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Rune Bennike - Research Project  

Managing Plural Societies - A Comparative Analysis of Three South Asian States

Societies characterized by a plurality of cultural identifications are often regarded as inhibitive to stable, national level democracy (see e.g. Lijphart 1977; Fish and Brooks 2004) and a "dichotomous contrast between the plural societies of the Third World and the supposedly homogenous societies of the First World" (Lijphart 1977: 142) is often superimposed on this proposition.

This PhD project seeks to extend our understanding of the relationship between pluralism and democracy beyond this simple proposition by contextualizing the relationship in three South Asian states - India, Pakistan and Nepal. To do so, the project proposes a shift from an objectivist focus on the ‘fact of pluralism' to a genealogical focus on the ‘management of pluralism'. The project will approach this management as central feature of the historical interaction of extensions of state power and democratization in the three countries. The analysis will attempt to answer the following three research questions:

• How has state power in the three countries historically handled pluralism and how has this affected plural identification?
• What effect do the interactions of state power and societal pluralism have on the democratic experiences of the three countries?
• How do these experiences shape their present engagements with democracy?

The project's theoretical approach to answer these questions rests on three main tenets: 1) That pluralism is a historical construction; 2) that this construction is significantly shaped by state power; and 3) that, at any given point in time, the historically contingent constellation of pluralism conditions the possibilities for and shapes of democracy. A substantiation of the approach is sought by combining the historical sociology of authors such as Charles Tilly (1990; 2007) and Michael Mann (1984; 1986; 1993) with a more radical understanding of power inspired by James Scott (1998) and Michel Foucault (2007). It furthermore seeks to connect the rich contextual descriptions of the historical sociological approach to the universal democratic questions posed by pluralist scholars such as William Connolly (1995; 2005; 2008).