Description

The Challenge of Sustaining Democracy in Deeply Divided Societies: Citizenship, Rights, and Ethnic Conflicts in India and Israel by Ayelet Harel-Shalev explores the inherent tension between the conflicting logics of democracy, citizenship, and nation-state. Majority-minority relations are comparatively explicated by analyzing and theorizing the practices democracies utilize to allocate legal rights to minorities while limiting their share in power. The discourse of legal rights offers minorities empowerment while simultaneously limiting their access to national power; it also functions as a political formula that enables such states to survive while sustaining a democratic process in the face of ethno-religious conflicts.