Representation of minority nations in multinational federal states

Extrait de la présentation du numéro / Excerpt from the editorial :

« Studies on nationalism are legion (see, for example, Hobsbawm, 1990; Greenfeld, 1992; Brubaker, 1996; Guibernau, 2013; Smith, 2013; Gagnon, 2014; Keating, 2001). Nonetheless, the issue of competing representations of national minorities by majority groups in the public space has received less attention in political science (Rocher and Carpentier, 2022; Rocher, 2023; Budd, 2024). The question of representation that is addressed in this thematic issue focuses on a few cases of multinational states within which national minorities have institutional levers granting them a certain political autonomy, as is the case in Canada for the Quebec population and indigenous peoples, in the United Kingdom for the Scots, the Northern Irish, and the Welsh, and in Pakistan, particularly with regard to the Baluchis. The question is how and in what terms the main spokespersons of the national majority groups construct and convey a particular representation of the national minority(ies) cohabiting on the same federal territory. These representations can be deployed in several discursive spaces: mainstream newspapers, television, electronic and social media, citizen groups, political parties, etc. They may be constructed by political elites, political commentators, and analysts but also expressed more widely in the media.

The central question is whether the majority group’s portrayal of the national minority group is based on a strong critique of the latter’s identity representation and political claims. Does this strong critique contribute to reinforcing the social norms and identity representations of the majority group, which constructs itself, among other things, in opposition to its national minority? Is the use of negative discursive representations of the national minority part of differentiation and an inferiorization process, or does it instead contribute to defining the identity of the majority political community? How are these discursive representations transposed into the political relations between the two political communities? These are the main questions addressed by the authors of the special Research Topic.

Rocher, F. et Gagnon, A.G. (2025). Representation of minority nations in multinational federal states. Frontiers Political Science, 7.

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