Minority Rights

Extract

Minority Rights, Jennifer Jackson Preece, Cambridge (UK) and Malden MA: Polity Press, 2005, pp. ix, 213.

This book is not, as its title might be thought to suggest, an abstract conceptual analysis of a particular sub-set of rights. Although it builds on, and acknowledges, the work of Kymlicka, Raz, Taylor and Shklar (160), the narrative thread that gives it unity is historical. It deepens our understanding of the nature of the discourse of minority rights by contextualizing that discourse both temporally (through historical examples) and spatially (through adroitly selected comparative examples). With extraordinary succinctness and clarity the author guides us through a succession of political epochs: the time of the Christian and Islamic medieval universitae, the period of the dynastic re-organization of Europe, the modern era of popular sovereignty with its attendant notions of civic and ethnic nationalism, and especially the contradiction-laden time of European imperialism and its post-imperial and post-colonial reverberations. As this narrative unfolds we follow the vicissitudes of religious, racial, linguistic and ethnic minorities and observe the successive forms taken by the “problem of minorities.”