Race Equality in Scotland: Challenges and Opportunities
This IPPI Policy Brief sets out why race equality matters in Scotland and highlights examples from which the rest of the UK could learn in the aspiration for race equality and a successful approach to citizenship. It identifies two ways through which Scotland can better improve public policy on race equality. The first is a more systematic approach to data collection on ethnic monitoring across the public sector. (Ethnic monitoring is currently common practice in some areas but entirely absent in others; a best practice approach would level this upwards). Secondly, how existing statutory commitments could be more consistently put into practice, especially in terms of the Equality Duty, by making fully operational use of existing instruments, rather than calling for new legislation.
Who do you say you are?
In discussion of `identity politics' in modern Britain, issues of ethnicity and national identity rarely seem to connect in the literature. Whereas the vocabulary and rhetoric of ethnicity belong to a framework of `multiculturalism', those of nationalism and national identity relate to constitutional politics and the devolution of power. The article argues that this separation is a result of differential patterns of migration in the postwar years into the constituent nations of the UK, as well as different debates about the meanings of state (British) identity and national (English, Scottish, Welsh) identities. By focusing on how people choose to mobilize and negotiate the cultural markers and rules relating to identities which are available to them, the article argues that the relationship between ethnicity and national identity in these islands is not straightforward. Nevertheless, there is opportunity to reconnect these dimensions by exploring how they play in different territories of Britain. Thus, there is no single `national' debate about issues of nationality and ethnicity, and while being `English' (as opposed to British) as an identity seems to be less available to ethnic minorities, in Scotland and Wales nationality and ethnicity interact differently with one other to the extent that some forms of hybrid identity are possible.
The Internet and the Changing Beijing-Taipei Relations: Toward Unification or Fragmentation?
Information and its technologies facilitate the exercise of what has been called “soft power,” a concept that differentiates information from the conventional dimensions of “hard power,” which is mainly associated with military force and economic influence. Soft power, according to Nye, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense of the United States, means that “A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness. In this sense it is just as important to set the agenda in world politics and attract others as it is to force them to change through the threat or use of military or economic weapons.”1