Minorities, Violence, and Peace Research

Ekkehart Krippendorff
Additional contact information
Ekkehart Krippendorff: Freie Universität, Berlin

Journal of Peace Research, 1979, vol. 16, issue 1, 27-40

Abstract: Over the last decade we can observe a growing political and cultural renaissance of minority consciousness: US Blacks and now the Indians, the Kurds subdivided in three different countries, the Scots and the Welsh, but religious minority identifications as well — from Philippine Muslims to Northern Irish Catholics. Switzerland, one of the most sophisticated countries in dealing with ethnic diversity, recently had to grant another minority a new canton, the Jura, but only after years of political conflict marked by — among other things — terrorist violence. The rise of so many minorities to general socio-political consciousness tends to be accompanied by 'terrorism' as apparently the only effective way to be heard in a society of nation-states. The desperate plea of the Palestinians over the years is the most dramatically known case, recently involving political partisans within metropolitan countries in similar acts of violence and/or terrorism. Behind this phenomenon lies some thing structural which goes far beyond immediate grievances: it is a challenge to the modem nation-state and a form of mediated class consciousness which challenges social inequalities differently from in the past. We are likely to experience even more national and inter national violence/terrorism along ethnic/religious/racial lines, so long as those coincide with socio-economic inequalities and discriminations. And this in turn seems unavoidable.

Date: 1979
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://jpr.sagepub.com/content/16/1/27.abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:joupea:v:16:y:1979:i:1:p:27-40

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Peace Research from Peace Research Institute Oslo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().