Reetta Toivanen

Counterterrorism and expert regimes: some human rights concerns

This article focuses on authoritative knowledge on terrorism and counterterrorism: its production, application, and legitimation. The question is as follows: What are the possible consequences for the application of internationally agreed human rights standards when democratic governments (are forced to) rely on expert knowledge in the planning and execution of their counterterrorism strategies? The specialty of the expert knowledge discussed in this article lies in the fact that the producers of the knowledge cannot be made accountable in a transparent and democratic manner for the expertise they advocate. Therefore, the main concern here is with the processes through which counterterrorism mechanisms become a ‘validation’ for the violation of human rights. This article problematises the relationship between states and the expert bodies chosen by governments to advise them in countering terrorism. It argues that the readiness of democratic decision-makers to rely on expert knowledge that deploys security as an opposite of freedom has the potential to increase terrorism.

Change and Maintenance of Plurilingualism in the Russian Federation and the European Union

Linguistics, anthropology, social sciences and law have treated languages as more or less closed systems. Scholars have been interested in the variation in language and the linguistic behavior of the people that speak particular languages. Some scholars have postulated that all languages are “invented” and questioned the very existence of languages, speech communities and ethnolinguistic groups. This chapter argues that denying the existence of a particular language may also represent denying the identity of members of minority communities, many of which fight for recognition as an independent ethnic and linguistic identity and stresses that in order to understand the processes leading to language attrition and loss of minority linguistic heritage, one has to create theoretical models that join the perspectives of contact linguistics and variation studies with a framework of careful ethnographic study of social identity and status position and critical research into power relations in a context of changing language use.

Obstacles and Successes

This contribution discusses the role of minority-language activists in their efforts to revitalize endangered minority languages. There is a significant gap between most of the potential speakers of minority languages and the group of activists who advocate language maintenance and revitalization measures. The role of minority language advocates and activists is to mitigate between the majority society, which may look only at statistically “proven” numbers of minority language speakers when drafting policies and allocating funding directed towards minority communities, and members of the minority who do not actively express their minority identity. The majority society has to be informed about the variety of reasons why people belonging to minorities have given up their original mother tongue and the role and responsibility of the majority society in that development. On the other hand, members of the minority have to be kept informed and encouraged to give up their fears and shame and be motivated to revitalize their language skills. This contribution seeks to explain, using the cases of the Sorbian and Sami language communities, the problems related to the demands placed by a dominating majority society on minorities. The main question in this chapter is: who is responsible for language revitalization and maintenance?