REGIMES OF ETHNICITY · Regimes of Ethnicity: A Global Database of Ethnic Demography and Survey of State Policies on Ethnicity

This project is aimed at, first, creating a database by gathering the most up to date information on the ethnic demography of the 172 countries in the world with a population over 250,000; and second, conducting a survey of state policies on ethnicity in these countries in order to gauge the relationship between ethnicity and nationality as reflected in state policies. The database of global ethnic demography will be a major improvement over the current databases, most of which are inconsistent and unreliable because of their use of information processed by different authors, collected at different points in time, based on different definitions of ethnicity, and with different levels of specificity, making these databases inadequate for systematic comparisons. Surveys that include a list of 15 policy areas, which gauge the institutionalization of ethnicity in each country, will be sent out to country experts. Three experts will be contacted for each country, generating 516 survey responses in total. In addition to the list of fifteen policies, country experts will also be asked to agree or disagree with, or suggest better sources for, the ethnic demographic data collected by the researcher and provided as part of the survey. Results will be made available online in order to facilitate the dissemination of accurate information on ethnic demography and state policies on ethnicity around the world, and to receive feedback on the data and the survey results from the wider public and the scholarly community. Disclosure of experts' identities will be strictly subject to their consent. This new database will significantly increase the capacity for research conducted by other scholars in Europe and elsewhere on topics related to ethnicity. At the end of the project, the results will be published as a reference book on ethnic demography and state policies on ethnicity.