Power-Sharing and Non-Dominant Minorities
Dr Timofey Agarin outlines his research into the effect of political systems in post-conflict societies on 'newcomers', including migrants, refugees and asylum seekers.
Much of my current research activity evolves out of the ESRC-funded project "Exclusion Amid Inclusion: Power-Sharing and Non-Dominant Minorities" which I have conducted Jun 2017-May 2021 with Dr Allison McCulloch (Brandon University). The project engages with issues pertaining to the status of non-dominant groups in divided societies managed by consociational political systems. That is, those systems that are established to stop intercommunal violence by bringing representatives of formerly conflicting parties to share responsibility to govern.
That project resulted in further practice-oriented projects, including the ”Civil Society in Post-Conflict Societies” project funded by the Global Challenge Research Fund (June 2019-May 2020) investigating the role of civil society in governance of post-conflict societies. Jointly with Dr Ola Zdeb (University of Krakow) and Drew Mikhael (Queens University Belfast) we sought to understand whether, as widely believed, international support for the NGOs "helps people help themselves", or not.
Together with Dr Drew Mikhael, I continue this line of research on the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust funded project “Transforming Divided Societies into Welcoming Communities” (February 2021 – January 2022). This activity builds on our comprehensive engagement with ‘newcomers’ in post-conflict power-sharing societies in our past research collaboration. ‘Newcomers’ are understood as those individuals who have not been born in the region, but reside here habitually. The group includes residents who do not hold citizenship of UK or ROI, labour migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. The JRTF grant allows us to collect targeted data in the Northern Ireland (NI) to inform and conduct important capacity building with migrants and policymakers, and produce actionable policy plan to enhance newcomer participation in social and economic life in Northern Ireland. Many newcomer NGOs operating in NI are comparably new; and in our past projects we have developed strong working relationships with many. Through these working relationships, this projects will collate evidence for presentation to local policy makers on the policy updates to improve participation of newcomers in NI.
In the spring 2021, jointly with Studyseed we are also offering GCSE Support & Employability Skills as part of our pilot project to help education attainment of Female Newcomer Students. Newcomers are often unable to enjoy rights and political participation in NI, limiting their contribution to society. Instead of finding means to be included on the basis of their own ethnic identities, newcomers are either expected to assimilate into the prevailing ethnic-paradigm or face exclusion and discrimination, Our Employability Support Scheme operates as a pilot project to test transformative experience we have seen as assisting newcomers to find their feet in other divided societies, such as Lebanon, South Tyrol, and Kosovo which we have researched in the past.
The project “Minority Participation and Representation in National Societies” was funded by the International Researcher Mobility Scheme of the Autonomous Province Bolzano – Südtirol for Research Collaboration with the Eurac Research, Bolzano. It examines the prevailing view in everyday life, politics and science that nation states offer the best forum for negotiating the contradictory claims of majority and minority groups. This view has so far only partially proven itself useful, as such policies tend to focus on groups significant at one point in time, and neglect both the less significant identity communities (e.g. micro minorities) and those that emerge as a result of societal change (e.g. EU citizens benefitting from freedom of movement, migrants as well as new minorities). My research project therefore asks: What are the effects of nation state consolidation on political participation and representation of all affected in the increasingly diverse societies?