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Minorities At Risk (MAR) is a university-based research project that monitors and analyzes the status and conflicts of 283 politically-active communal groups in many countries throughout the world from 1945 to 2006. Those minorities included have been deemed politically significant, meaning that the group collectively suffers or benefits from systematic discriminatory treatment at the hands of other societal groups and the group is the foundation of political mobilization and collective action in defense or promotion of self-defined interests. MAR seeks to identify where the groups are located, what they do, and what happens to them. The project is designed to provide information in a standardized format that aids comparative research and contributes to the understanding of conflicts involving relevant groups. The MAR project was initiated by Ted Robert Gurr in 1986 and has been based at the University of Maryland's Center for International Development and Conflict Management (CIDCM) since 1988.
The dataset does not include all minority groups across the world. There are specific requirements that limit the number of groups analyzed. Below are the seven database rules that must be met:
MAR groups are categorized into six groups which refer to the populations’ past and current struggles on the basis of racial/historical/ethnical variances from the majority population of their country.
1. Ethnonationalist: regionally concentrated peoples with a history of organized political autonomy with their own state, traditional ruler, or regional government who have supported political movements for autonomy at some time since 1945.
2. Indigenous: conquered descendants of earlier inhabitants of a region who live primarily in conformity with traditional social, economic, and cultural customs that are sharply distinct from those of dominant groups.
3. Ethnoclass: ethnically or culturally distinct, usually descended from slaves or immigrants, most of whom occupy a distinct social and economic stratum or niche.
4. Communal Contender: culturally distinct peoples, tribes, or clans in heterogeneous societies who hold or seek a share in state power.
-Disadvantaged: subject to some degree of political, economic, or cultural discrimination but lack offsetting advantages
-Advantaged: those with political advantage over other groups in their society
-Dominant: those with a preponderance of both political and economic power
5. Religious Sect: communal groups that differ from others principally in their religious beliefs and related cultural practices, and whose political status and activities are centered on the defense of their beliefs.
6. National Minority: segments of a trans-state people with a history of organized political autonomy whose kindred control of an adjacent state, but who constitute a minority in the state in which they reside.
There are five phases completed thus far for the dataset. Phase I covered 227 communal groups, which met the criteria for classification as a minority at risk for the years 1945–90; Phase II covered 275 groups from 1990–96; Phase III covered 275 groups from 1996–9; Phase IV covered 283 groups from 1998–2003; and phase V covered 283 groups from 2003–06. Also available is the Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior (MAROB) which began in 2005 with the purpose of answering fundamental questions focusing on the identification of those factors that motivate some members of ethnic minorities to become radicalized, to form activist organizations, and to move from conventional means of politics and protest into violence and terrorism.
The data is coded by-hand by undergraduate and graduate students under the direct supervision of directors. The information is culled from a variety of sources; journalistic accounts, government reports, group orgs, scholarly material. Coders rely upon multiple sources for each code assigned as often as possible. Variables are broken down into four categories: Group Characteristics, Group Status, External Support, and Group Conflict Behavior. For all of the phases, there are a varying number of variables for which have been coded. Phase V includes 71 core variables and 282 groups. There are codebooks for every phase of recorded data. The variables range from descriptive traits referring to their population and location in the world, to their active protests and rebellions, to the discriminatory practices that affect them. The data allows viewers to see trends by years, country, or conflict.
Such an analysis can be done over many years and at both the group and country level. For example, here are the calculated means for three variables, including rebellion, protest, and political discrimination, for African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Native Hawaiians within the United States. The means for the years 1985–1993 can then be compared to the country's average as well as the overall average for all groups included in the database.
The codebooks allow for an understanding of what each number means (e.g., a 1 for political discrimination represents neglect/remedial policies and a 3 for protest represents small demonstrations numbering less than 10,000 actors).
Discrimination is the process of making unfair or prejudicial distinctions between people based on the groups, classes, or other categories to which they belong or are perceived to belong, such as race, gender, age, religion, physical attractiveness or sexual orientation. Discrimination typically leads to groups being unfairly treated on the basis of perceived statues based on ethnic, racial, gender or religious categories. It involves depriving members of one group of opportunities or privileges that are available to members of another group.
An ethnic conflict is a conflict between two or more ethnic groups. While the source of the conflict may be political, social, economic or religious, the individuals in conflict must expressly fight for their ethnic group's position within society. This criterion differentiates ethnic conflict from other forms of struggle.
Ethnic minorities in China are the non-Han population in the People's Republic of China (PRC).
Sectarianism is a political, cultural, or religious conflict between two groups. Prejudice, discrimination, exclusion, or hatred can arise in these conflicts, depending on the political status quo and if one group holds more power within the government. Often, not all members of these groups are engaged in the conflict. But as tensions rise, political solutions require the participation of more people from either side within the country or polity where the conflict is happening. Common examples of these divisions are denominations of a religion, ethnic identity, class, or region for citizens of a state and factions of a political movement.
The Correlates of War project is an academic study of the history of warfare. It was started in 1963 at the University of Michigan by political scientist J. David Singer. Concerned with collecting data about the history of wars and conflict among states, the project has driven forward quantitative research into the causes of warfare. The Correlates of War project seeks to facilitate the collection, dissemination, and use of accurate and reliable quantitative data in international relations. Key principles of the project include a commitment to standard scientific principles of replication, data reliability, documentation, review, and the transparency of data collection procedures.
