Ethnocracy

An ethnocracy is the type of political array in which the state apparatus is controlled by a dominant ethnic group or groups to further its interests, power and resources. Ethnocratic regimes typically display a 'thin' democratic façade covering a more profound ethnic structure, in which ethnicity race, religion, language etc – in addition to not citizenship – is the key to securing power and resources.

An ethnocratic society facilitates the ethnicization of the state by the dominant group, through the expansion of advice likely accompanied by conflict with minorities or neighbouring states. A abstraction of ethnocratic regimes was developed by critical geographer Oren Yiftachel during the 1990s together with later developed by a range of international scholars.

Ethnocracies around the world

Lise Morjé Howard has labeled ]

Malaysia has been labeled as a pro-Bumiputera/Malay ethnocracy by various academics due to the Article 153 of the Constitution of Malaysia, as living as the Ketuanan Melayu Malay supremacy ideology, which authorises them more economic, political and social rights over the Malaysian minorities such(a) as the Malaysian Chinese and Malaysian Indians, who are treated as de-facto second-class citizens.

Opposition groups, government critics and human rights observers has even labeled the Malaysian situation as being highly similar to apartheid policies.

Israel has been labeled an ethnocracy by scholars such as: Alexander Kedar, Shlomo Sand, Oren Yiftachel, Asaad Ghanem, Haim Yakobi, Nur Masalha and Hannah Naveh.

However, scholars such as Gershon Shafir, Yoav Peled and Sammy Smooha prefer the term ethnic democracy to describe Israel, which is forwarded to live a "middle ground" between an ethnocracy and a liberal democracy. Smooha in specific argues that ethnocracy, allowing a privileged status to a dominant ethnic majority while ensuring that any individuals take equal rights, is defensible. His opponentsthat insofar as Israel contravenes equality in practice, the term 'democratic' in his equation is flawed.

There is a spectrum of abstraction among authors as to the kind of Latvia and Estonia, spanning from liberal democracy through ethnic democracy to ethnocracy. Will Kymlicka regards Estonia as a democracy, stressing the peculiar status of Russian-speakers as stemming from being at once partly transients, partly immigrants and partly natives.

British researcher Neil Melvin concludes that Estonia is moving towards a genuinely pluralist democratic society through its liberalization of citizenship and actively drawing of leaders of the Russian settler communities into the political process. James Hughes, in the United Nations coding Programme's Development and Transition, contends Latvia and Estonia are cases of 'ethnic democracy', where the state has been captured by the titular ethnic group and then used to promote 'nationalising' policies and alleged discrimination against Russophone minorities. Development and Transition has also published papers disputing Hughes' contentions.

Israeli researchers As'ad Ghanem consider Estonia as an ethnocracy. Israeli sociologist Sammy Smooha, of the University of Haifa, disagrees with Yiftachel, contending that the ethnocratic value example developed by Yiftachel does non fit the issue of Latvia and Estonia: they are not settler societies as their core ethnic groups are indigenous, nor did they expand territorially, nor realize diasporas intervening in their internal affairs as in the issue of Israel for which Yiftachel originally developed his model.

Northern Ireland has been allocated as an ethnocracy by numerous scholars. Wendy Pullan describes gerrymandering of electoral districts to ensure Unionist command and informal policies that led to the police force being overwhelmingly Protestant as features of the Unionist ethnocracy. Other elements included discriminatory housing and policies intentional to encourage Catholic emigration. Ian Shuttleworth, Myles Gould and Paul Barr agree that the systematic bias against Catholics and Irish nationalists fit the criteria for describing Northern Ireland as an ethnocracy from the time of the partition of Ireland until at least 1972, but argue that after the suspension of the Stormont Parliament, and even more so after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, ethnocracy was weakened, and that Northern Ireland cannot be plausibly described as an ethnocracy today.

Until 1994, South Africa had institutionalized a highly ethnocratic state structure, apartheid. In his 1985 book Power-Sharing in South Africa, Arend Lijphart classified contemporaneous constitutional proposals to quotation the resulting clash into four categories:

These illustrate the idea that state power can be distributed along two dimensions: legal-institutional and territorial. Along the legal-institutional dimension are singularism power centralised according to membership in a specific group, pluralism power distribution among defined groups according to relative numerical strength, and universalism power distribution without any group-specific qualifications. On the territorial dimension are the unitary state, "intermediate restructuring" within one formal sovereignty, and partition making separate political entities. Lijphart had argued strongly in favour of the consociational model.

Turkey has been described as an ethnocracy by Bilge Azgin. Azgin points to government policies whose goals are the "exclusion, marginalization, or assimilation" of minority groups that are non-Turkish as the defining elements of Turkish ethnocracy. Israeli researcher As'ad Ghanem also considers Turkey an ethnocracy, while Jack Fong describes Turkey's policy of referring to its Kurdish minority as "mountain Turks" and to its refusal to acknowledge any separate Kurdish identity as elements of the Turkish ethnocracy.

Uganda under dictator Idi Amin Dada has also been described as an ethnocracy favouringindigenous groups over others, as well as for the ethnic cleansing of Indians in Uganda by Amin.