The article details the complex geopolitical and national conditions that shaped the securitization of Kists — a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority who primarily reside in the Pankisi Gorge of Georgia. Securitization of Kists emerged at the intersection of colonial encounters: Russian colonial relations with the Caucasus, primarily with Georgia and Chechnya, and Western neocolonial relations with Muslims in a form of global counterterrorist policies that painted Islam as a looming threat to the Western world after 9/11. Moreover, notions about minorities within Georgia contributed to the emergence of the securitization paradigm towards Kists. These circumstances molded Georgian national politics concerning Kists — namely, securitization policies and practices that legitimized violent special operations in the valley, close surveillance, scrutiny, and intimidation of the community. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation, qualitative interviews, and critical discourse analysis, this article examines these policies, practices, and the profound effects of the state’s politics on the social landscape of Pankisi. Moreover, this research also observes various everyday strategies and tactics employed by Kists to navigate the social terrains of marginality.

This article introduces CriTaRep v1, a geo-coded event dataset documenting state repression against Crimean Tatars (2000–2024). Drawing on locally sourced materials in Crimean Tatar, Ukrainian, and Russian languages, CriTaRep records n = 709 repression events affecting more than 2,200 individual victims. We inductively identify 22 repression types across three categories: deprivation of liberty, legal and administrative repression, and physical repression. Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea marked the onset of a large-scale and systematic repression campaign against the Crimean Tatar population. We document a concentration of arbitrary searches on Thursdays, physical repression targeting elites, and intensified repression during periods of dissent. Empirical analyses show that repression spikes in response to protest activity. Russian authorities respond rapidly and increasingly harshly to dissent, pursuing a dual strategy of protest suppression and long-term deterrence. CriTaRep fills critical gaps in existing datasets and provides new opportunities to study patterns and mechanisms of demographically targeted repression in Russian-occupied territories and beyond.

This paper investigates how the historical institutional legacies of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires affect present-day attitudes toward women and minorities in Romania. We conduct a thorough historical analysis which shows that the institutional setup in the Ottoman part of Romania was more favourable toward women and minorities compared to that in the Habsburg part. Using the 2016 round of the EBRD-World Bank Life in Transition Survey, we find that these differences in historical institutions have long-run impacts on attitudes today. While we find mixed support for our hypotheses when it comes to gender attitudes, consistent with our expectations, men and women in ex-Habsburg locations report that women have less decision-making power in the household and are less tolerant towards people of different races, gay people, and Jews. The paper has important implications for advancing the debate on long-run imperial legacies by highlighting their persistent impact on women and minorities.

The Banat, like all territories lost after the First World War, was part of Hungarian irredentist plans. On the eve of the German occupation of Serbia, Hitler promised both the Bačka and the Banat to Hungary. Romania, the other ally of Nazi Germany, also had interest in the Banat as compensation for its territorial losses and as fulfillment of its First World War goals. To avoid a possible conflict between its two allies, Germany decided to occupy the Banat and appointed an ethnic German administration to the region. This article explores how the Banat Hungarian cultural elite navigated this new situation in the shadow of the Reich German occupation and the ethnic German administration. The failed and indefinitely postponed return of the region to Hungary raised self-doubt in the Banat Hungarian minority elites, causing them to rethink their position in the region and in the Hungarian nation. In the hopes of strengthening their positions, these elites discussed their ideas in the only Hungarian-language daily in the Banat during the period. The texts published in the Torontál repositioned the historical borderland of the Banat as a core part of the Hungarian nation-state and reinforced the border only towards the Balkan peninsula.

The last phases and immediate aftermath of World War One represented both the peak of the nationality question and the definitive breakthrough of the minority one. The “morphing” of one into the other (as Holly Case has defined it) is often mentioned in the historiography but rarely analyzed in detail. This article focuses on the key period 1916–1923 and tracks this transition examining the work of different organizations and actors that contributed to it. The article shows that the switch from nationalities to minorities was not absolute. Although the grammar of minorities and majorities was dominant in the interwar years, the vocabulary of nationalities did not disappear and many actors used these terms as synonyms to refer to the same underlying “problem”: the persistence of national difference in an increasingly homogenizing world. Above all, the move from nationalities to minorities foreclosed any possibility of obtaining independent statehood in the new Europe of nation-states. Finally, the article dissects the process whereby the imposition of minority treaties only to Central and Eastern European countries entrenched a stereotypical distinction between a civilized homogenous West and a repressive heterogeneous East that established an understanding of the two areas as undifferentiated monolithic entities.

