• Council of Europe European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (1992) • Council of Europe Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (1995) While each of these documents differs in detail, they all share a commitment to the idea that diversity should be seen as a normal and natural feature of contemporary societies; that the distinctive identities of minorities and indigenous peoples must be recognised and accommodated; that minority and indigenous rights are a part of human rights; and that peaceful and democratic political mobilisation in pursuit of such claims is legitimate. And, precisely because these official statements can be seen as representing the will of the international community, they have quickly become the currency of claims-making by minority and indigenous political actors around the world. Even when these international norms are not legally enforceable in any domestic or international court of law, they still provide important political resources to legitimise minority claims-making. However, the existing literature on these international norms suffers from important limitations. It is written almost entirely by and for international lawyers, who tend to treat international law as an autonomous, self-enclosed system, and so provide little if any insight into why these international declarations have been adopted now, or how they are related to larger sociological trends or political ideologies, or what geopolitical agendas are served by them. They explain what international declarations mean by a right to enjoy one’s culture, for example, but provide no account of why (some) international organisations have decided that there is such a right, or of how domestic actors use (and abuse) this right in their I n t e r n a t i o n a l a p p r o a c h e s t o g o v e r n i n g e t h n i c d i v e r s i t y political mobilisations, or how this does or doesn’t contribute to improved governance. A second relevant body of work focuses on the role of international organisations in dealing with violent ethnic conflict around the world. This literature, dominated by political scientists, focuses on a set of high-profile cases of international interventions in situations of ethnic violence, and hence on how international organisations can maintain peace, rebuild trust, organise elections, decommission arms, reintegrate paramilitaries, and so on, so as to avoid further violence and help rebuild a ‘failed’ state. Much of this literature is caseoriented and focused on a short time frame (i.e. international involvement in the immediate period around the signing and implementing of peace agreements). It also tends to be very strategic in orientation, focusing not on how to build a societal consensus on certain norms (such as minority rights), but on how to defuse threats to peace, particularly from the hard-line ‘spoilers’ of any proposed resolution to the conflict. Indeed, where offers of amnesties or even jobs and positions of power are used as available levers, the strategic pursuit of conflict resolution may directly undermine efforts at promoting international norms of respect for diversity.1 Such high-profile crisis-management issues are obviously very important, but here again the literature is isolated from broader debates about the larger and longer-term dynamics and processes by which international actors shape everyday assumptions about the appropriate and normal governing of ethnic diversity. International organisations are not just involved in trying to strengthen ‘fragile’ or failed states; they are also involved in shaping our everyday understandings of what a ‘normal’ state looks like, and we need to better understand how approaches to failure or crisis are informed by perceptions of success. Commonwealth Governance Handbook 2014/15 111 There is a growing body of literature on the role of international organisations in dealing with violent ethnic conflict Sadik Gulec / Shutterstock.com
CEP template 2012
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