This Master?s thesis deals with a reflection of national minorities in textbooks of civic in elementary schools. The aim of this thesis is both theoretical research of civics textbooks and a practical exploration of attitudes of students and teachers of elementary schools in relation to minorities. The thesis contains three main parts. The first part deals with issues of multicultural community and explains the basic concepts that are associated with these issues. The next part, describes an author?s reflection of ethnic and national minorities in civics textbooks. The last part is dedicated to the research where a questionnaire survey was used. It maps attitudes of students and teachers of elementary schools to ethnic and national minorities

The thesis deals with the government's policy towards national minorities in Slovakia after 1993. It focuses on policies towards the two most populous minorities in Slovakia (Hungarian and Roma minority) mainly in two key spheres -- culture and education. The aim of the thesis is to evaluate the development of the minority policy towards Hungarians and Roma people and to asses individual factors that causes its changes. The goal is also to compare the approach of government coalitions towards these two minorities. The continuity of these policies is mainly observed. Policies can be influenced by internal and external factors. International organizations -- Council of Europe, European Union and OSCE -- and Hungarians are set as external factors and different government coalition in Slovakia as internal. Last question that thesis deals with is if the triadic nexus (as characterized by Rogers Brubaker) between nationalism of Slovak government, Hungary and Hungarian minority in Slovakia can influence also minority policy towards Roma. Despite all these factors that have an influence on government's minority policy after 1993 in Slovakia, it is continual.

After 1989 a lot of non-democratic regimes crumbled in Central and Eastern Europe. These regimes had started their way towards democracy and its consolidation. This way differed case by case but some aspects that affected them were common. One of the most important aspects is European Union, a strong international actor and a possibility for future development for these countries. This paper tries to examine the influence of possible future accession of Romania into the EU on its democratic consolidation. It is mainly focused on issues of national minorities and their protection and on extreme nationalist political parties and their position within Romanian society. Additional topics are democratic consolidation in broader sense and Europeanization. The conclusion shows that Romanian democracy in studied fields has become more consolidated and the influence of the EU o this change can be traced.

No / The rights of minorities are becoming increasingly important, especially in the context of enlargement of the European Union, yet there are remarkably few treaties dealing with minority rights under international law. One of these is the Council of Europe's Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. This volume provides the first expert commentary on the Convention, which is the principal international document establishing minority rights in a legally binding way. Many minority rights such as those to political participation, non-assimilation, and the use of native languages are not incorporated in other major Human Rights agreements. The Convention is therefore often taken to be the leading standard in the international law of minority rights.

Kazakhstan: Mortality in European context (comparison with selected European countries and nationalities) Abstract The aim of this diploma thesis is to anylized mortality rates in Kazakhstan and compared it with selected European countries. In the begining of the thesis is brief outline of history and development of ethnic composition in this Central Asian Republic. Another section contains a comparison of the economic and social conditions in Kazakhstan with two selected European countries - the Czech Republic and Sweden. The thesis continues with comparison and development of the most important mortality indicators in the three above mentioned countries. One of the used criteria summarizes findings from the comparison of mortality backgrounds of three selected European minorities living in Kazakhstan (Germans, Russians and Ukrainians) with their country of origin. This comparison shows a big difference for German nationality, for Russians and Ukrainians the differences are minimal. The concept of avoidable mortality was also used for comparison mortality conditions in selected countries. The results show a low level of health care system in Kazakhstan. The analysis shows a clear gap in Kazakhstan levels of mortality in comparison with selected European countries and nations. Keywords: Kazakhstan, The...

La politique de la langue azerbaïdjanaise doit être étudiée en suivant quatre aspects différents mais très liés : la politique linguistique à l’égard de la langue officielle, la politique linguistique à l’égard des langues minoritaires en Azerbaïdjan, la politique linguistique à l’égard de la Turcophonie et la politique linguistique à l’égard des minorités azerbaïdjanaises vivant surtout dans les pays frontaliers tels que l’Iran, la Géorgie ou bien la Fédération de Russie (également la République du Daghestan de la Fédération de Russie). Cet ensemble constitue pour la politique linguistique de l’Azerbaïdjan à la fois une intervention sur la langue officielle mais aussi sur les langues minoritaires de la part de l’Etat et un domaine de coopération internationale dans le cas de la Turcophonie. Par conséquence, l’aspect régional de cette politique est considéré comme une action ayant des enjeux essentiels pour le développement et le rayonnement de l’azerbaïdjanais comme langue minoritaire. / Policy Azerbaijani language must be studied in four different but closely related aspects : the language policy towards the official language, the language policy towards minority languages in Azerbaijan, the language policy towards the Turcophonie and the language policy against Azerbaijani minorities especially in neighboring countries such as Iran, Georgia or Russia (also the Republic of Dagestan of the Russian Federation). This set is for the language policy of Azerbaijan in both the official language intervention but also on minority languages from the state and an area of international cooperation in the case of Turcophonie. Consequently, the regional aspect of this policy is considered as an action that key issues for the development and influence of Azerbaijani as a minority language.

