Beyond the Multicultural Turn: Nation-Building and the Politics of Accommodation in Latin America
Summary: When, where, and to what extent did “multicultural” accommodation gain prominence in Latin America? This paper situates the region’s multicultural turn within a broader nation-building framework, distinguishing four variants—accommodation, assimilation, segregation, and eradication—and operationalizing them through country-level indices built from the novel global Nation-Building Policies (NBP) dataset for 1945 to 2020. The indices reveal a regional shift toward accommodation and a decline in assimilation, while segregation and eradication remain episodic and without a clear trend. Yet the rise of accommodation was uneven and concentrated rather than regional. On our indices, strong accommodation was largely confined to Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile and Guatemala, assimilation endured elsewhere, and many countries displayed mixed profiles combining recognition with homogenizing policies. Panel regressions indicate that the organizational capacity of ethnic movements is the central correlate of higher accommodation, while democracy, norm diffusion, and group size show no theoretically expected effects. The study thus embeds multiculturalism in comparative nation-building and clarifies when and where accommodation has been adopted.
Speaker: Matthias vom Hau is an associate professor at IBEI. He holds a PhD from Brown University and previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Manchester. He has been a visiting researcher at Princeton University and the Free University in Berlin. His research explores the intersections between identity politics, institutions, and development and has been published in leading journals such as Theory and Society, the American Journal of Sociology, Comparative Political Studies and Nations and Nationalism. He was the recipient of a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant and has been the Principal Investigator of the ETHNICGOODS project, which examines variations in nation-building from a global perspective, and their causes and consequences. For more information, see https://nation-building-research.github.io/
This event is sponsored by the Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS)
