Public Lecture: Ethnocracy – Exploring and Extending the Concept
James Anderson, Emeritus Professor of Political Geography, Queen's University Belfast, Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Short summary: ‘Ethnocracy’ - rule by an ethnic group - reflects imperial histories, contested states, border conflicts and urban divisions. It persists and deepens because of globalization as much as despite it. The lecture explores this ethnic domination in a variety of national statehood contexts including Israel-Palestine, Ireland and Australia. It discusses how the concept can also fruitfully be extended to urban, imperial, and so-called ‘post-conflict’ and ‘post-national’ contexts.
Picture: Part of the 700 km 'Separation Wall' constructed by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Bethlehem, November 2014. With permission.
Full abstract: Ethnocracy, ‘government or rule by an ethnic group’ or ethnos, is sometimes contrasted with democracy or rule by the demos or people. The term was developed from a general imprecise label into an analytical concept which can be extended to a number of different contexts each with its own specific dynamics. Primarily the concept was developed as national ethnocracy for regimes in sovereign national states which claim to be democratic, and above all it was pioneered for Israel-Palestine by the Israeli geographer Oren Yiftachel. He applied it to ethnically-biased state policies and the asymmetrical relations between Jews and Palestinians. Then he and others extended it to analysing state and ethnic relations in other countries including Apartheid South Africa, Sri Lanka, Estonia, Northern Ireland, and Australia. Secondly, along with other Israelis such as Haim Jacobi, he extended the concept down to specifically urban ethnocracy and local urban administrations within national ethnocracy; and we can elaborate further on how cities and city government have their own specificities which differentiate their ethnocracy from that of states and open up possibilities for greater flexibility and relative moderation. Thirdly, I have extended the concept back in time to the explicitly imperial ethnocracy of the British Empire in Palestine and Ireland. Although in both cases the immediate precursor of national ethnocracy, the three-way relations between ‘settlers’ and ‘natives’ (respectively Jews and Arabs; Protestants and Catholics) and the imperial power which played them off against each other, arguably had a moderating effect compared to the simpler and often harsher two-way ‘settler-native’ juxtaposition in the national ethnocracy which followed - and the same may be true to a lesser extent in the case of Australia? Fourthly, and more speculatively, I suggest that the concept of ethnocracy can be extended forwards to the usually mis-named ‘post-conflict’ stages of ‘peace processes’ and the often contradictory relations of consociational power-sharing, to what we might call post-conflict ethnocracy or perhaps ethnocracy-sharing. Fifthly - and even more speculatively - it might be extended to contemporary religious-political movements which largely operate in national contexts but are typically transnational in character, or seek in varying degrees to transcend the national, or in the case of Arab Islamists might be seen as reflecting the failures of ‘Arab nationalism’ - what could perhaps be labelled post-national or religious ethnocracy. But is this to over-extend the concept? Alternatively, we could continue to speculate about additional contexts where it could usefully be applied?
James Anderson, now Emeritus Professor of Political Geography in Queen's University Belfast, previously worked at the UK’s Open University where he chaired the Social Science Foundation Course. Later he was appointed to the Chair of International Development in the University of Newcastle upon Tyne where he was also Associate Director of the Centre for Transnational Studies set up jointly with the Department of Politics. At Queens Belfast since 1999, he is Co-Director of the Centre for International Borders Research www.qub.ac.uk/cibr and a Co-Investigator of the ESRC-funded project, 'Conflict in Cities and the Contested State: Everyday Life and the Possibilities of Transformation in Belfast, Jerusalem and Other Divided Cities', www.conflictincities.org . His current research interests are in ethno-nationally divided cities and the urban dimensions of ethno-national conflict; and in the political economy and politics of ecological crisis.
