect of
old-fashioned racism persists in many locations. The challenge is to retain a critical

perspective on racialised disadvantage while appreciating the impact of discourses
of ethics, values and morality on the politics of race in many places.
An Ethical Vision for Studying Race and Ethnicity
This volume begins with a piece by Howard Winant arguing for the continuing
need for an ethical vision for race and ethnic studies. Winant argues that we have
been living through a crisis of racial meaning and that this presents a challenge for
‘racial pedagogy at the start of the 21st
century’. He describes a world where the
impact of anti-racist movements, patterns of globalisation with their accompanying
flows of people, capital and information and the legacy of colonialism reshape
racialised discourse. However, despite this tumultous backdrop, Winant argues
for a focus on the matter of education and how race is discussed and taught.
He explains the forces that have remade race and ethnic studies in recent years,
including the tension between the global connectedness of a world where diaspora
consciousness and critiques of contemporary imperialism compete with more
localised conceptions of racial justice. Inevitably, these tensions feed into what
Winant calls ‘the racial curriculum’, these shifts in social and political structures
influence a debate about what the focus of investigation should be. Overall, Winant
asserts the continuing need for a scholarship of conscience in relation to racism.
Although there may be inevitable debates about the proper focus of study and the
impact of wider social changes, it is important to defend the belief that some forms
of knowledge are important as part as a larger project in pursuit of social justice.
Parminder Bhachu suggests something similar to this, although she couches
her analysis in different terms. For Bhachu, the project is to articulate and give
space to the range and innovation of diaspora cultural production. In the face of
limiting and sometimes demeaning representations of what diasporics can do or be,
Bhachu describes the importance of creative interventions that extend dominant
frames and both clear space for new kinds of articulation and show that racialised
groups can show imagination and innovation in the expression of their identities,
regardless of the narrowness of dominant accounts of their communities. Bhachu
argues, forcefully, that a scholarship that does not extend what can be said and
thought, that does not, in the manner of the cultural producers that she analyses
have ‘an innovative edge ... not doing what has already been done before’, has
little social value. In common with Winant, Bhachu also argues that scholars who
study ethnic identities and relations or contemporary racisms continue to have
a responsibility to produce accessible work that can change public perceptions.
Otherwise, as she says succinctly, ‘you should just shut up’.
Ronit Lentin argues that migrant women’s networks in Ireland represent a new
articulation of ethnicity that operates through transnational and diasporic frames
of reference. At the same time, she argues that Irish state racism has assumed
gendered forms and that through this, migrant women have come to be hailed and
persecuted as problematic mothers. Lentin is identifying the particular conjunction

that arises between a reinvigorated state racism that mobilises popular support by
adopting vigorously exclusionary tactics and the unlikely dialogue between such
a state formation and the emerging networks of migrant women that at once build
solidarity within and beyond Ireland and act as interlocutors to a state attempting
to demonstrate mastery of both acceptable diversity and dangerous migrants. The
piece argues that Ireland’s rapid economic growth through recent decades has led
to an adoption of state strategies that confirm Ireland’s status as a racial state,
one where the racialised categorisation of useful migrants, dangerous aliens and
unwanted non-citizens is central to the exercise of state power. For Lentin, this
is an indication of how racism can be absorbed into the workings of the liberal
state. In a continuation of a long-standing demonisation of (some) mothers, the
Republic of Ireland has deemed ‘non-national’ mothers as enemies of the state
– no longer examples of the ethical care that human beings can offer to each other
and instead regarded as producers of corrosive aliens who undermine the nation
and its internal coherence. Migrant networks that work within state frameworks
tread a difficult path between confirming a state machinery that divides migrants
into good social assets and bad unwanted aliens and being able to challenge state
racism through consolidating the power of their own networks.
Abel Ugba also considers the emergence of new articulations of ethnic identity
in Ireland, with a focus on Pentecostal churches and their role in African migrant
communities.Ugbasuggeststhat‘bymeansofthemAfricanimmigrantsaremaking
distinctive marks on Ireland’s socio-cultural landscape and inviting the majority
society to acknowledge, cherish and debate ‘difference’. Ugba goes on to argue
that these religious organisations also take a central role in linkingAfrican migrants
to each other and to other groups and that the beliefs that shape Pentecostalism
offer a particular repertoire of cultural values through which African migrants
articulate their notions of self, of others and of society. This is, Ugba argues, in
direct challenge to the dominant portrayal of Africans in Irish society. Instead of
an account of ethnic belonging based on blood or land, Pentecostalism provides a
framework to express self and belonging on the basis of values. This is occurring
alongside an increase in levels of participation across religious groups, including
mainstream Christian churches. Ugba argues, however, that the ‘most innovative
and dramatic changes on Ireland’s socio-religious landscape in recent years is
not the participation of immigrants in mainline churches but the birth and spread
of immigrant-led religious groups’. He goes on to explain that Pentecostalism
offers a mode of self-understanding that can challenge the demeaning and racist
representation of Africans in Irish society. In opposition to the popular discourse
that presents Africans as socially marginalised economic migrants, Pentecostal
African migrants regard themselves as ‘agents of religious and social change’, sent
to Ireland on a divine mission to re-sacralise an Irish society that has fallen into
moral decay. The expression of religious identity serves as an ethical challenge to
the lived popular values of the nation and a refusal to be contained in the racialised
terms of the reference of the state.

