Ethnic Minority Rights in Georgia 2013–15: A Period of Stagnation

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 251-280
Author(s):  
Giorgi Bobghiashvili ◽  
Graham Donnelly

Georgia is the most ethnically diverse state in the South Caucasus. Since independence, it has been blighted by violent secessionism and Russian invasion, the roots of which are invariably described as having stemmed from this diversity; the lack of integration of its ethnic minorities; and the recurrent failures of Georgian governments to adequately balance the nationalizing tendencies of constructing a newly independent state on the one hand and the needs and desires of its multinational citizenry on the other. In the first part of this report, we look at the roots of the present minority situation in Georgia, noting the main minority groups and the issues concerning them, before moving on in the second part to consider the issue of minority governance. We also provide a review of the most significant developments in 2014–2015 before commenting on the prospects for the coming year.

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. 457-470 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad H. Zafarmand ◽  
Parvin Tajik ◽  
René Spijker ◽  
Charles Agyemang

Background: The body of evidence on gene-environment interaction (GEI) related to type 2 diabetes (T2D) has grown in the recent years. However, most studies on GEI have sought to explain variation within individuals of European ancestry and results among ethnic minority groups are inconclusive. Objective: To investigate any interaction between a gene and an environmental factor in relation to T2D among ethnic minority groups living in Europe and North America. Methods: We systematically searched Medline and EMBASE databases for the published literature in English up to 25th March 2019. The screening, data extraction and quality assessment were performed by reviewers independently. Results: 1068 studies identified through our search, of which nine cohorts of six studies evaluating several different GEIs were included. The mean follow-up time in the included studies ranged from 5 to 25.7 years. Most studies were relatively small scale and few provided replication data. All studies included in the review included ethnic minorities from North America (Native-Americans, African- Americans, and Aboriginal Canadian), none of the studies in Europe assessed GEI in relation to T2D incident in ethnic minorities. The only significant GEI among ethnic minorities was HNF1A rs137853240 and smoking on T2D incident among Native-Canadians (Pinteraction = 0.006). Conclusion: There is a need for more studies on GEI among ethnicities, broadening the spectrum of ethnic minority groups being investigated, performing more discovery using genome-wide approaches, larger sample sizes for these studies by collaborating efforts such as the InterConnect approach, and developing a more standardized method of reporting GEI studies are discussed.


Prospects ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 249-266
Author(s):  
Lewis P. Simpson

No scene in Faulkner is more compelling than the one that transpires on a “long still hot weary dead September afternoon” in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, toward the end of the first decade of this century. Quentin Compson sits with Miss Rosa Coldfield in a “dim airless room” still called “the office because her father called it that,” and listens to Miss Rosa tell her version of the story of the “demon” Sutpen and his plantation, Sutpen's Hundred. As she talks “in that grim haggard amazed voice”—“vanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream, a trickle running from patch to patch of dried sand”—the 22-year-old Mississippi youth discovers he is hearing not Miss Rosa but the voices of “two separate Quentins.” One voice is that of the “Quentin preparing for Harvard in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous baffled ghosts.” The other voice is that of the Quentin “who was still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost, but nevertheless having to be one for all that, since he was born and bred in the deep South the same as she [Miss Rosa] was.” The two Quentins talk “to one another in the long silence of notpeople, in notlanguage: It seems that this demon—his name was Sutpen—(Colonel Sutpen)—Colonel Sutpen. Who came out of nowhere and without warning upon the land with a band of strange niggers and built a plantation”.


1998 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 943-950 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Warbrick ◽  
Dominic McGoldrick ◽  
Geoff Gilbert

The Northern Ireland Peace Agreement1 was concluded following multi-party negotiations on Good Friday, 10 April 1998. It received 71 per cent approval in Northern Ireland and 95 per cent approval in the Republic of Ireland in the subsequent referenda held on Friday 22 May, the day after Ascension. To some, it must have seemed that the timing was singularly appropriate following 30 years of “The Troubles”, which were perceived as being between a “Catholic minority” and a “Protestant majority”. While there are some minority groups identified by their religious affiliation that do require rights relating only to their religion, such as the right to worship in community,2 to practise and profess their religion,3 to legal recognition as a church,4 to hold property5 and to determine its own membership,6 some minority groups identified by their religious affiliation are properly national or ethnic minorities–religion is merely one factor which distinguishes them from the other groups, including the majority, in the population. One example of the latter situation is to be seen in (Northern) Ireland where there is, in fact, untypically, a double minority: the Catholic-nationalist community is a minority in Northern Ireland, but the Protestant-unionist population is a minority in the island of Ireland as a whole.7 The territory of Northern Ireland is geographically separate from the rest of the United Kingdom. The recent peace agreement addresses a whole range of issues for Northern Ireland, but included are, on the one hand, rights for the populations based on their religious affiliation, their culture and their language and, on the other, rights with respect to their political participation up to the point of external self-determination. It is a holistic approach. Like any good minority rights agreement,8 it deals with both standards and their implementation and, like any good minority rights agreement, it is not a minority rights agreement but, rather, a peace settlement.


1857 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 294-295
Author(s):  
Robert Harkness

The author remarks that the existence of Annelida during the Palæozoic formations is manifested in two conditions. In the one, we have the shelly envelope which invests the order Tubicola, in the form of Seapolites; and in the other, the tracks of the orders Abranchia and Dorsi-branchiata are found impressed on deposits which were, at one time, in a sufficiently soft state to receive the impressions of the wanderings of these animals.Among the strata which have hitherto afforded annelid tracks, those which, in the county of Clare, represent a portion of the equivalents of the Millstone Grit, contain such tracks, in their most perfect state of preservation in great abundance; and these strata also furnish evidence concerning the circumstances which prevailed during their deposition.


