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This chapter demonstrates the multiple challenges thrown up by ethnic and cultural diversity, and the consequent problems of balancing rights and accommodating claims involving asymmetries of power. Racism and xenophobia are part of the environment in which issues about culture and cultural diversity enter into the law and the courtroom. Accommodation is a wide-ranging process operating at many levels and in many different sites, and does not only involve those engaged in legislation or in managing cases in the courtroom. Sensitization of judges and legal actors is representative of approaches which puts the onus on the receiving society and its institutions to adapt and accommodate. The concept of interlegality is consistent with anti-essentialist accounts of culture predominant in post-modern anthropology where it is seen less as a body of lore, than as a set of frequently highly contested principles and practices.

This collection brings together papers by anthropologists, political scientists and legal specialists who consider how contemporary cultural and religious diversity challenges legal practice, how legal practice responds to that challenge and how practice is changing in the encounter with the cultural diversity occasioned by large-scale, post-war immigration. Questions about cultural difference, and whether, or to what extent, such difference should be recognized by legal systems, have provoked much discussion among lawyers and others, and raise issues highly pertinent to current debates across the globe about integration, multiculturalism and the governance of diversity. They are also keenly contested. Well-documented controversies such as those over the demands of Sikhs to wear turbans or Muslim schoolgirls to wear the Islamic headscarf (hijab), over legislation to outlaw racial or religious hate-speech, or arranged and forced marriages, or about whether or not legal systems should acknowledge claims by Muslims to be able to live their lives according to shari’a principles, illustrate how contentious is the relationship between the law and diversity. Building on these recent debates, the present book seeks to contribute to theoretical and comparative accounts of the interaction of legal practice and cultural diversity by observing actual practices and interpretations which occur in jurisprudence and in public discussion, and examining how the wider environment shapes legal processes and is in turn shaped by them. The chapters are based on papers presented to a conference held in London in July 2007, sponsored by IMISCOE (the EU-funded Network of Excellence for International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion), and hosted by the Law School, Queen Mary

Human rights occupy a central role in contemporary legal and socio-political discourse. Having been given concrete form in the American Constitution, and reinforced in revolutionary France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, all flavours of Euro-American social, cultural and political thought have since been conditioned by a powerful conceptual trope: the expectation that individual freedom, underpinned by a legally guaranteed charter of human rights, provides the most effective means of constructing a just and equitable social order. This vision was further strengthened when the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, in the hope that it would provide a universal legal bastion against exploitation and oppression.

Diasporic initiatives, implemented ‘from below’ no less than ‘from above’, have played a key role in 500 years of globalisation and have made significant contribution to swings in the global balance of power and wealth. The diasporic networks which non‐European migrants have utilised to establish themselves in the global North are far from novel, although their transgressive success has begun to alarm the indigenes of Euro‐America. In a last‐ditch effort to sustain the established global order, Northern jurisdictions are currently seeking to criminalise the ‘informal’ dimensions of the interlopers’ transjurisdictional networks, even though their function and purpose is strikingly similar to those deployed within contemporary multinational corporations.

David Coleman and John Salt (eds) ETHNICITY IN THE 1991 CENSUS, VOLUME ONE: DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ETHNIC MINORITY POPULATIONS, London: HMSO, 1996, 290 pp., £25.00

Even though the inclusion of an ethnic question has undoubtedly added an important new dimension to the [UK] Census deciding how data associated with the new ethnic group variable can best be interpreted is by no means a straightforward task.... My central objective is to bring the underlying issues into clearer analytical focus. To this end I begin with a brief review of the current state of racial inequality and ethnic diversity in Britain--both to set the issues in a wider context and to highlight the differing significance of the concepts of race and ethnicity--and then move on to consider the way in which the question itself was constructed. (EXCERPT)

