Abstract
This chapter discusses the perils, benefits, possibilities and limits that sovereign states can represent in a world where the nation-state is viewed and cherished as the political standard of organizing human life. It also looks into the modes that states construct majorities and minorities and justify relations of dominance and subordination, ethnocultural primacy and cultural otherness. In other words, how state with the help of nationalist ideas produces a master identity and marked constituencies whose lives, legal, political, cultural, economic status remain insecure and precarious. Due to the dominance and the persistence of the nation-state, stateless subjects continue to invest in nationalism with an aspiration to achieve some form of autonomy, federalism or sovereignty. In other words, the antidote to the status injury of stateless nations continues to be located in the nation-state as a political bandage to alleviate or end their sufferings and vulnerabilities. Statehood can be envisaged as vehicle to achieve and sustain peace and security from outsiders and internal unrest; it can also be viewed as home for one’s national community. For those who are at the margins of the state, the governing state is viewed as a means of ethnic oppression and an obstacle to one’s political aspiration to achieve independence (see Grzybowski and Koskenniemi in The concept of the state in international relations: Philosophy, sovereignty, cosmopolitanism. Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and mastery over one’s land, natural resources, identity, culture, religion and language.
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Eliassi, B. (2021). The Nation-State Crafting of Majorities and Minorities. In: Narratives of Statelessness and Political Otherness. Minorities in West Asia and North Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76698-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76698-6_2
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