· July, 2010

Stories about Ethnicity & Race from July, 2010

Georgia: Frozen conflicts, frozen happiness

With a little over a week to go before the second anniversary of the short war fought between Russia and Georgia over the breakaway territory of South Ossetia, Evolutsia turns its attention to another one of the country's two frozen conflicts, Abkhazia.

Chile: Mapuche on Hunger Strike over Anti-terror Law

  30 July 2010

On July 12, 2010, fourteen Mapuche indigenous detainees began a hunger strike to denounce the Chilean State’s treatment of Mapuche communities in southern Chile. The strike is aimed mainly at ending the use of Chile’s Anti-terrorism Law against Mapuche prisoners, a Pinochet-era decree widely used during the seventeen years of the Pinochet dictatorship.

Georgia: Presidential faux pax

The Tbilisi Blues comments on the latest gaffe by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili when he called his prime minister a term considered politically incorrect in the West. The blog says that it is surprised at how many people have reacted to the remarks so strongly given that even losing a...

Armenia-Azerbaijan: Border

This is cinemelo comments on Border, a 2009 film from director Harutyun Khachatryan. Ostensibly a tale of life in rural Armenia, the blog says that the most telling images come from barbed wire fences which illustrate the filmmaker's connection with his country and his hatred of the war and closed...

Israel: Rape by Deceit or Racism?

  28 July 2010

The recent conviction of rape by deceit of an Arab posing as a Jew to seduce a Jewish woman to engage in sexual intercourse has sparked conversations across the Hebrew blogosphere about the dire inequality between Jews and Arabs living in Israel. Gilad Lotan translates some of the reactions from Hebrew.

Armenia: Eating a way to peace

Ianyan says that food might represent the path to peace for cultures that place such significance in it. Referring to an Armenian bakery in the U.S.-Armenian Diaspora as well as responses to a recent guest entry on Armenian-Azerbaijani relations in the context of the still unresolved conflict over Nagorno Karabakh,...

Bahamas: Race & History

  26 July 2010

“If…young Bahamians imagine that they can take their twenty-first century notions of black and white and translate them into what they may one day read about the history of this nation, they will never fully understand their country and its rich and difficult past”: Nicolette Bethel explains the significance of...

Philippines: Dayo and the Filipino Migration

  25 July 2010

The Marocharim Experiment designates the Filipino word “dayo” as descriptive of the Filipino experience of migration: “Diaspora assumes exile, deportation, the removal of identification. ‘Dayo,’ like ‘pakikipagsapalaran,’ represents the hope for return; of when, they can only tell.”

Armenia-Azerbaijan: Moving the conversation forward

Le Retour (in 3 Parts), a blog by a Canadian-Armenian resident in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, comments on the three recent guest entries posted on The Caucasian Knot, the blog of Global Voices’ Caucasus regional editor, and summarized here. The blog looks forward to more conversations between Armenians and Azerbaijanis.