Ayelet Harel, PhD

My Book, The Challenge of Sustaining Democracy in Deeply Divided Societies: Citizenship, Rights, and Ethnic Conflicts in India and Israel, addressed the challenge of sustaining a democratic regime in deeply divided societies with focus on the relations between the newly established states of India (since 1947) and Israel (since 1948) and their respective minorities, the Muslim citizens of India and the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, respectively, during the first 60 years of independence. The first edition was published in 2010 by Lexington Press and second edition with a new introduction in Asia by Cambridge University Press India, and Foundation Books. In this work, I emphasize the many important similarities, along with the obvious differences, between India and Israel, which warrant continued investigation. Both countries were created out of the painful processes of partition and nation-building that significantly affected the constitutional orders put in place and the inter-communal relations that have developed between the different ethno-national communities. This research was published in the above book and in several papers.

 

Although Israel and India chose seemingly different political routes, similar political mechanisms, in terms of state–minority relations and of minority languages and religious autonomy, among other fields, can be traced in both states. For instance, with a view to maintaining political stability, both Indian and Israeli governments have been willing to promote, to some extent, the status of women within the majority community, but not within the minority communities.

 

In keeping with the premise that in societies divided along ethnic and religious lines one should hope for conflict reduction rather than expect conflict resolution, I have evaluated the nature of democracy in Israel and India in comparison to two cases in which democracy failed, namely Cyprus and Sri-Lanka. The comparison of countries in which the democratic procedure has survived for more than 60 years with those in which democracy collapsed early on revealed that during the early years of nation-building, homeland ethno-national minorities tend to accept situations in which they are granted fewer rights than the majority, but the curtailing of group rights already granted to the minority—by either the majority community or the state—usually portends major strife. In the case of Cyprus, the cancelation of rights for representation and affirmative action for the Turkish Cypriot minority led to a civil war and partition of the state. Likewise, the cancellation of the official status of the Tamil language by the Sinhalese majority of Sri-Lanka cultivated a marked radicalization of the Tamil minority, whose separatist aspirations fueled a civil war and ultimately effected the collapse of democracy. This theory was further developed and implemented in paper # 12 that addressed the case of Macedonia.