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Political theory has been engaged in an ongoing debate about the role of recognition in liberal democracies. Recognition demands, among other things, respect for all social groups and their fundamental way of life. A failure to fulfill this demand can lead to discrimination and prejudice, and ultimately impedes effective democratic citizenship. This chapter argues that these claims are ultimately psychological in nature, and that psychological science provides evidence to support a politics of recognition. Specifically, psychological research suggests that misrecognition impedes democratic citizenship, and that meeting the demands of recognition can actually enhance the dynamics of democratic deliberation.

This chapter examines Aliite engagement with recognized sources of state authority and the ways Aliites court favor by claiming—and offering evidence of—past recognition by the state, from the citation of the original MSTA's state registration paperwork as proof of endorsement of Ali's mission to the citation, by Washitaw, of an imagined Supreme Court precedent they call “the 1848 Supreme Court Case” “United States v. Henry Turner’s Heirs.” After consideration of Aliite emphasis on the Supreme Court’s actual decision in Dred Scott v. Stanford, which is widely read by Aliites as authorizing the ongoing legal exclusion of “negroes” from citizenship in the United States, the chapter concludes with a caution about describing Aliite use of legal texts as “magical” and consideration of how Aliite examples can contribute to contemporary academic criticism of the politics of recognition.

This chapter focuses on the politics of recognition that are so central to contemporary democratic thought. It analyses recognition in terms of its other modalities, espionage and camouflage. It describes the way in which liberal-democratic calls for recognition function to bracket alterity and explains what occurs within the so-called brackets of recognition. The analysis reveals that discourses of belonging in late liberalism produce injustice rather than justice, insofar as belonging is explicitly limited to those who are sufficiently ‘like us’.

In this chapter, I examine if African American women benefitted from their support of the Obama presidency by using traditional markers of group interests, especially as a key constituency group supporting candidate Obama. I explore the Obama presidency, asking beyond the politics of recognition, Did American women receive the attention from the president that their numbers as voters and early supporters of his presidential run might suggest? If not, why? I explore these questions from four different perspectives. First, I center African American women as the key constituency group that accounted for Obama’s electoral successes and situate what traditionally emerges when groups bear that designation in electoral politics. Second, I examine a range of policy interventions the administration pursued that might have addressed the specific needs of African American women as a distinct group. Third, I explore African American women’s descriptive representation under the Obama administration and whether the Obama administration created unique opportunities for African American women as decision makers in the administration. Finally, I argue that Obama’s failures to adequately address African American women as a critical constituency is explained by critical disconnections in his relationship to Black women.

This chapter reveals and interrogates the dominant tendency in contemporary democratic theory to presume that some kind of commonality is required in democracy. This claim may at first seem counterintuitive: many theorists are quite critical of specific sources of commonality – such as ethnicity and culture. Yet, instead of rejecting commonality as such, they modify the kind of commonality that they believe is essential to democracy. What could explain the persistent allure of commonality to democratic theorists? The chapter argues that theorists continue to insist that democracies need commonality because they believe it is necessary in order to meet three democratic requirements: for a shared identity, affective ties between citizens, and collective agency. Commonality can only work to secure identity, affect, and agency if a number of other corollary assumptions hold true: assumptions about meaning, language, psychology, and politics. In order to shift away from commonality and towards political freedom, these corollaries must be critically examined as well.

This chapter examines Indigenous media in New Zealand within the context of some of the key debates currently occurring in Indigenous studies. It first considers the politics of appropriation, which refers to the problematics surrounding the uptake of media technologies by Indigenous peoples, specifically in relation to decolonization. It then discusses Kimber Charles Pearce’s analysis of “generic appropriation” in relation to how late 1960s radical feminists mimicked the manifestos of patriarchal groups. It also explores the politics of recognition in relation to the question of culture, along with pan-Indigenous media and the concept of Fourth World Media as an analytical device to situate global Indigenous media circuits. Finally, it analyzes how Indigenous media fundamentally alter national culture and reframes the essentialist/nonessentialist debate that plagues postcolonial theory through Indigenous sovereignty.

