The Politics of Majority Nationalism ─ Framing Peace, Stalemates, and Crises

What drives the politics of majority nationalism during crises and peace mediations? This innovative work on the comparative politics of majority nationalism answers this important questionfor both policy-makers and scholarsby investigating how peacemakers succeed or fail in transforming the language of ethnic nationalism and war in their communities.The Politics of Majority Nationalism focuses on the Middle East and the Balkans to explore crises, stalemates, and peace mediations involving Turkey and Greece and including European Union, Kurdish, Cypriot, Syrian and (Slav) Macedonian issues. In addition to employing a novel mixed-method research design to study frames, crisis behavior, and mediation analysis, the book also extends its arguments to the post-communist transitions in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine. Drawing on new datasets, elite interviews, and parliamentary debates, the book analyzes and explains the under-emphasized linkages between institutions, symbols, and framing processes that enable or restrict the choice of peace.

Exploring systematically, and for the first time, the politics of majority nationalism in its various manifestations, Neophytos Loizides shows how ethnopolitical frames influence crisis behavior, protracted stalemates, and ultimately thechoice of peace. He provides a comprehensive account of the failures and successes of accommodation mechanisms in the Middle East and the Balkans and identifies the ideational pre-conditions of peace and conflict while highlighting for policy-makers and mediators a set of tools to use when communicating peace messages to local and national constituencies.

Neophytos G. Loizides is a Reader in International Conflict Analysis at the University of Kent.