Politicised Ethnicity as ‘Experienced Reality’

Abstract

When introducing the concepts of nation state and ethnicity (see 6.2), I have focused on their historically interwoven connotations in order to conceive of politicised ethnicity. Politicised ethnicity describes the taken for granted notion implied in Andreas Wimmer’s quote that a nation state is to “be dyed by a nation’s color and designate ‘the people’ in whose name it rules over the territory” (Wimmer 1997: 634). Elsewhere Wimmer (2002: 212, emphasise added) is even more precise, arguing that against the background of the notion of modern nation state, “politics […] become[s] a matter of representing an ethnically defined people in whose interest the state is supposed to act”. In other words, ethnicity constitutes a taken for granted basis for political rights, claims, and representation, i.e., inclusion (see 1.1). Arguing in a similar way, Mahmood Mamdani (2002: 495) describes the idea, which for him is a colonial legacy, “that ancestry [i.e., according to the present definition: ethnicity, author’s note] should be the basis of rights” as common sense taken for granted in the Great Lakes Region in Africa, to which Rwanda and Burundi belong.