This article reexamines the Ottoman Turkish term millet, which is supposedly central to understanding Ottoman governance over non-Muslim subjects. While scholars have largely assumed that the use of millet for non-Muslim collectives reflected top-down imperial control, this article challenges that premise by extensively examining how the term was employed in Ottoman documents from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The findings reveal that the extant understanding of millet as a rigidly defined, state-recognized confessional community lacks empirical support throughout the empire’s history. Instead, the term millet, as used in Ottoman documents, vaguely denoted a group of people who supposedly shared a common origin and culture, though not necessarily defined by a common religion or confession. Furthermore, millet’s use for non-Muslim collectives gradually increased from around 1805, not due to state imposition, but influenced by non-Muslim actors who responded to millet’s acquired distinction as a term denoting modern nationhood. Thus, this article contributes to revising the prevalent state-centric view of Ottoman history by demonstrating the participation of non-Muslims in the development of Ottoman discourse.

In contrast to the ‘benign’ and ‘hostile’ forms of secularism found globally, many European states exhibit a distinctive model we term ‘discriminatory secularism’. In this arrangement, the state discriminates against certain minority religions while privileging religious majorities, creating an uneven religious playing field. Discriminatory secularism is justified not on the basis of religious ideology but on the basis of secularist principles. We argue that discriminatory secularism fosters a culture of hostility toward minority faith communities, increasing the likelihood of physical violence against them. Using cross-national data from European states between 2003 and 2017, we find that higher levels of discriminatory secularism are strongly associated with greater violence against religious minorities. These results remain robust across multiple model specifications and statistical techniques.

Tort law has traditionally prioritized physical over emotional injury claims, due in part to insufficient methods of quantifying the latter. But advances in neuroimaging now make it possible to measure the distinct (and often chronic) neurological damage caused by PTSD, suggesting that it should be treated as both a physical and emotional harm. I argue that this recategorization may help PTSD victims win just restitution, especially for those from marginalized groups whose suffering has traditionally been overlooked and underappreciated by the legal system. Lingering probative and prejudicial flaws will likely limit current judicial applications of PTSD neuroimaging to citations of aggregate research. Until the technology improves in accuracy and sensitivity, individual PTSD neuroimaging on tort plaintiffs will fail to meet most state and federal evidentiary standards. When it does achieve sufficient reliability, neuroimaging precedent for traumatic brain injury may offer guidance on how to incorporate the technology without creating a “CSI effect” that harms plaintiffs unable to access or afford brain scans. PTSD neuroimaging may ultimately foster a greater appreciation for the physical toll of psychological illnesses, catalyzing the movement to dismantle the mind-body divide in tort jurisprudence.

We examine if the presence of minority individuals in the community affects the decision to give to charities by majority individuals. We focus on two giving decisions by the majority population. The first is giving to any charitable organization; the second is giving to organizations geared to international causes. We also examine these two decisions when the sample is split into religious and non-religious individuals. We find that the larger the proportion of minorities in a given community, the less likely that members of the majority group give to charity in general—supporting the idea that heterogeneous communities deter outreach—but the more likely they are to give to international causes, giving credence to Allport’s ‘contact’ hypothesis.

In the 1970s, the voluntary sector acted as a key space for advocacy and support for communities that were marginalised from statutory provision. This paper explores how East London voluntary sector organisations addressed the needs of new migrant communities in this period. Drawing on data from six case study organisations, this historical study explores the dual role these organisations played in advocating for these communities and providing needed services. The findings show that in the 1970s through the 1990s advocacy and service delivery functions were closely linked rather than service delivery crowding out advocacy as has been the trend in recent decades. The findings also emphasise the importance of the creation of trusted relationships between the organisations and the communities they served.

Tensions between regionalist claimants and state‐wide governments remain the primary source of violent conflicts. Existing theories cannot systematically explain why and when state‐wide governments accede to such claims. Building on the partisan approaches developed so far, a theory of ideological authority insulation is constructed in this article. It is argued that the willingness of state‐wide parties to transfer authority to specific territorial entities is predominantly informed by ideological proximity to those entities. In a nutshell, the dominant conflict dimension in a country superimposes partisan rationales on the territorial dimension. A new dataset has been compiled with roughly 4,300 region‐cabinet dyads between 1945 and 2015, including electoral data, party positions and regional ‘centres of gravity’. Using panel rare‐events regressions, it is found that ideological proximity systematically explains the accommodation of minority demand controlling for alternative explanations from the partisan and ethnic conflict literature. The empirical evidence therefore supports adding ideological insulation and superimposition to the toolbox of partisan and conflict researchers. Additionally, the findings encourage the application of arguments from the conflict literature in established democracies and the testing of insights from partisan researchers in less democratic environments.

