Abstract
This year is a particularly auspicious one for Ethnicities, marking the 25th year since its initial publication in March 2001. The journal had its origins two years prior to that year in a one-off interdisciplinary conference at the University of Bristol, Nationalism, Identity and Minority Rights, which we convened with Judith Squires in September 1999. The conference had two principal aims. The first was to achieve a critical nexus between the disciplines of sociology and politics with respect to debates on ethnicity, nationalism, and identity politics. The second was to establish an overtly international perspective on these issues, drawing from as wide a range of social and political contexts as possible. In both respects, the conference was a major success. Indeed, the interdisciplinary aims of the conference were expanded considerably by additional participant contributions from anthropology, cultural studies, education, geography, and human rights law, among others. Key commentators at the conference – including Craig Calhoun, Will Kymlicka, Bhikhu Parekh, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Iris Marion Young, and Nira Yuval Davis – subsequently contributed to an important volume with Cambridge University Press, Ethnicity, nationalism and minority rights (May et al., 2004). At the conference, the University of Bristol’s Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship was also launched, with Tariq Modood as Director and Steve Fenton (whose obituary is in this volume) as Deputy Director. The centre remains to this day a key contributor to research on such issues and spawned the Bristol School of Multiculturalism (see Levey in Ethnicities, 19 (1); Modood, Uberoi, & Thompson in 22 (4)).
Following the conference, we began discussing with Sage the need for an associated journal that likewise drew together debates from sociology and politics on issues of ethnicity, nationalism, and minority rights. We argued at the time that sociology and politics too often talked past each other. In politics, for example, the analysis of ethnic and ethnonational movements had tended to concentrate on their sociopolitical and constitutional implications for nation-states, as well as liberal democratic ideals more broadly, with multiculturalism having become an important sub-field of political theory. However, the discussions were often left unconcretized and related to a narrow range of (often hypothetical) cases. They also tended to take constructions of ethnicity and nationalism as given. Meanwhile, debates in sociology focused on the authenticity/constructedness of ethnicity and nationalism. Along with related debates in anthropology and cultural studies, they highlighted the complex and at times contradictory interconnections among identity claims, their political mobilization, and ther social and political consequences but did not pursue these questions normatively (Fenton & May, 2002). As with the conference, the principal aims of Ethnicities were to draw these debates together, along with additional interdisciplinary perspectives, to explore the complex interconnections between culture and structure in the mobilization of ethnicity, other social movements, and the implications of such mobilization for modern nation-states. Obviously, our arguments resonated with Sage and so Ethnicities came to be, with the plurality of our title a specific indicator of the journal’s pluralistic aims, both disciplinarily and contextually.
Over the subsequent 25 years, the journal has thus provided a key interdisciplinary and international avenue for ongoing discussions on these issues. It has of course also since been shaped by pivotal world events, including 9/11 (Ethnicities was one of the first to provide an academic symposium in response to this in 2 (2)), Brexit, the rise of Islamphobia, the backlash against multiculturalism as public policy along with its unexpected resilience, and the related rise of right wing populism and anti-immigration policies across the world. We have also focused in the journal on issues that have not previously been given the attention they deserve in wider debates on ethnicity, nationalism, and minority rights. These include the interstices of religion, diversity, and multiculturalism and their relationship to national exclusion and inclusion, the significance of Indigenous claims to rights and representation, the role and function of language(s) and education as both oppressive and potentially liberatory spaces of engagement, and the increasingly pluralized forms of racism and antiracism evident in the world today.
In establishing the journal, we were intent on providing a range of avenues for academic engagement – including Invited Special Issues, Invited Symposia, Debates, and Review Essays – a commitment we have consistently maintained. In recent years, for example, we have had special issues on Linguistic Racism (23 (5)), The Anthropocene and Posthumanism (24 (4)), and the Politics of Death (25 (4)). Review symposia include discussion (20 (1)) of Whiteshift, populism, immigration and the future of white majorities (Kaufmann, 2019), (25 (5)) The New Governance of Religious Diversity (Modood and Sealy, 2024), and Bhikhu (Parekh) at 90 (25 (1)). Our most recent Debate focused on Loïc Wacquant’s conception of race as denegated ethnicity (25 (3)).
In the first issue of Ethnicities, we included key state of the art commentaries from leading scholars at that time. To mark this 25th anniversary, we asked a number of contemporary scholars (including some who contributed to the first issue) to do the same. Our aim, in so doing, is to highlight both what has changed, and what still remains the same, in the field a quarter of a century later.
To conclude on a personal note, it is perhaps unusual to have maintained the same co-editorship over 25 years. However, this is testimony to the close working relationship that we established at the University of Bristol and have since maintained for the last two decades across different hemispheres. We have over this period had the considerable fortune to have had exemplary editorial assistance from a range of ex-doctoral students at the University of Bristol and the University of Auckland, most recently with our current Editorial Manager, Lincoln Dam. And our experiences in working with Sage, as our publisher, have been, and continue to be, consistently productive. We have also been most fortunate with the army of reviewers who have been willing to serve the journal, not to mention the many authors who have chosen to publish with us. We are in their debt and thank them most sincerely, and we also look forward to continuing to work with all of them in the years to come.
