Ethnocracy Without Groups: Conceptualising Ethnocratiser States Without Reifying Ethnic Categories

Abstract

This article advances a non-groupist understanding of the foundation, operation and self-perpetuation of states that scholars have hitherto labelled ethnocracies or ethnic democracies. Such states create and ignite zero-sum internal conflicts between portions of their populations. They do so by demarcating the population into ethnic categories. They apply labels to individuals and hierarchically order the categories to which they are deemed to belong, awarding one cohort more privilege than the other. Existing literature on such states has obscured the processes by which states reify and institutionalise identity, instead presenting it through groupist frames in which ethnicity is a pre-existing variable. Re-conceptualising the doing of ethnicity as a process enables us to study internal dissent against ethnic privilege and consider its transformational capacity in inspiring new nationalist discourses.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks David Brown for his assistance in the development of these ideas, and the two anonymous reviewers for their suggested improvements. Excerpted sections from Attwell, Jewish-Israeli national identity and dissidence, 2015, Palgrave Macmillan, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

Notes

1. This terminology of ‘doing’ ethnicity borrows from West and Zimmerman's (1987) notion of ‘doing’ gender, and Deutsch's (2007) ‘undoing gender’ critique. It draws our attention to the performative, institutional and discursive means by which something that appears natural is, in fact created for and by participants, seemingly with their consent, but with the potential for resistance.

2. Interestingly, it took the most militarised and extreme form of Zionism to recognise the rights claims of the Other, even if this recognition occurred in the process of denial (Shlaim 2000, pp. 11–16).

3. Shohat (1999) and Behar (2007) describe how the Palestinian nationalist discourse unwittingly reproduced and reinforced the Zionist discourse's ethnicised framing and praxis in Palestine. Shohat (1999) explains that nationalists in the Arab world sought to end colonial rule by inventing ‘third world nations … according to the definitions supplied by the often Eurocentric ideologies’ (pp. 8–9), unhelpfully leading anti-Zionists to articulate ‘the idea of a homogenous “Jewish Nation”’ (p. 13).

4. Yiftachel cites Brubaker (1996) here, but Brubaker actually frames this proposition in less groupist terms.

5. Yiftachel (2006) offers an extreme version of this logic in Sri Lanka, where the Sinhalese ethnocratiser state denies over one million long-term residents citizenship, labelling them ‘Indian Tamils’ as distinct from ‘Sri Lankan Tamil’ citizens of the state, who are also Othered by the regime (p. 23).