Missing Minorities (MIMI) is a research project initiated by the European Blood Alliance that aims to develop new strategies to recruit blood donors from minority groups. This paper contributes to this larger project by analyzing data of the German Socio-Economic Panel study 2011 that questioned over 20,000 respondents about their blood donation behavior. Within this sample, the authors identify 1,726 potential blood donors from various migrant groups. Applying logistic regression analysis, the authors analyze differences between blood donors and non-donors with migration background. The results show that non-donors trust other people significantly less, use the internet less often, and have a significantly lower reading ability in German. Based on these findings, the authors discuss the current practices in minority blood donor recruitment as found in the MIMI project. Furthermore, promising recruitment tactics for blood donation managers and areas for further research are derived.

Volunteerism makes critical contributions to individual lives and society as a whole. However, to date, few studies have investigated volunteerism within Latino communities, a large and growing US population. The aim of this study was to understand how non-metropolitan US Latinos perceive volunteerism, as well as to determine what motivates and what deters their participation in volunteer programs. Our research team conducted six focus groups with 36 Latina women living in the State of Illinois. The focus groups covered topics such as the definition of volunteerism, participation motives and barriers, personal volunteer experience, and Latino culture, community, and organizations. We also assessed demographic information. Results from this study indicate that Latinas have a unique understanding of the concept of volunteerism. Participants associated everyday “helping” with volunteerism, establishing commonplace forms of aid as perhaps a “Latino way of volunteering.” We found time-consuming activities such as family responsibilities and work to be deterrents to Latinas participating in more formal volunteer activities.

Since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, language management has been a central activity of the party and government, interrupted during the years of the Cultural Revolution. It has focused on the spread of Putonghua as a national language, the simplification of the script, and the auxiliary use of Pinyin. Associated has been a policy of modernization and terminological development. There have been studies of bilingualism and topolects (regional varieties like Cantonese and Hokkien) and some recognition and varied implementation of the needs of non-Han minority languages and dialects, including script development and modernization. Asserting the status of Chinese in a globalizing world, a major campaign of language diffusion has led to the establishment of Confucius Institutes all over the world. Within China, there have been significant efforts in foreign language education, at first stressing Russian but now covering a wide range of languages, though with a growing emphasis on English. Despite the size of the country, the complexity of its language situations, and the tension between competing goals, there has been progress with these language-management tasks. At the same time, nonlinguistic forces have shown even more substantial results. Computers are adding to the challenge of maintaining even the simplified character writing system. As even more striking evidence of the effect of politics and demography on language policy, the enormous internal rural-to-urban rate of migration promises to have more influence on weakening regional and minority varieties than campaigns to spread Putonghua. Overall, linguists and a strongly developed cadre of sociolinguists have played a useful role, but the driving force has been the Communist leadership.

Following the establishment of a national legislature in Wales in 1999 the third sector has entered into a pioneering cross-sectoral partnership with the Welsh government. This paper presents the results of a research project that has studied the new structures of devolved governance through the expectations and participation of voluntary organizations representing three marginalized or “minority” groupings: women, disabled people, and those from an ethnic minority background. The findings reveal that despite varying levels of expectation expressed by “minority” voluntary groups, active engagement of minority groups in policy making has been a feature of the Assembly’s first months. Nevertheless, formidable challenges face both sectoral “partners” in the new system of governance, not least in creating organizational structures that facilitate partnership working in the devolved polity.

Doctoral candidates in political science have a universe of potential career options to choose from. These include not only academia, but also the non-governmental sector, political consulting, and government work. When I obtained my doctoral degree in 1993, little did I imagine that within fifteen years I would have tried my hand in all of these fields, including serving as a cabinet minister. In this article, I reflect on how this professional whirlwind came about, how each field helped and/or hindered the others, what these wanderings taught me about post-communist democratic politics, and particularly what lessons a political scientist learned from entering, albeit briefly, the ‘real world’ of politics.