Contents: Legal practice and cultural diversity: introduction, Roger Ballard, Alessandro Ferrari, Ralph Grillo, Andre J. Hoekema, Marcel Maussen and Prakash Shah Cultural diversity: challenge and accommodation, Roger Ballard, Alessandro Ferrari, Ralph Grillo, Andre J. Hoekema, Marcel Maussen and Prakash Shah Indian secular pluralism and its relevance for Europe, Werner Menski Legal pluralism and differentiated morality: Shari'a in Ontario?, Veit Bader Transforming to accommodate? Reflections on the Shari'a debate in Britain, Prakash Shah Shari'a in a European context, Mathias Rohe Objection, Your Honour! Accommodating niqab-wearing women in courtrooms, Natasha Bakht The challenge of African customary laws to English legal culture, Gordon R. Woodman Religious challenges to the secularized identity of an insecure polity: a tentative sociology of Quebec's 'reasonable accommodation' debate, Jean-FranA ois Gaudreault-DesBiens Does the Dutch judiciary pluralize domestic law?, Andre J. Hoekema The influence of culture on the determination of damages: how cultural relativism affects the analysis of trauma, Alison Dundes Renteln Jews and Muslims in France changing responses to cultural and religious diversity, Martine Cohen L'affaire du foulard in the shadow of the Strasbourg court: Article 9 and the public career of the veil in France, Claire de Galembert The changing position of religious minorities in English law: the legacy of Begum, Russell Sandberg Approaches to diversity in the domestic courts: Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, Samantha Knights Human rights in contexts of ethnic plurality: always a vehicle for liberation?, Roger Ballard Index.

The rapid growth of Britain’s South Asian population during the second half of the twentieth century, such that it included nearly two million people by the turn of the millennium, is best understood as the most recent manifestation of a dynamic series of interconnections between the British Isles and the Indian subcontinent. These first began to emerge as Britain set about creating an imperial presence in South Asia, and are now developing yet further – albeit on rapidly changing terms – in a post-imperial context. In that process of transformation 1947 was a turning point in three quite separate senses. In the first place it marked the point at which, as Nehru put it, India fulfilled its tryst with destiny, and thus awoke to life and freedom: the British Raj had come to an end. Second, and just as significantly, it did so not as a single unit, but as two separate states, which were before long to become three: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – each of which have followed increasingly different socio-economic trajectories as the years have passed. Third, and equally important, it marked the start of Britain’s post-war economic boom, and with it the beginnings of a phenomenon which ultimately precipitated some equally significant transformations in the character of Anglo-Indian relationships: the large-scale immigration of migrant workers of South Asian descent.

This paper takes a close look at the impact of large-scale overseas emigration - and the resultant inflow of migrant remittances - on the local economy of Mirpur District in Pakistan. No other District in Pakistan has seen a higher proportion of its population engage in transnational migration than, and from nowhere else have a higher proportion of such migrants successfully established themselves in Britain. Yet despite the intensity of the trans-local linkages which have thereby been created, and the huge flow of remittance capital into a District which otherwise occupies a thoroughly marginalised position on the global periphery, in no way has this served to stimulate any kind of sustainable pattern of economic development. This article sets out to place these developments in their appropriate historical, political, environmental, local and global contexts in an effort to establish how and why it is that the Mirpuris otherwise sophisticated and successful entrepreneurial capabilities have not led to more successful and sustainable outcomes in their home base. There are good reasons why the lessons that can be learned in Mirpur could well be applicable elsewhere.

On a global scale, the estimated flow of migrant workers' remittances through formal channels now comfortably exceeds $100bn per annum, while the unrecorded flow through informal channels amounts to at least as much again. During the last few years the Informal Value Transmission Systems (IVTS) networks through which the latter are transferred have attracted a great deal of attention, both because of a gradual realisation of their scale, and because of fears that they could provide a vehicle for drug smugglers and terrorists to shift funds without fear of detection by the authorities. Recently reinforced anti-money laundering (AML/CFT) regulations aimed at curbing such illegitimate transfers are having an expensive impact on all sections of the financial services industry, no less in the formal than the informal sector. As yet, however, remarkably little attention has been paid to the basis on which the so-called‘underground’networks in the informal sector actually operate, the basis on which they organise and guarantee the security of their financial operations, let alone the extent to which they may have developed their own internal mechanisms for keeping drug smugglers and terrorist financiers at bay. In the same vein there is little awareness of the extent to which these‘informal’networks now use sophisticated communications technology, including Swift and telegraphic transfer (TT), to implement their transactions, and the extent to which the financial liquidity generated by remittances now plays a key role in supporting commercial counter-trade. Based on first-hand observations of the activities of Anglo-Pakistani hawala networks, this paper presents an empirically informed account of the operation of IVTS as highly efficient financial systems, and on this basis explores whether recently reinforced AML/CFT initiatives are fit for their purpose.

