Host governments, national minorities, and minorities' kin states: Assessing the triadic nexus

Ethnic politics necessarily entails conflict-ridden scenarios in which trust is broken and identities compromised, and as such, is an area in need of urgent scholarship. The notion that minority elites in ethnic politics in general take cues from their kin-states as well as host governments, in strategizing how to do politics, is the key idea behind 'the triadic thesis'. The ethnographic study presented in this article shows, however, on the example of the minority elites' speech-based or rhetorical acts regarding claim-making about these elites' demands that the behaviors by the minority elites unfold autonomously from the above. The latter behaviors are either a politics of consensus or a politics of disengagement. Re-Assessing the triadic nexus involving the relationships between host governments, national minorities and the latter's kin-states therefore allows us to make more room for an agency-based perspective. © 2017 The Author(s).