This master thesis is a study on identity construction of a group of 9-14 year old children with Finnish origin in Sweden. In 2000 Sweden granted a special status of a national minority to five indigenous minorities, of which the Sweden-Finns are one, by ratifying European council’s framework convention for protection of national minorities. The status was further strengthened in 2010 with law 2009:724 giving Sweden’s five national minorities right to preserve and promote their own cultures and languages considered to be endangered due to centuries-long marginalisation, discrimination and forced assimilation to the Swedish society. The law emphasises particularly children’s right to a cultural identity and the minority language. Majority of the Sweden-Finnish children today are second or third generation decendants of the large group of work-related immigrants who migrated from Finland to Sweden during the 1960s-70s. Due to various socio-political reasons, the Sweden-Finns have assimilated culturally and linguistically to the Swedish society and children are predominantly Swedish-speaking. The theoretical framework in this thesis is a constructionist view on identity and ethnicity as ever-changing and in a constant process of being reproduced. There is an aspect of hybridity in identity; one person can have different identities during his or her lifetime. By using qualitative group interviews as a research method this thesis studies how a group of eleven Sweden-Finnish children relates to and identifies with “Finnishness” or “Sweden-Finnishness”. The study focuses on how these identity categories are reproduced by children and how they are used to mark and symbolise different aspects of the children’s identities. According to the sociology of childhood, children are seen as active social actors. Therefore this thesis presents a child’s perspective and it is the children’s own stories, opinions and insights to identity construction that form the basis to the analysis. The conclusion drawn is that the Sweden-Finnishness is constructed through children’s relations to Finland and how they relate to their Finnish origin even though their lives are preconditioned in a Swedish-speaking environment. Children describe Sweden-Finnishness as a relatively new identity category that is still under construction but a majority identify themselves as Sweden-Finns for their lives are in Sweden. Children have a limited access to other Finnish-speaking children and children’s cultures outside the group meetings where the interviews were conducted and Finnish language is mostly used with the Finnish-speaking parent or more seldom with relatives. The children consider their bilingualism as an advantage but the limited contacts to Finnish-speaking friends and the dominance of Swedish, and increasingly English, through social media in their daily lives decreases the possibilities to use Finnish in social relations. / Det här examensarbetet skrivs inom barn och ungdomsvetenskap och handlar om sverigefinska barns identitetsarbete. Sverigefinnar är i Sverige bosatta personer med finsk härkomst och en av de fem nationella eller historiska minoriteterna som Sverige erkände i februari 2000. Lagen (2009:724) om nationella minoriteter och minoritetsspråk fastställer bland annat att allmänheten ska särskilt främja minoritetsbarns rätt till utveckling av en kulturell identitet och användningen av det egna språket. Majoriteten av dagens sverigefinska barn och unga tillhör den andra- eller tredje generationen av den stora arbetskraftsinvandrargruppen som emigrerade från Finland till Sverige under 1960-70-talet. Dåtidens minoritetspolitik och bristen på finsk kulturell- och språklig kontext i vardagen har gjort att inte bara en, utan flera generationer sverigefinska barn saknar idag kunskaper om den finska kulturen samt kunskaper i det finska språket. Studiens teoretiska utgångspunkt utgörs av begreppen identitet, etnicitet och kultur. Studien använder sig av ett konstruktionistiskt perspektiv, att identiteter konstrueras hela livet i olika korsade och även motsatta diskurser. Identitetens hybriditet betyder att en och samma person kan uppleva och anamma olika identiteter under sitt liv. Inom barndomssociologi anses barn vara aktiva aktörer som själva konstruerar sin verklighet och det är därför att barnens egna funderingar och berättelser får företräde i redovisningen av den insamlade empirin. Med kvalitativ gruppintervju som forskningsmetod har en grupp av 11 sverigefinska barn i åldersgrupp 9-14 år intervjuats i syfte att kunna presentera ett sverigefinskt barns perspektiv som belyser hur barnen själv upplever och uppfattar sin identitet samt hur den kan kopplas till sverigefinskhet eller finskhet. Självidentifikation är en strategisk positionering som görs i relation till andra människor och att identifiera sig som finsk eller sverigefinsk är därmed en högst individuell uppfattning eller upplevelse om vem man är. Forskningsresultaten fastställer att sverigefinskhet skapas genom barnens relationer till Finland och den finska härkomsten trots att barnens levnadsmiljö huvudsakligen är svenskspråkig. De flesta kan identifiera sig med sverigefinskhet även om den uppfattas som en relativ ny identitetskategori som håller på att utvecklas och fyllas med innebörd. Barnen upplever att det finns få möjligheter att skapa sverigefinska kamratkulturer utöver den fritidsverksamheten där intervjuerna genomfördes och det finska språket används nästan uteslutande med den finskspråkiga föräldern eller mer sällan med släktingar. Flerspråkighet anses som en resurs som gynnar barnen i olika livssituationer men kompisrelationer är till stor del svenskspråkiga och användning av social media på engelska minskar tillfällena och möjligheterna till att använda finska.