Author(s):  
Patrick Donabédian

Two important spheres of the history of medieval architecture in the Anatolia-Armenia-South-Caucasian region remain insufficiently explored due to some kind of taboos that still hinder their study. This concerns the relationship between Armenia and Georgia on the one hand, and between Armenia and the Islamic art developed in today’s Turkey and South Caucasus during the Seljuk and Mongol periods, on the other. Although its impartial study is essential for a good understanding of art history, the question of the relationship between these entities remains hampered by several prejudices, due mainly to nationalism and a lack of communication, particularly within the countries concerned. The Author believes in the path that some bold authors are beginning to clear, that of an unbiased approach, free of any national passion. He calls for a systematic and dispassionate development of comparative studies in all appropriate aspects of these three arts. The time has come to break taboos.


Author(s):  
Guilherme Cavalcante Silva

Over the last few years, data studies within Social Sciences watched a growth in the number of researches highlighting the need for more proficuous participation from the Global South in the debates of the field. The lack of Southern voices in the academic scholarship on the one hand, and of recognition of the importance and autonomy of its local data practices, such as those from indigenous data movements, on the other, had been decisive in establishing a Big Data in the South agenda. This paper displays an analytical mapping of 131 articles published from 2014-2016 in Big Data & Society (BD&S), a leading journal acknowledged for its pioneering promotion of Big Data research among social scientists. Its goal is to provide an overview of the way data practices are approached in BD&S papers concerning its geopolitical instance. It argues that there is a tendency to generalise data practices overlooking the specific consequences of Big Data in Southern contexts because of an almost exclusive presence of Euroamerican perspectives in the journal. This paper argues that this happens as a result of an epistemological asymmetry that pervades Social Sciences.


2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (5) ◽  
pp. 648-668 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geert E. Smid ◽  
Annelieke N. Drogendijk ◽  
Jeroen Knipscheer ◽  
Paul A. Boelen ◽  
Rolf J. Kleber

Exposure to mass trauma may bring about increased sensitivity to new or ongoing stressors. It is unclear whether sensitivity to stress associated with ethnic minority/immigrant status may be affected by severe exposure to mass trauma. We examined whether the loss of loved ones or home due to a disaster is associated with more persistent disaster-related distress in ethnic minorities compared with Dutch natives in the Netherlands. In residents affected by a fireworks disaster ( N = 1029), we assessed disaster-related distress after 3 weeks, 18 months, and 4 years. The effects of loss of loved ones or home and ethnic minority/immigrant status on distress were analyzed using latent growth modeling. After controlling for age, gender, education, employment, and post-disaster stressful life events, the loss of loved ones was associated with more persistent disaster-related distress in ethnic minorities compared with natives at 18 months, and the loss of home was associated with more persistent disaster-related distress in ethnic minorities compared with natives between 18 months and 4 years. Our results suggest that the loss of loved ones may increase sensitivity to stress associated with ethnic minority/immigrant status during the early phase of adaptation to a disaster. Loss of home may lead to further resource loss and thereby increase sensitivity to stress associated with ethnic minority/immigrant status in the long term. Efforts to prevent stress-related psychopathology following mass trauma should specifically target ethnic minority groups, notably refugees and asylum seekers, who often experienced multiple losses of loved ones as well as their homes.


Author(s):  
Anthony Heath ◽  
Konstanze Jacob ◽  
Lindsay Richards

This chapter uses CIL4EU data to investigate strength of identification with the nation and with the ethnic group. It explores how these vary across ethnic and religious groups, generations, and destination countries and how far these differences can be explained by processes of social integration on the one hand or perceptions of being excluded on the other hand. The key findings are that young people with a migration background are less likely than those without a migration background to identify strongly with their country of residence. This holds true more or less irrespective of their ethnic group or religion. Differences between European and non-European minority groups, and between Muslims and members of other non-Christian religions were generally modest in size, rarely reached statistical significance and were dwarfed by the overall gap between minorities and the majority.


Author(s):  
Samira K. Mehta

Interfaith families that are also interracial are less able to seamlessly fit into “mainstream” American Jewish life, which is dominated by Ashkenazi culture and racially coded as white. On the one hand, this can make interactions in Jewish communities more challenging. On the other, these families are often given more freedom and flexibility for including traditions from the Christian side of the family than their white interfaith counterparts.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca E. Chatham ◽  
Sandra J. Mixer

Introduction: Childhood obesity remains an unrelenting public health problem disproportionately affecting ethnic minorities. Although research has examined ethnicity as a factor of childhood obesity, few studies have examined cultural influences. The purpose of this systematic review was to examine the qualitative evidence of cultural influences on childhood obesity in ethnic minority groups. Methodology: Selective sampling of studies since 2008 yielded 251 articles. Twelve articles that addressed cultural influences on childhood obesity were identified for review. The Culture Care Theory Sunrise Enabler factors were used as an a priori framework for theme coding. Results: Nine themes emerged: child feeding, family, gender roles, food, healthy child appearance, physical activity, sedentary activity, food cost, and obesogenic environment. Discussion: Cultural care practices such as traditional foods and family meals are protective factors in childhood obesity and should be encouraged by nurses caring for and working with ethnic minority populations.


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