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communities - is beginning to fray, providing a fresh impetus for scholarly reexaminations of the fundamental tenets of nation formation.
This provides the context for the sociologist T.K. Oommen's venture into perhaps the most challenging terrain in contemporary social and political theory. Oommen's stated purpose is to arrive at a conceptualisation of the triad of terms that make up his title, in a manner that they are able to explain the variety of empirical situations that come their way. Rich in empirical material, Oommen's sociological excursus affords a welcome relief in a scholarly milieu dominated by historians and political theorists. The situations he examines in their variegated diversities, span continents and historical epochs. Bolstered by his wide reading of empirical facts, he approaches current interpretative literature with a high degree of scepticism.
Oommen deprecates a widespread tendency in current thinking on the subject: "whatever maybe the definitions of citizenship, nationality and ethnicity, there seems to be an implicit expectation that they should coincide". As a norm that a modern nation-state is a priori, expected to conform to, this legitimises the "exploitation and even oppression" of smaller and weaker nationalities and ethnic groups within the territorial bounds of the state.
It is not clear whether the alleged failing is of modern political theory or of practice. Nations and nationalities have been defined, invented and created in a multitude of ways, which much of the recent literature on the subject has only begun to unravel. Seemingly so unitary and inexorably goal-directed for those who live within the parameters of the finished product, nation formation in reality has embraced a breathtaking diversity of conditions and as a political process, relied upon a number of strategies. In interpreting this aspect of modern human experience, social scientists in turn have had to work with a multitude of approaches and categories.
Oommen finds much of this lacking in a basic essential - theoretical rigour. He finds the tendency to conflate or subsume one concept within another of a different dimension to be so strong, that he devotes an entire chapter to the task of diligently separating out the strands that have got interlocked by loose usage. All the three terms that are the focus of his inquiry bear reference to kinds of human identities. But the three are anchored in very different social realms - citizenship is a legal right that is established in relation to the state; nationality bears reference to the nation and ethnicity to the ethnic. Oommen urges, in