The Political Strategies of Ethnic and Indigenous Elites

Abstract

The worldwide ethnic and indigenous movements of the last three decades of the twentieth century were intended to achieve social justice, economic redistribution and greater political participation for peoples marginalised initially during colonisation, and subsequently by their concentration in the industrial working class. These goals have remained elusive for the vast majority. But why, despite the extravagant rhetoric, has this happened? In this chapter, I refer to examples from four countries: New Zealand (Rata, 1996, 2000), Fiji, Malaysia (Larson and Zalanga, 2003) and the United States (Schroder, 2003), to show the ways in which the politics of ethnicity¹ changed from these initial democratising intentions to become the means for the emergence of ethnicised political, economic and intellectual elites.