This chapter builds on Charles Taylor’s concept of the ‘politics of recognition’ to argue that new Sámi cinema practices in Finland eschew the image of the ‘mystical’ or exoticized Sámi and instead addresses contemporary issues of land and language rights and the self-governance of indigenous people. Kääpä shows how many recent films function as a ‘sub-regional forms of political self-definition’. Kääpä addresses the films of Paul Anders Simma, whose work ranges from activist works such as Give Us Our Skeletons! to fictional feature film productions such as Minister of State. Kääpä also considers the work of other recent Sámi filmmakers such as documentarian Katja Gauriloff. This chapter also addresses Finnish film politics and the current policies of the Finnish Film Foundation.

The split between some traditional owners and the Northern Australia’s ostensible ‘leaders’ was one of the most remarkable features of the Actcontroversy. Following Beckett’s observation that Indigenous groups ‘cannot be understood apart from their relationship with the state,’ this chapter analyzes the two dominant forms of contemporary political authority – the traditional owner and the executive advocate – as articulated in relation to changing government policies and one another. Given the fundamental inconsistency between the executive advocate and the traditional owner as forms of Indigenous political authority, how have these positions been articulated together in Northern Australia after the foundational 1992 Mabo decision? This chapter argues that as Indigenous people have been ‘recognized’ by the state these two figures have negotiated specific balances between engaging with state power and symbolic or rhetorical performances of differences; balances best understood as a political dynamic between legibility and illegibility.

The conclusion revisits the major theoretical themes of the book to suggest how the issue of women’s representation in the Indian Parliament is framed within the context of neoliberal development and the politics of recognition. It looks forward to outline some trends that are becoming visible in Indian parliamentary politics and suggest ways in which these might affect women’s participation. It argues that we need to see parliamentary politics for what it is—a limited but critically important gendered performance of politics, where women members play their roles through participating in its deliberations, law-making, ceremonies, and rituals. In so doing they reproduce dominant forms of gendered power relations while at the same time challenge them.

This chapter provides a full overview of the theoretical principles of the Poverty-Aware Paradigm (PAP). Following a brief introduction of the concept of the paradigm and a discussion of its contribution, the chapter goes on to describe the PAP and its ontological, epistemological, and axiological premises and their influence on social work practice. The chapter compares the PAP and the two historically dominant social work paradigms—the conservative and the structural. The conservative paradigm, with its distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, notions of the “culture of poverty”, “underclass”, and the currently popular neuroscience of poverty, is strongly challenged in this chapter. The structural paradigm is presented as offering a fruitful analysis of poverty. However, it has not inspired direct practice on a large scale. The chapter builds upon the structural paradigm and combines it with concepts from critical theories and current psychoanalytic concepts to present the PAP as a useful paradigm for analysis and practice.

The three Dalit women’s livelihood entitlement struggles provide insights for operationalizing development strategies to secure rights-based entitlements and freedoms. A central point is the reorientation of human rights from law to action-oriented practice. Through exercising their agency to overcome unequal power relations and secure entitlements and freedoms, actors generate discourses constitutive of human rights. This process involves interconnected struggles for redistribution and for recognition. Therein, agency is better understood in relation to structural power, which shapes Dalit women’s sense of entitlement, their organizational capacities, and strategies. At the same time, their intersectional identities sometimes produce conflicting interests, which condition their agency. Power relations also shape the women’s pathways to entitlement in terms of institutional access, positioning of their demands, and political strategies. In this process, external development interveners can support the institutional legitimation of Dalit women’s entitlements by playing a crucial bridging role between state actors and the women.

Northeast India’s political troubles can be traced to its economic underdevelopment. There is no guarantee that the Northeast’s present predicament can be solved by a successful counter-insurgency and a lot of money. This chapter argues that globalization presents opportunities for Northeast India to get out of the ‘territorial trap’ and relate to its transnational neighbours on the east, both economically and culturally. It discusses transnationalism and how transnational region building can bring important dividends to Northeast India in terms of economics and politics. It also describes the politics of recognition as a recurrent theme in the politics of ethnic militancy in the region, how China and security anxieties are holding back the region’s pursuit of a Look East policy, and the future direction of this policy.

