"Re-Thinking Ethinicity and Nation Building" Conference
 Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Fiji are three multiethnic societies in the Asia-Pacific region which provide a rich laboratory to re-think issues of ethnicity and nation-building. Each has gone through political uphealvals centred around the issue of ethnicity and upheavals centred around the issue of ethinicity and political representation during different periods of their history. Each has tried to rebuild the multi-ethnic society in their own ways and experimented with nation-building.
The conference - jointly by UNESCO and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation - was held to attempt a comparative study of what kinds of constitutional and political arrangements prevent undue violence on the legitimate interests, concerns and aspirations on important sectional cleavages within ethincally divided societies. It was to encourage comparative
research on local processes, structures and public policies which engender harmony in multiethnic societies in the Asia-Pacific region."
The conference was jointly organised by:
- Professor Abdul Rahman Embong, Malaysian Social Science Association (PSSM),
- Associate Progessor Norani Othman, Institute of Malaysian and International Studies (IKMAS/UKM),
- Professor Brij V. Lal, Centre for Asia Pacific, Australian National University
- Professor S.T. Hettige, Department of Sociology, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.
About 150 participants consisting of scholars, researchers, policy makers, NGO representatives and students discussed some of the latest scholarship on these questions, assess the state of the art, and chart a future programme of understanding and analysis.
The keynot address on "Re-thinking Ethinicity, Rights and National-builing in Ethnically Divided Societies" was delivered by Professor Donald L. Horowitz, Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University, USA.
Topics discussed were:
- current developments in the three countries that have direct impact upon issues of ethnicity and nation-building;
- the envisionings of the nation by various forces at the point of independence, the contestation and bargaining that took place;
- public policies in the three countries in the fields of economy, politics, education, language, culture, law, etc. that have shaped the nation and built the state after independence;
- current reimaginings of the nation that have been, or are being undertaken by various sectors in society-political leadership, political parties, public intellecturals, NGOs;
- the possibility of collaborative research and continuous debate to contribute more substantively to the rethinking of ethnicity and nation-building not only in the three countries but also in the region.
The conference papers will be revised and published in an edited volume, which will contribute to the corpus of knowledge and as policy inputs for managing ethnicity and nation building. In a wider sense, the three case studies will contribute to global understanding of these issues from the Asia-Pacific region.
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