Book notice: Ideologies across Nations: Duch êne

[Harold Schiffman]

Ideologies across Nations: Duchêne


 Ideologies across Nations: The Construction of Linguistic Minorities
at the United Nations
Series Title: Language, Power and Social Process [LPSP] 23
Published: 2008
Publisher: Mouton de Gruyter
                http://www.mouton-publishers.com

Book URL: http://www.degruyter.de/cont/fb/sp/detailEn.cfm?id=IS-9783110205831-1

Author: Alexandre Duchêne

Abstract:

The book is an invitation to a genealogical understanding of the
ideological and discursive processes that have emerged out of the
regulation of linguistic minorities issues within an international context
and, more precisely, at the United Nations. It highlights the
contradictions, limits and possibilities in the elaboration of
international measures within the universalist framework of human rights.
The book also emphasizes the paradoxes between national interests and the
elaboration of an international community - paradoxes in which minority
issues fundamentally question the homogeneity of the state. It shows that
despite the shift from national spaces to international ones, the fears of
nation-states for linguistic minorities remain. Finally, the book reveals
the importance of the reproduction of the interests of nation-states within
an international organization and the reproduction of power through the
legal management and regulation of minority rights in general, and those of
linguistic minorities in particular.

Through its presentation of the history of the United Nations, its vision
of the protection of linguistic minorities, the underlying ideologies that
have emerged, as well as the limits and possibilities of action, the book
contributes to a better understanding of the complexity of the protection
of linguistic minorities and the role of language ideologies within an
international context.

http://linguistlist.org/issues/19/19-3290.html

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