This chapter offers a historical account of how polities have operated in a linguistically diverse society. Although societal multilingualism has been commonplace throughout human civilization, official multilingualism is clearly a modern phenomenon. However, whether the use of a language is mandated by policy or law, or is a matter of convention, polities have always had to deal with linguistic diversity. Therefore, instead of comparing the language(s) that receive official recognition, the chapter uses law as a site to examine the internal language practice of a polity in different historical periods. The account shows that official multilingualism today, encapsulating contemporary ethics and politics, has characteristics that distinguish it from treaded paths of linguistic management.

While not itself the subject of a controversy, Nadeem Aslam’s 2004 novel Maps for Lost Lovers, the focus of Chapter 5, thematises and explores the politics of minority offence and the binary of individual freedom versus cultural censure and censorship that has framed responses to controversies surrounding artistic representations of Islam and Muslims. In tracing the presence and complication of this binary in Maps for Lost Lovers, the chapter explores how far the novel gets beyond the gendered culturalist discourses that have underpinned pronouncements on the ‘failure’ of multiculturalism from both left and right. It argues that despite contextualising the oppressors’ behaviour within their own disempowerment in Britain, the novel appears to present just two alternative positions: individual withdrawal and dissent from community, culture and faith, or complicity with the community’s oppressive practices whose victims are primarily its women and children. The potential for a positive communitarianism formed around religious culture is constantly deflected or stymied, often through a focus on the abuse of women, so that a thoroughgoing multiculturalism predicated on a ‘politics of recognition’ and a commitment to gender equality are held in tension.

This chapter introduces the Declaration and its significance in terms of indigenous peoples’ full participation in its design and the resulting rights, especially the inclusion of a right to self-determination. In particular, it was the participation of indigenous advocates of Anglo-settler states of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States (CANZUS) and their advancement of a decolonization model that led to the inclusion of a right to self-determination in the Declaration. The chapter indicates the tensions between human rights and decolonization models advanced by indigenous advocates in negotiations and how this struggle has not been fully appreciated by scholars. The chapter also introduces the notion of reconciling the two approaches through a new interpretative approach: the mixed model.

Chapter 5 analyses manifestations of history, that is, concrete historical legacies of power and knowledge in present-day Andaman society. The first section discusses the impact of hegemonic nationalist rhetoric—highlighting the role of bourgeois nationalist freedom fighters incarcerated in the Andamans—on the local sense and perception of history. The first section aims to show how politics of recognition influence the ways in which community actors constitute their present by narrating the subaltern past. The second section focuses on the manifestation of criminality as a crucial relation between the state and the population in the here and now. It shows that Andaman actors construct contemporary identities by referring to the criminal past of convicts deported to the islands; moreover, the institutionalization of criminality within the economic system of the Andaman divides the population into elite actors profiting from the black-market sector and subalterns whose participation in the same system brings them into continuous conflict with the law.

This chapter calls attention to the problematic reductivism and eliminativism endemic among egalitarians of both “vertical” and “horizontal” leanings. Citing many examples, the chapter shows that there is widespread and persistent disagreement about which egalitarian idea—vertical or horizontal, roughly speaking—is the fundamental or overarching one and which idea is merely derivative or epiphenomenal. The argument in this chapter is that we should reject the central premises upon which such disagreement turns: that equality is a single idea, that it has a fundamental locus, and that there is a singular or primary route to the achievement of a genuinely egalitarian society.

The epilogue argues that the truce indigenous peoples and the state established in the last three decades of the twentieth century came undone in the twenty-first century as a new set of circumstances fueled a backlash against “special” rights for indigenous peoples. Briefly discussing some of these developments, it nonetheless urges scholars and others to take account of the far-reaching effects of indigenous activism on the settler state in the late twentieth century.