The author examines the results of including an ethnic question in the 1991 census of Great Britain. "Half a century has now passed since mass migration began and in most communities at least a quarter of a century since the influx reached its peak. Hence we are now in an excellent position to begin to assess how each of these communities has fared during the intervening years and thus how far their hopes of upward mobility have in fact materialized. Furthermore and perhaps most significantly we can now begin to explore just how varied these trajectories of adaptation have proved to be." (EXCERPT)

This paper explores the radically different premises around which the concept of the family is constructed in Euro-American and South Asian cultural contexts, and the confusions, contradictions and misunderstanding which routinely occur when behaviour generated and ordered in terms of one of these sytems is naively interpreted in terms of through the premises of the other.

In Common Law systems, juries fulfil a crucial role as assessors of the evidence presented by the contending parties to legal proceedings, and consequently act as finders of fact. A vision of 'common sense' has always been an integral feature of the English tradition of Common Law. During the course of the past eight centuries the English tradition of common law has undergone all manner of transformations. Although ethnic plurality is in no sense a novel phenomenon in either English or British contexts, its current salience may well be unprecedented. Whilst globalisation is shrinking the significance of distance, it is by no means undermining the plural character of the world in which we live. In historical terms successive inflows of immigrants from elsewhere in Western Europe have regularly introduced additional layers of plurality into Britain's established social order. Keywords: common law; English tradition; ethnic plurality; globalisation; immigrants; juries

In 1958-59 and in 1977-78, we undertook holistic ethnographic studies of a village in northern India. Profound technoenvironmental change occurred in the 18-year period between the two studies. Wit...

(1979). Comparing performance in multi‐racial schools: South Asian pupils at 16‐plus. New Community: Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 143-153.

The paper explores differential trends in migration from and patterns of economic development within two Districts in Indian Punjab and Pakistani Kashmir from where large numbers of UK-based South Asian settlers have arrived. It also examines the social change in this two areas.

(1985). South Asian entrants to British Universities: A comparative note. New Community: Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 260-265.

Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan (eds.), Ethnicity: Theory and Experience. Harvard University Press 1975. 581 pp. £8.25.

Parminder Bhachu, Twice Migrants: East African Settlers in Britain, Tavistock Publications, London, 1985,205pp., £15.95 h.b., £7.95 p.b.

Although there are now substantial Asian and West Indian settlements in most major British cities, the issues which their presence raises for the social services are still being approached with uncertainty. The limited literature that is available generally looks at members of these groups as ‘immigrants’ (see, for example, Fitz-herbert, 1967; Cheetham, 1972; Triseliotis, 1972; Jones, 1976). Their cultural and social backgrounds are described, as are their reasons for migrating to Britain, and the problems that they have in adjusting to their new environment. It is almost always assumed, explicitly or implicitly, that the cultural distinctiveness of members of minority groups will gradually fade, so that the behaviour of their children will, for instance, closely resemble that of the remainder of the population. However, it is now becoming increasingly evident that whatever earlier commentators may have assumed, a straightforward process of assimilation is not taking place. The ‘immigrant’ minorities are sustaining culturally distinctive patterns of social relations, which are a product of their experiences in Britain, quite as much as of their roots overseas. The central aim of this paper is to consider the problems which the presence of relatively permanent ethnic collectivities pose for practitioners, institutions and ideologies currently established in the whole field of the social services.