The term "minority group" has different usages, depending on the context. According to its common usage, the term minority group can simply be understood in terms of demographic sizes within a population: i.e. a group in society with the least number of individuals, or less than half, is a "minority". Usually a minority group is disempowered relative to the majority, and that characteristic lends itself to different applications of the term minority.
Romanianization is the series of policies aimed toward ethnic assimilation implemented by the Romanian authorities during the 20th and 21st century. The most noteworthy policies were those aimed at the Hungarian minority in Romania, Jews and as well the Ukrainian minority in Bukovina and Bessarabia.
The Adjarians, also known as Muslim Georgians, are an ethnographic group of Georgians indigenous to Adjara in south-western Georgia. Adjarian settlements are also found in the Georgian provinces of Guria, Kvemo Kartli, and Kakheti, as well as in several areas of neighbouring Turkey.
The origins of the Sri Lankan Civil War lie in the continuous political rancor between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Sri Lankan Tamils. According to Jonathan Spencer, a social anthropologist from the School of Social and Political Studies of the University of Edinburgh, the war is an outcome of how modern ethnic identities have been made and re-made since the colonial period, with the political struggle between minority Tamils and the Sinhalese-dominant government accompanied by rhetorical wars over archeological sites and place name etymologies, and the political use of the national past.
The Political Instability Task Force (PITF), formerly known as State Failure Task Force, is a U.S. government-sponsored research project to build a database on major domestic political conflicts leading to state failures. The study analyzed factors to denote the effectiveness of state institutions, population well-being, and found that partial democracies with low involvement in international trade and with high infant mortality are most prone to revolutions. One of the members of the task force resigned on January 20, 2017, in protest of the Trump administration, before Donald Trump was sworn in as U.S. president.
Communal violence is a form of violence that is perpetrated across ethnic or communal lines, where the violent parties feel solidarity for their respective groups and victims are chosen based upon group membership. The term includes conflicts, riots and other forms of violence between communities of different religious faith or ethnic origins.
Bengali nationalism is a form of nationalism that focuses on Bengalis as a singular nation. The Bengalis speak Bengali language. The Bengalis mostly live across Bangladesh and the Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura. Bengali nationalism is one of the four fundamental principles according to the original Constitution of Bangladesh and was the main driving force behind the creation of the Independent nation state of Bangladesh through the 1971 liberation war. Bangladesh Awami League doesn't allow Bihari Muslims (1%) to stay in Bangladesh, whereas Bangladesh Nationalist Party doesn't allow Bengali Hindus (8%) and Tribals (1%) to stay in Bangladesh. The present Government of Bangladesh is Bangladesh Awami League Government. Bengali Muslims make up the majority (90%) of Bangladesh's citizens (Bangladeshis), and are the largest minority in the Indian states of Assam (29%) and West Bengal (27%), whereas Bengali Hindus make up the majority (60%) of India's citizens (Indians) in Indian state of West Bengal, and are the largest minority in the Indian states of Assam (28%) and Jharkhand (8%) and the independent state of Bangladesh (8%).
This article focuses on ethnic minorities in the Republic of Azerbaijan.
Kurdish nationalism is a nationalist political movement which asserts that Kurds are a nation and espouses the creation of an independent Kurdistan from Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.
Ilirida or the Republic of Ilirida is a proposed state in the western regions of North Macedonia, declared twice by the politician Nevzat Halili, once in 1992 and again in 2014. The proposal has been declared unconstitutional by the Macedonian government. The secessionist concept of Ilirida emerged in the early 1990s and was advocated by some Albanian politicians as a solution to concerns and disputes the Albanian community had regarding constitutional recognition and minority rights within Macedonia.
Sectarianism can be defined as a practice that is created over a period of time through consistent social, cultural and political habits leading to the formation of group solidarity that is dependent upon practices of inclusion and exclusion. Sectarian discrimination focuses on the exclusion aspect of sectarianism and can be defined as 'hatred arising from attaching importance to perceived differences between subdivisions within a group', for example the different denominations of a religion or the factions of a political belief.
The 1979 Khuzestan uprising was one of the nationwide uprisings in Iran, which erupted in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution. The unrest was fed by Arab demands for autonomy. The uprising was effectively quelled by Iranian security forces, resulting in more than a hundred people on both sides killed.
Arab separatism in Khuzestan was a decades-long separatist Arab movement in the western part of the Khuzestan Province in Iran.
Ethnic federalism, multi-ethnic or multi-national federalism, is a form of federal system in which the federated regional or state units are defined by ethnicity. Ethnic federal systems have been created in attempts to accommodate demands for ethnic autonomy and manage inter-ethnic tensions within a state. They have not always succeeded in this: problems inherent in the construction and maintenance of an ethnic federation have led to some states or sub-divisions of a state into either breaking up, resorting to authoritarian repression, or resorting to ethnocracy, ethnic segregation, population transfer, internal displacement, ethnic cleansing, and/or even ethnicity-based attacks and pogroms.
The Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) dataset identifies all politically relevant ethnic groups, their size, and their access to state power in every country of the world with a population of at least 250,000 from 1946 to 2017. It includes annual data on over 800 groups and codes the degree to which their representatives hold executive-level state power, from total control of the government, power-sharing to overt political discrimination. Also, it provides information on regional autonomy arrangements.