Decolonizing the British Army: a preliminary response

Following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020, anti-racist protests occurred across America and Europe. As a result, public institutions in the UK have begun to re-examine their cultures and practices to ensure not only that they are non-discriminatory, but also that they are actively anti-racist. The Army will not be immune to this process. Indeed, senior commanders including the Chief of the Defence Staff have already embraced the ‘decolonizing’ programme. Since 2000, the Army has incorporated significant numbers of Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) soldiers; just over 10 per cent of the Army is now BAME. This article examines the integration of minority soldiers over the last two decades in order to assess the prospects of ‘decolonization’ in the Army today. Despite the apparent success of the Army's integration policy, this article identifies three obstacles which still obstruct minority integration and are likely to impede decolonization. Firstly, the majority of the Army's BAME soldiers are not British citizens, but foreign and Commonwealth nationals. Secondly, the young age of the majority of British soldiers generates interactional dynamics in barracks and training which often accidentally excludes foreign minority soldiers. Thirdly, the military ideal of the British Army remains understandably Anglo-Saxon. This article considers the tensions inherent in the Army's multicultural project and lays out suggestions about how they might be overcome to pursue a de-colonizing agenda.

‘The Slovakebab’: Anti-Islam Agenda in Slovak Parliamentary Elections and Beyond

The article examines discursive framing of Muslims during the 2020 Slovak parliamentary campaign, putting it in the broader context of the four-year period since the previous 2016 elections, which took place in the shadow of the European migration crisis. We adopt a social constructivist framework to argue that, despite very low numbers of Muslims in Slovakia, Islam remains a politically divisive issue. Competing discourses strive to redefine Islam for their own political purposes, making use of politicized symbols such as the ‘kebab’ or the ‘minaret’ in the process. This makes Islam a floating signifier of Slovak politics to which multiple meanings can be attached. In the absence of actual problems with Muslim minority integration, axiological conflicts over Islam can be seen as representing broader struggles between more culturally conservative and liberal-multiculturalist forces.

Identity Security in Romania from Concept to Implementation in the Public Policies of Integration of Minorities / Roma Population

The preoccupation for the field of social security / identity security (a particular form of security of human communities in the absence of which it would not be possible to survive in history, protecting the memory and collective identity, maintaining social and cultural-symbolic cohesion in a society identity security has been steadily increasing over the last decades as a result of the European Union's enlargement and the interest shown by the European institutions for the protection of ethnic and religious specificities, the ethno-cultural identity of the communities and the prevention of democracy, exclusion and discrimination.The concept of social security belongs to the constructivist current (the current trend in which ethnicity is a phenomenon of continuous development built in everyday life that is manifested throughout life) and was developed in the early 1980s, starting with redefining security by certain such as COPRI - Copenhagen.Social security refers to the survival of a community as a cohesive unity; his referent object is large scale collective identities that can function independently of the state. Societal security is concerned with the ability to sustain, within acceptable acceptability conditions, the traditional elements of language, culture, identity, cultural and religious customs.Ole Waever's identity security (social security) refers to preserving, in acceptable conditions of evolution, the traditional patterns of language, culture, association, and national, religious and customary identity. Thus, we can say that social security refers to situations where companies perceive a threat to identity.Regarding the situation of Romania, though, during the two decades of transition to a democrathic regime, the responsibility of the Romanian citizen has come to be pursued with minority integration (wishing to ensure the identity security for them), adopting 200 dectrets by setting up institutions to deal in the areas of minority inclusion and allocating funding to support an organization that considers the role of the intrusional civil society to be more effective is still deficient in this area.The purpuse of this article is to explore the concepts of mionority, ethnicity, social integration, public minority integration policies, citizenship, integration and identity security, starting from the idea that identity should be understood both as a social process and as a power instrument.It will also review the impact of minority integration policies focusing on the Roma minority on identity security and outline the possible threats / opportunities for understanding and implementing the concept of identity security in public policies for minorities / Roma.

From the margin to the centre? A relational analysis of discursive contention in the minority integration debate in the Low Countries

Minority integration is a highly contested topic in public debates, and assimilationist actors appear to have gained discursive ground. However, it remains difficult to accurately depict how power relations in debates change and evolve. In this study, the public debates on minority integration in Flanders and the Netherlands between 2006 and 2012 are studied to ascertain changing power relations. We use a relational method to identify clusters formed through discursive contention and study polarization in the debates as well as several aspects of discursive power between and within clusters. In the Netherlands, a pattern identified in earlier research is reproduced, whereby a unified but small cluster of assimilationists with strong discursive leaders is able to dominate the debate on integration. In Flanders, group consolidation is too low, so the clusters cannot be viewed as cohesive groups. Another difference to the Dutch debate is that the volume of opinion articles is much lower and the actors in the Flemish debate are more often foreign opinion leaders. We conclude that the assimilationists have increased their discursive power in the Dutch debate, while the anti-assimilationists have lost power. The stark contrast between the Dutch and Flemish discursive landscape highlights the need for more research on the causal mechanism behind discursive struggles.

Integration of New and Old Minorities: Beyond a Janus-Faced Perspective

Diversity and integration issues are undoubtedly amongst the most salient ones on today’s political agenda. Most European states have been searching for models and policies to accommodate diversity claims and integrate not only old minority groups, but increasingly also new minority groups stemming from international mobility flows. This article addresses these issues by bridging two fields of research: minorities and migration. Studying the interaction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ minority groups is not an obvious task since, so far, these topics have been studied in isolation from one other. The article investigates the alleged dichotomy between old and new minorities, their similarities and differences, especially in terms of rights and claims, and the potential extension of the scope of application of international instruments for the protection of minorities, such as the Framework Convention for the Protection on National Minorities (FCNM), as to include new minorities too. In the final part, the article analyses the states’ responses to diversity with the aim to develop a common model for minority integration encompassing old and new minority groups.