ABSTRACT
Colonialisation, immigration, war, movement of refugees, redrawing of boundaries, and increased mobility and communication have made contemporary society highly pluralistic. Within any nation state, there are competing conceptions about how best to live a life, about what is good, and about appropriate religious, educational, and moral values. These differences may be magnified where there is civil strife or war, or between nations states where there is competition for territory or for dominance. Often disagreements become intractable and turn violent. Indeed, the liberal democratic hope for a peaceful future might seem these days rather naive. Michael Ignatieff captures the disappointment nicely:
With blithe lightness of mind, we assumed that the world was moving irrevocably beyond nationalism, beyond tribalism, beyond the provincial confines of the identities inscribed in our passports, towards a global market culture which was to be our new home. In retrospect, we were whistling in the dark. The repressed has returned, and its name is nationalism.
