Isabelle Lucie Cote

Memorial University of Newfoundland · Department of Political Science

In 2011, the Government of Québec, Canada announced an ambitious twenty-five-year plan to develop the province’s northern region—an area nearly twice the size of France. A centrepiece of the Plan Nord is to integrate the province’s various Indigenous peoples in the sustainable development of the region. However, there are early warning signs of the...

News media perform an important role in shaping how Canadian society views Indigenous peoples and issues. They are rarely passive, neutral bystanders, as media routinely employ a particular set of frames (e.g., criminality, economic burden, threats to unity, promotion of social justice) when covering Indigenous stories. We explore how the use of su...

Labelling resettlement programs as voluntary suggests that they cause little contention and are devoid of coercion. But is this representation accurate? Drawing on unpublished government documents and media reports, we provide a detailed case study of the Community Relocation Policy (CRP) of Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) from 2009 to the present....

‘Une île, une nation?’ Le nationalisme insulaire à la lumière des cas de Terre-Neuve et Puerto Rico Valérie Vézina, Montréal : Presses de l'Université du Québec, 2018, pp.256 - Isabelle Côté

Why are female migrants rarely attacked in “Sons of the Soil” (SoS) violence? Based on interviews with key stakeholders in Indonesia and China, we argue that women are shielded from the brunt of migration-related violence due to gendered patterns of migration and economic integration that highlights the positive contributions of female migration to...

In 2010, the Government of Ontario, Canada passed the controversial Far North Act. The Act purportedly aims to promote land use planning and sustainable development while recognising Aboriginal and Treaty rights. There are, however, early warning signs that the Act could be a breeding ground for future conflict between Indigenous peoples and other...

Migration has always been a long-standing feature of political life throughout the world. In some cases, however, the arrival of large numbers of migrants has produced violent clashes between ethnically distinct ‘native’ or ‘local’ populations and migrants. These conflicts are commonly referred to as ‘Sons of the Soil’ (SoS) conflicts. Notwithstand...

Why are large population movements conflict-prone in some regions while they remain peacefully integrated elsewhere? I argue that clashes between ethnically distinct indigenous populations and migrants – i.e. ‘Sons of the Soil (SoS) conflict’ – erupt when there are large socio-economic and political horizontal inequalities between ‘dominant migrant...

Recent research reveals that nearly one-third of ethnic civil wars since 1945 have been “sons of the soil” (SoS) conflicts that pit indigenous populations against internal migrants. Despite important differences across SoS conflicts, many share a common trait as they often escalate during elections. While scholars have examined the causal mechanism...

Challenging conventional wisdom, this article argues that Indonesia - long home to both large-scale transmigration programmes and a range of conflicts - has not witnessed transmigrant conflicts. The vast majority of Indonesian transmigrants were resettled in parts of Sumatra which have remained peaceful. In some conflicts, the role of transmigratio...

How can we account for the targeted pattern of violence in Xinjiang, in which Uyghur secessionist groups attack some second-order minorities such as the Han Chinese and the Hui, but not the sizeable populations of Kazak, Kyrgyz, and Mongol minorities? Based on a variety of primary and secondary sources, I argue that members of the Han minority, bei...

Spontaneous and organized population movements have long been used as a means of promoting a country's goals of development and national integration. At the local level, on the other hand, these movements have frequently done the opposite, fueling local grievances, sharpening group distinctions, and at times creating ‘sons-of-the-soil’ conflicts. I...

Over the last decades, many liberal democracies have experienced a tension between the education system’s expressed requirement to foster citizenship norms and the liberal (sub-)ideal of norm neutrality. This dilemma has been accentuated by, on the one hand, increased ethnical and cultural diversity and, on the other hand, liberalization of society...

Social networking sites have recently garnered academic attention for their role in fostering democracy and openness in both developed and developing regions. Unfortunately, in political science, this newfound interest has not yet translated into a greater interest in social media as a methodological tool for researchers conducting fieldwork. How h...

With 55 national minorities (shaoshu minzu) accounting for nearly 107 million individuals, it is no wonder that the ‘nationality question’ is a hotly debated topic in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Traditionally, two approaches have been applied to foster national unity while simultaneously accommodating minorities’ socio-cultural, political...

The tumultuous events of summer 2009 have brought Uighur protests and minority mobilization in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) to the forefront. But this focus overlooks similar protests organized by various groups of Han Chinese settlers over the years. This paper contributes to the body of literature on minority mobilization and ethn...