Robbie McVeigh analyses new waves of state attacks on gypsy communities
across Europe and argues that these demonstrate the emergence of ‘novel forms
of racism’. Both McVeigh and Lentin suggest that we are entering a phase where
states adopt tactics of ‘racism without racism’, issuing statements of moral outrage
against racism while developing increasingly draconian techniques of racialised
exclusion and discrimination in state practices. At the same time, McVeigh argues,
the interventions of state racism are presented as ‘being in the interests of the
racialized’. This is linked to what McVeigh terms ‘ethnicity denial’, a process
by which there is an official denial that some groups are constituted by ethnicity
and, therefore, an assertion that such groups cannot be victims of racism. In these
circumstances where states are developing novel forms of exclusionary racism, the
issue of what ethnicity is, how it is defined and who can claim its label all become
urgent questions in the formulation of anti-racist resistance. McVeigh argues that
this can be seen in the continuing consequences of the denial of gypsy experiences
of genocide, a denial that consolidates contemporary anti-gypsyism by reasserting
that these people are not an ethnic community and therefore they cannot face
antipathy on the grounds of ethnicity. The piece goes on to describe recent instances
of this formulation in which explicitly racist anti-gypsy propoganda is defended as
arising in response to the ethical failings of gypsies not their ethnic identity. This
tactic has wider implications for all those seeking to combat racism, because it
both reinstates the fiction that racism is an understandable and legitimate response
based on ethical judgement and it disallows the claim of collective identity that
can offer a rallying point against racist persecution.
Carlos Sandoval-Garcia writes about La Carpio, an area of Costa Rica that
embodies a range of social fears. This is a space of high unemployment and
low incomes, regarded as dangerous home to crime and migrants, particularly
to the much hated group, Nicaraguans. As Sandoval-Garcia writes, ‘the
criminalisation of La Carpio, combined with its association with the immigrant
population, has allowed words such as “migrant,” “Nica,” and “criminal” to
become interchangeable’. This, the piece argues, is the space of abjection – where
Costa Rican society can expel the unclean matter that it deems to be ‘not us’.
This symbolism is increased by the location of a garbage dump at the entrance
to the neighbourhood and plans to locate a water treatment plant nearby. The dirt
and material excess of the city become associated with the poor and racialised
community that inhabits this marginal site. This serves to confirm again that
the urban segregation that is ‘the most apparent material reality through which
stigmatisation occurs’. This stigmatisation translates into the everyday experience
of residents, so that respondents describe their sense of shame at belonging to La
Carpio and their reluctance to reveal where they live. However, others tell of how
they have overcome this shame that is projected onto to them from all corners,
and instead have come to view themselves as achieving autonomy, family and
survival through affirmation of an ethical grounding that refuses the terms of their
exclusion.

John Gabriel and Jennifer Harding also describe the manner in which a
stigmatised group seek to offer an alternative set of values. Their piece examines
the life histories of a diverse group of refugees who were interviewed in London
as part of a project designed to document the ‘positive’ contribution of refugee
communities to the city. Gabriel and Harding identify the shortcomings of such an
approach, including the reliance on positive representations as a counter to racism
and the potential to reduce all migrants to ‘a shared set of virtuous characteristics’.
In response to these issues, project participants developed an understanding of
‘contribution’ that referred to ‘both ‘achievement’, which inferred high status
and recognition, and ‘participation’, which was worthy but low status’. In this
piece, the researchers interrogate these concepts and their meaning in the lives of
the respondents. They found that, perhaps inevitably, refugees were influenced
by public debates about their ‘worth’ and included descriptions of mainstream
‘success’ such as qualifications and high status employment as well as recounting
the sacrifices that they had made to ensure that their children had access to routes
of mainstream success. However, alongside this apparent acceptance of the terms
of mainstream concepts of worth, there is also a critique of inequality and injustice,
including the injustices faced as a refugee. Respondents refer to wider sets of
values that link their experiences in different locations and narrate a continuity
of values between resisting oppression in their homelands and forging alliances
as refugees in London. Gabriel and Harding explain that, far from being simply
rebuttals of media and popular demonisation of refugees, the ‘transcripts present a
more complex relationship to notions of ‘achievement’, ‘contribution’and ‘virtue’.
The accounts that arise celebrate a range of everyday survivals and achievements
that must be understood in the context of family and community ties and a refusal
of the limits implied by the category of ‘refugee’. Gabriel and Harding analyse this
material to argue that proposals to enhance ‘community cohesion’ which assume
that all will participate in a set of shared values and culture that is defined by
the majority are not helpful. Instead of seeking to show that refugees are really
‘good’, our collective well-being may be better served by learning to appreciate
the particular interpretations of ‘right’ that emerge through experience and social
interaction.
In his chapter, Max Farrar extends the debate about ethnicity and values to
address some urgent questions of our time. He links recent concerns about the
rise of Islamism (used in his piece as a short-hand for ‘that version of Islam which
adopts an explicitly political agenda and espouses violence as its strategy for
achieving power’). He proposes that instances of urban violence ranging from
‘riot’ to ‘terrorism’ should be understood as ‘violent urban protest’, not in order
to detract from the seriousness of violence but in order to place such violence
in historical context. Farrar outlines a history of recent violent urban protest in
Britain and argues that the challenge is to uncover the ‘proto-politics’ that informs
these events. Importantly, he argues for a distinction between terms such as
‘uprising’, which imply a conscious politics and programme, and ‘violent protest’,
which can encompass both an embryonic political impulse and a decided refusal

Ethnicities and Values in a Changing World

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