The book deals with a topic of great contemporary significance. Majority-minority relations in nation-states keep up popping up in different forms, and in recent decades the national integration has been confronted with the challenge of ethnicity. The threat to national unity on account of fissiparous forces rooted in race, religion and language and culture has been a world-wide phenomenon. The region of South Asia has witnessed the division of the sub-continent into three states, and these and other states have been further faced with ethnic strife. The articles in this collection focus on the tensions between ethnicity and national integration and generally emphasise the factors of cultural pluralism and constitutional democracy and federal structure as the grounds of accommodation between ethnic diversity and national integration.
