Citizenship and Ethnic Politics in Latin America

Citizenship is at the core of democracy. It is also at the core of many ethnic struggles around the world. Indeed, debates over the boundaries and content of citizenship have often given rise to ethnic based movements, parties, agendas, and at times, violence. Broadly speaking, these ethnic struggles have taken two broad forms. First, in their most extreme and exclusionary form, social and political movements have formed to redefine the boundaries of citizenship by restricting membership to a given ethnonational group. Informed by nationalist ideas and international rhetoric about selfdetermination, groups in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East have mobilized in multiethnic/national polities to construct nation-states where membership is allocated along ethnonational lines. This program has often had destructive consequences as non-nationals have been excluded, often violently, from the polities that they once identified as theirs. These concerns have dominated studies of ethnic conflict (Sri Lanka, Rwanda, Ireland, Israel/Palestine) and studies of genocide (Germany, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia). In both cases, struggles to restrict citizenship along ethnonational lines have commonly resulted in violence.