| Samuel Huntington, almost half century ago, explained how the state capacity is fundamental to guarantee order in societies in transition. Francis Fukuyama, recently, recuperated this concept arguing that a strong effective state is fundamental for stability of democratizing countries. But strong institutions are not enough to make democracy and political order compatible: institutions need to be also inclusive, to foster participation and respect the freedom of all parts of society, including ethnic minorities.;The main question this study wants to answer is: what factors explain the differences in how democratizing Muslim countries treat their ethnic minorities? In other terms: why do democratizing Muslim majority states differ in their approaches to the incorporation of ethnic minorities? Studies of social conflict in Muslim countries typically emphasize sectarian divisions but ignore ethnic differences. Likewise, theories of democratization in Muslim countries examine the rights of religious minorities but overlook the inclusion of ethnic minorities. The research is a comparative analysis of two similar cases with different outcomes: Turkey and Indonesia. The importance of the study is based also on the fact that the "Arab exceptionalism", and the failure or success of Muslim democracies in general, depended often in the past on a domestic variable: the exclusion or inclusion of ethnic, religious or political minorities by the new regimes, as the failing of the Arab Spring showed also recently (see Egypt/Iraq versus Tunisia/Morocco). The focus of the study is to analyze specifically two cases and outcomes: the securitization (Buzan et. al., 1998) of Kurds in Turkey and the "autonomization" (Lijphart, 2004) of Acehnese in Indonesia, to understand what independent variables affect these different results. The cases chosen are the two most scholarly recognized democracies in the Muslim world. The hypotheses to test are four: the elites' power interest, following the Rational Choice theory, the international factors, following the structural theories, the institutions and history of the state, following the Historical-Institutionalist theory, and finally the ontological security of the country, following the Critical theories. Also, by examining states with ethnic diversity but very little religious diversity, the research controls for the effect of religious conflict on minority inclusion, and so allow future generalization and comparison to minority inclusion in democratizing states that are not Muslim. The methodological approach is a qualitative analysis of case studies. The research design is based on the 'most similar systems' (Miller criteria) and on 'process tracing', to clarify the causal chain between the independent variables and the outcome. |
