Marc Howard Ross is to be congratulated on putting together a detailed, stimulating, and wide-ranging collection of essays on the role that culture and cultural contestation play in ethno-nationalist contention. Indeed, the reader is offered 12 case studies on issues ranging from the (re)emergence of local patois in France (Britt Cartrite) to disputes concerning the repatriation of ancestral remains in Hawaii (Greg Johnson). French politics are also covered in a chapter on the Islamic head-scarf controversy of 2004 (Elaine R. Thomas), while Northern Ireland receives two chapters (one on the politics surrounding flags by Dominic Bryan and Clifford Stevenson and one on loyalist paramilitaries by Lee A Smithey). The topic of dealing with the past in South Africa is, meanwhile, covered by three chapters (Sabine Marschall, Crain Soudien, and Ross). Chinese New Year festivals (Chiou-Ling Yeh); the Philadelphia Liberty Bell Center (Charlene Mires); the shrine at Ayodhya in northern India (Richard H. Davis); and Irish, Jewish, and African American campaigns against theatrical stereotyping (M. Alison Kibler) make up the remaining chapters.

Overall, the book succeeds in the rationale that Ross sets out in his articulate and insightful introduction—namely, to explore ethnic conflict from the perspective of the politics of emotion. Thus, he explains that “while ethnic conflict is about clashing interests and incompatible identities, it is the former that are most often analyzed and that too often the underlying issues of cultural and identity contestation are neglected” (p. 2). In other words, the decisions by political actors at the individual and group levels—whether they are politicians, soldiers, police officers, terrorists or others—are filtered through ideological and emotional prisms that cannot be reduced to overly mechanical rational choice or cost–benefit analysis. While this point may be debated on empirical grounds, there seems to me to be two methodological problems associated with the book's culturalist perspective that are indulged in and reproduced, rather than tackled head-on. The first relates to the conceptualization of causality and the role that institutions and policymaking plays, while the second relates to a more fundamental moral problem associated with the reproduction of cultural narratives.

As regards the first criticism, one response to Ross's raison d'être is “What follows?” That is, does the study of culture and identity necessarily lead to better alternatives for regulating or managing ethnic conflicts than those that are hotly debated in the literatures associated with, say, consociationalism or transitional justice? In this regard, the book is something of a missed opportunity given that many of the chapters take Ross's presentist position regarding the idea that “how we understand the past grows out of our present needs” (p. 12). Thus, rather than interrogate the path-dependency idea that policy decisions in the past may influence latter-day mobilization and identification, several of the authors return to an essentially legalistic approach to the question of dealing with ethnic conflict. In other words, while Ross is surely correct that political contests often involve heated emotional issues that are not reducible to simplistic “interest-based” analysis (p. xi), the presentist approach lends itself to a telescoping of historical context to contemporary battles over legislation, all the while ignoring the fact that people may mobilize over long-standing perceptions of injustice.

This is certainly the case with Johnson's chapter on Hawaii and Thomas's chapter on the head-scarf debate, in which she argues that feminist mobilization, rather than a delayed reaction to September 11, was instrumental in securing legislation banning students from wearing “signs or dress [that] conspicuously express a religious affiliation” (p. 107). While French political elites may indeed have framed the law within the rhetoric of republicanism and feminism, the setting up of this explanation against the idea that France reacted differently to 9/11 than America reveals a certain redundancy and a rather literal understanding of the dynamics concerning how states enforce, foster, and protect democracy and moderate opinion.

The point that states and state forces may act in more nuanced ways than are set down in legislation is highlighted in Bryan and Stevenson's conclusions (pp. 77–82). They argue that by strategically ignoring the flying of communal flags in certain areas and on certain occasions, the Police Service of Northern Ireland mitigated what might have been perceived as triumphalist and threatening displays of Orange and loyalist culture from potentially destabilizing politics in the province in the years following the power-sharing settlement of 1998.

The second main criticism echoes Soudien's chapter on “Emerging Multiculturalisms in South African Museum Practice.” Soudien argues that “discourses shift and evolve but always build on, or take from pre-existing discourse” (p. 177), and he makes the important point that researchers and archivists need to be attentive to the “contradictions” that occur in the lives of their subjects (p. 186). Thus, he describes how narrative strategies regarding the history of apartheid—such as a narrow empiricist or “triumphalist multicultural” approach—may effectively essentialize or “ethnicize” that past. This institutes, he argues, a “displaced” or “hollowed-out” version of history, in which only the “traces” of racism are left, confronting the victims of racism with a model of reconciliation in which historical grievances are placed at the service of a redemptive narrative of repentance and forgiveness (pp. 186–87).

The dangers involved in failing to heed Soudien's advice are much in evidence in Smithey's account of “conflict transformation” and the identification of extremist or radical Protestant “loyalists” in Northern Ireland (Chapter 5). The treatment of “conflict transformation” in this regard seems to follow from the methodological attachment to a presentist lens. Thus, the commitment of loyalist ex-prisoners to improving their local areas is emphasized, while their consistent emphasis that their campaign of violence was justified is downplayed. The problem is that this ignores the threat of what might happen if their communities are not supported in the ways they want. The methodological dilemma involved here gives way to a deeper moral relativism that Smithey's essay encapsulates, for while he argues that loyalist paramilitaries wish to engage in peace, he also admits that “[t]hey want to maintain their place within communities as defenders … against poverty and unemployment” (p. 100). It is never quite asked why unelected and largely unelectable—given the fact that the vast majority of Protestants continue to disavow those paramilitary leaders—ex-terrorists should “maintain their position”; instead, the author criticizes those Irish nationalists who bore the brunt of the loyalists' murder campaign for being “predictably skeptical,” while he warns that “state bureaucracy” may “undermine the authenticity of local efforts.”

Ross is correct in stating that dominant rational choice and interest-based models do not capture the reality of identity politics (p. ix), but it is the disconnect between overly empathetic accounts and critical and contextualized argument that bedevils the interpretative project that his own work—and the best pieces in this collection—exemplifies. As such, while this review may be critical of some aspects of Culture and Belonging in Divided Societies, it should be stressed that it remains an important and stimulating work that deserves to be taught and engaged by serious researchers.