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In an age of multiculturalism and identity politics, many minority groups seek some form of official recognition or public accommodation of their identity. But can public institutions accurately recognize or accommodate something as subjective and dynamic as "identity?" Avigail Eisenberg and Will Kymlicka lead a distinguished team of scholars who explore state responses to identity claims worldwide. Their case studies focus on key issues where identity is central to public policy. By illuminating both the risks and opportunities of institutional responses to diversity, this volume shows that public institutions can either enhance or distort the benefits of identity politics.
The political concept of recognition has introduced new ways of thinking about the relationship between minorities and justice in plural societies. But is a politics informed by recognition valuable to minorities today? Contributors to this volume examine the successes and failures of struggles for recognition and self-determination in relation to claims of religious groups, cultural minorities, and indigenous peoples on territories associated with Canada, the United States, Europe, Latin America, India, New Zealand, and Australia. The chapters look at cultural recognition in the context of public policy about intellectual and physical property, membership practices, and independence movements, while probing debates about toleration, democratic citizenship, and colonialism. Together the contributions point to a distinctive set of challenges posed by a politics of recognition and self-determination to peoples seeking emancipation from unjust relations.
Most discussions of multiculturalism and group rights focus on the relationship between the minority and the majority. This volume advances our understanding of minority rights by focusing on conflicts that arise within minority groups and by examining the different sorts of responses that the liberal state might have to these conflicts. Groups around the world are increasingly successful in maintaining or winning autonomy. In light of this trend, a crucial question emerges: what happens to individuals within groups who find that their group discriminates against them? This volume brings together distinguished scholars who examine this question by weaving together normative political theory with case studies drawn from South Africa, the United States, India, Canada, and Britain. Classical liberalism, deliberative democracy, feminism, and associative democracy are among the theoretical frameworks used to offer solutions to the complex set of issues raised by minorities within minorities.
Calls for the provision of group rights are a common part of politics in Canada. Many liberal theorists consider identity claims a necessary condition of equality, but do these claims do more harm than good? To answer this question, Caroline Dick engages in a critical analysis of liberal identity-driven theories and their application in cases such as Sawridge Band v. Canada, which sets a First Nation’s right to self-determination against indigenous women’s right to equality. She contrasts Charles Taylor’s theory of identity recognition, Will Kymlicka’s cultural theory of minority rights, and Avigail Eisenberg’s theory of identity-related interests with an alternative rights framework that account for both group and in-group differences. Dick concludes that the problem is not the concept of identity itself but the way in which prevailing conceptions of identity and group rights obscure intragroup differences. Instead, she proposes a politics of intragroup difference that has the power to transform rights discourse in Canada.
With public confidence in representative institutions dropping to distressing levels, it is time for political theorists to reconnect issues of representation to considerations of justice, rights, citizenship, pluralism, and community. Representation and Democratic Theory investigates theoretical and practical aspects of innovative political representation in the early twenty-first century. It reveals the complexity of contemporary political representation and the importance of re-invigorating public life outside legislatures, political parties, and competitive elections. A crucial supplement to empirical studies of conventional political representation this book offers a timely and thought-provoking contribution to contemporary democratic theory. It will be a necessary and welcome addition to the libraries of many political and social scientists.
The tension between diversity and equality is central to debates about multiculturalism, self-determination, identity, and pluralism. How, for example, can the claims of ethnic and religious groups be respected when they conflict with individual rights and liberal equality? Diversity and Equality critically examines the challenge of protecting rights in diverse societies such as Canada. It develops new approaches in philosophy, law, politics, and anthropology to address the goals and problems associated with cultural, religious, and national minority rights. The contributors to this volume explore the conflicts between group demands for cultural autonomy and individual assertions of basic interests. At stake in these debates about rights and autonomy in multicultural and multinational democracies is the very meaning of freedom.
Sexual Justice defends a robust a robust conception of lesbian and gay rights, emphasizing protection against discrimination and recognition of queer relationships and families. Synthesizing materials from law, philosophy, psychoanalysis and literature, Kaplan argues that sexual desire is central to the pursuit of happiness: equal citizenship requires individual freedom to shape oneself through a variety of intimate associations.
Autonomy is fundamental to liberalism. But autonomous individuals often choose to do things that harm themselves or undermine their equality. In particular, women often choose to participate in practices of sexual inequality—cosmetic surgery, gendered patterns of work and childcare, makeup, restrictive clothing, or the sexual subordination required by membership in certain religious groups. In this book, Clare Chambers argues that this predicament poses a fundamental challenge to many existing liberal and multicultural theories that dominate contemporary political philosophy. Chambers argues that a theory of justice cannot ignore the influence of culture and the role it plays in shaping ch...
James Tully’s scholarship has profoundly transformed the study of political thought by reconstructing the practice of political theory as a democratising and diversifying dialogue between scholars and citizens. Across his writings on topics ranging from the historical origins of property, constitutionalism in diverse societies, imperialism and globalisation, and global citizenship in an era of climate crisis, Tully has developed a participatory mode of political theorising and political change called public philosophy. This practice-oriented approach to political thought and its active role in the struggles of citizens has posed fundamental challenges to modern political thought and launch...
The current legal and political context is perhaps more congenial than ever before to considering claims made by minorities for the protection of some aspect of their identity. This book argues that diverse societies depend for their success on having courts and legislatures which are capable of assessing these identity claims in a fair and transparent manner. Despite the ubiquity of these claims today, how public decision makers assess minority identity claims in the course of decision making is only vaguely understood and mostly ignored in normative political theory and public policy analysis. This book examines several key approaches used by national and international institutions to asse...