Original essays examine ethnic challenges to the modern nation-state and to moderninty itself, on the philosophical, political, and social levels. These issues are examined in case studies encompassing three types of states: industrialized, liberal states in Western Europe, settler states in America, Africa, and the Middle East, and post-colonial states in Asia and Afica.

This penetrating and timely study by two well-known scholars offers a theoretically informed account of the political sociology of Israel. The argument is set in its historical context as the authors trace Israel's development from the beginning of Zionist settlement in Palestine in the early 1880s to the Oslo accords in 1993, and finally to the recent Palestinian uprising. Against this background, they speculate on the idea of citizenship and what it means to be the citizen of a fragmented and ideologically divided society.

This study examines the conditions for the viability of ethnic democracy by comparing the relations between three ethno-democratic states and their minority groups over time.

During Israel's military operation in Gaza in the summer of 2014 the commanding officer of the Givati infantry brigade, Col. Ofer Vinter, called on his troops to fight "the terrorists who defame the God of Israel." This unprecedented call for religious war by a senior IDF commander caused an uproar, but it was just one symptom of a profound process of religionization, or de-secularization, that Israeli society, including the Israeli military, has been going through since the turn of the twenty-first century.

The process of consolidation of the new civil religion is known in...

For decades, Israeli Jews, Palestinians, and Israeli Arabs have been engaged in a debate about past history, present options, and future possibilities. Basic questions of citizenship, religion, political tactics, democracy, the rule of law, and a host of other matters are abandoned, revived and modified in an intellectual exchange between representatives of all three communities that is as old as the political conflicts that have marked the region. The high stakes, intense emotions--and meager results--of the "peace process" lend particular importance and salience to these discussions. The...