Global capital is transforming the spaces in which we live, thereby transforming culture: this thesis challenges a set of liberal assumptions about culture and cultural transformation by elaborating upon this very hypothesis. Specifically, it argues that cultural identities are being formed in global cities, where disjunctive global flows of cultural, financial, technological, ideological, and human capital intersect. These global flows are creating cultural contexts of choice that can be as central to individual and group identities as national institutions or inherited or native cultural norms. And as these modern contexts of choice emancipate the imagination from the influence of national institutions, they enable peculiar new forms of agency. I use Arjun Appadurai’s notion of imagination and his model of “scapes”—cultural landscapes formed by intersecting flows of capital—to explain how the global is becoming the decisive framework for social life. In contrast, I use Will Kymlicka’s model of multicultural citizenship and Jeremy Waldron’s model of cosmopolitanism primarily to demonstrate the limits of a class of liberal theories of cultural accommodation that oversimplify the relationship of the individual to culture, and of culture to modernity, and which ignore the role of “scapes” in constituting cultural identities. To conclude, I propose an alternative, three- dimensional and ultimately non-comparative treatment of culture inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city. / Graduate

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed Aug. 13, 2007). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 197-204).

Les Bunjevci sont un petit groupe ethnolinguistique sud-slave qui réside dans la région de Bačka, au nord de la Province de Voïvodine en Serbie, ainsi qu'au sud de la Hongrie voisine. À travers une approche monographique et transdisciplinaire, nous tentons de contribuer à la compréhension des rapports complexes entre langue et identité (ethno)nationale en contexte minoritaire. Les Bunjevci peuvent être considérés, selon l'anthropologue serbe M. Prelić (2007), comme un groupe « à l'identité ethnique controversée ou contestée ». En effet, la question de leur appartenance ethnonationale – notamment leur catégorisation vis-à-vis des autres groupes sud-slaves de la région, Croates et Serbes – fait l'objet de débats depuis plusieurs siècles, dans les sphères politiques et scientifiques. Au cours de l'histoire, ils se sont trouvés en périphérie de divers mouvements d'intégration nationale (hongrois, serbe, croate, yougoslave) qui tendaient à les incorporer. À l'heure actuelle, bien qu'ils soient officiellement reconnus comme l'une des nombreuses « minorités nationales » de Serbie, ce statut leur est formellement dénié, de l'autre côté de la frontière, par les institutions hongroises. Leur existence en tant qu'entité ethnonationale particulière est également explicitement contestée par la Croatie voisine, tout comme par les institutions de la minorité nationale croate en Serbie, qui perçoivent les Bunjevci comme des Croates. Ayant obtenu le statut de « minorité nationale » au début des années 2000, les Bunjevci de Serbie – ou plutôt, les activistes nationaux qui les représentent – amorcent un véritable processus de (re)construction nationale dans lequel un rôle primordial est attribué à la langue. La « langue des Bunjevci » (bunjevački jezik), une variété štokavienne ikavienne (autrefois considérée comme un parler local de la langue serbo-croate), est aujourd'hui placée au centre des revendications de cette minorité et mise en avant comme un des éléments assurant l'individuation des Bunjevci vis-à-vis des Serbes et des Croates. / The Bunjevci are a small South Slavic ethnolinguistic group which lives in the Bačka region, in the north of the Province of Vojvodina in Serbia, as well as in the south of neighboring Hungary. Through a monographic and interdisciplinary approach, we try to contribute to the understanding of the complex relationship between language and (ethno)national identity in a minority context. According to the Serbian anthropologist M. Prelić (2007), the Bunjevci can be considered as a group "with controversial or disputed ethnic identity". Indeed, the question of their ethnonationality – especially their categorization vis-à-vis other South Slavic groups in the region, Croats and Serbs – has been the subject of debate for centuries, in political and scientific spheres. In the past, they were located on the periphery of various national integration movements (Hungarian, Serbian, Croatian, Yugoslavian) which tended to incorporate them. Today, although they are officially recognized as one of the many "national minorities" of Serbia, the Hungarian institutions formally deny them this status on the other side of the border. Their existence as a particular ethnonational entity is also explicitly contested by neighboring Croatia, as well as by the institutions of the Croatian national minority in Serbia, which perceive Bunjevci as Croats. Having obtained the status of "national minority" in the early 2000s, the Bunjevci of Serbia – or rather, the national activists representing them – begin a genuine process of national (re)construction in which a key role is assigned to the language. The "Bunjevac language" (bunjevački jezik), a štokavian ikavian variety (once considered as a local speech of the Serbo-Croatian language), is now placed at the center of the minority's claims and put forward as one of the elements ensuring the individuation of the Bunjevci from the Serbs and the Croats.