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In a relatively short time, many European governments have been purposefully dropping the notion ‘multicultural’ or other references to cultural diversity in their policy vocabularies. More and more politicians and public intellectuals have criticized a perceived shift towards ‘too much diversity’. This volume goes beyond the conventional approaches to the topic offering a careful examination of not only the social conditions and political questions surrounding multiculturalism but also the recent emergence of a ‘backlash’ against multicultural initiatives, programmes and infrastructures. Featuring case-study based contributions from leading experts throughout Europe and North America, this multidisciplinary work seeks to assess some of these key questions with reference to recent and current trends concerning multiculturalism, cultural diversity and integration in their respective countries, evaluating questions such as Is there is a common ‘sceptical turn’ against cultural diversity or a ‘backlash against difference’ sweeping Europe? How have public discourses impacted upon national and local diversity management and migration policies? Are the discourses and policy shifts actually reflected in everyday practices within culturally, linguistically and religiously diverse settings? The Multiculturalism Backlash provides new insights, informed reflections and comparative analyses concerning these significant processes surrounding politics, policy, public debates and the place of migrants and ethnic minorities within European societies today. Focusing on the practice and policy of multiculturalism from a comparative perspective this work will be of interest to scholars from a wide range of disciplines including migration, anthropology and sociology. \"In Western European politics, \"the end of multiculturalism\" has become a dogma. Here is finally a book that reopens the debate by distinguishing between political rhetoric, public opinion and public policies.\" - Rainer Bauböck, European University Institute, Florence \"Orchestrated predictions about \"the end of multiculturalism\" are shown, in this alert but finely-tuned collection, as emanating from a panic choir without a common score. Judiciously choosing seven European and two Canadian contrasts, it shows this empirically and deepens it theoretically.\" - Gerd Baumann, University of Amsterdam 1. Introduction: assessing the backlash against multiculturalism in Europe Steven Vertovec and Susanne Wessendorf 2. The Rise and Fall of Multiculturalism? New Debates on Inclusion and Accommodation in Diverse Societies Will Kymlicka 3. British and Others: From ‘Race’ to ‘Faith’ Ralph Grillo 4. From Toleration to Repression:The Dutch backlash against multiculturalism Baukje Prins and Sawitri Saharso 5. ‘We’re not all Multiculturalists Yet’: France Swings Between Hard Integration and Soft Anti-discrimination Patrick Simon 6. Denmark versus Multiculturalism Ulf Hedetoft 7. Switzerland: A Multicultural Country Without Multicultural Policies? Gianni d’Amato 8. Germany: Integration Policy and Pluralism in a Self-conscious Country of Immigration Karen Schönwälder 9. Multicultural questions in Spain: the ambivalence of Spanish public opinion Ricard Zapata-Barrero 10. Multiculturalism: a Canadian Defence David Ley Steven Vertovec is Director of the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen and Honorary Joint Professor of Sociology and Ethnology, University of Göttingen. Previously he was Professor of Transnational Anthropology at the Institute of Social andCultural Anthropology, University of Oxford and Director of the British Economic and Social ResearchCouncil’s Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS). Susanne Wessendorf is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Max-Planck Institute for the Study Of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, Germany. She has previously been an assistant lecturer At The Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Berne, Switzerland.

Superdiversity is one of the most prominent contemporary concepts advancing our current understanding of international migration and its societal outcomes. This handbook brings together chapters that link the numerous social scientific debates, approaches, and methodologies developed in light of superdiversity. The handbook offers students, educators, researchers, and practitioners a much sought-after compendium of major advances made in studying complex transformations in light of superdiversity.

Much of the literature on migrant transnationalism focuses on the ways that specific sociocultural institutions have been modified in the course of being stretched across the globe. Yet migrant transnational practices are involved in more deep-seated patterns of change or structural transformation. Such modes of transformation concern: 1) an enhanced 'bifocality' of outlooks underpinning migrant lives lived here-and-there; such dual orientations have considerable influence on transnational family life and may continue to affect identities among subsequent postmigration generations; 2) heightened challenges to 'identities-borders-orders' stemming from migrants' political affiliations in more than one nation-state; these particularly arise around questions of dual citizenship and nationality; and 3) potentially profound impacts on economic development by way of the sheer scale and evolving means of remittance sending; money transfer services, hometown associations and microfinance institutions represent three kinds of remittance-related organizations currently undergoing significant forms of adaptation with significant consequences for development. These modes of transformation, and the practices of migrant transnationalism surrounding them, both draw from and contribute to wider processes of globalization.

Over the last 30 years, as the CrossMigration project demonstrates, Migration Studies has been positively institutionalized in a number of ways. Further, a number of new theoretical interventions have significantly altered the ways we understand migration. What unfortunately has not changed, I believe, is the low level of impact that academic studies of migration has had on public understanding. For these reasons, we can call for a limited “two cheers for Migration studies”, but not the conventional three cheers.

We assessed evidence for a contextual effect of positive intergroup contact, whereby the effect of intergroup contact between social contexts (the between-level effect) on outgroup prejudice is greater than the effect of individual-level contact within contexts (the within-level effect). Across seven large-scale surveys (five cross-sectional and two longitudinal), using multilevel analyses, we found a reliable contextual effect. This effect was found in multiple countries, operationalizing context at multiple levels (regions, districts, and neighborhoods), and with and without controlling for a range of demographic and context variables. In four studies (three cross-sectional and one longitudinal) we showed that the association between context-level contact and prejudice was largely mediated by more tolerant norms. In social contexts where positive contact with outgroups was more commonplace, norms supported such positive interactions between members of different groups. Thus, positive contact reduces prejudice on a macrolevel, whereby people are influenced by the behavior of others in their social context, not merely on a microscale, via individuals' direct experience of positive contact with outgroup members. These findings reinforce the view that contact has a significant role to play in prejudice reduction, and has great policy potential as a means to improve intergroup relations, because it can simultaneously impact large numbers of people.

Sociological notions such as social network, social capital and embeddedness have proven valuable when adopted into a wide variety of social scientific fields. This has certainly been the case in the sociology of migration. Similarly, certain concepts drawn from studies on different modes of transnationalism - for instance, research and theory concerning the global activities of social movements and business networks - might serve as useful tools for understanding transnational social forms and practices among migrant groups.

“Diversity” is the focus of a wide-ranging corpus of normative discourses, institutional structures, policies and practices in business, public sector agencies, the military, universities and professions. Here, a brief account of the rise and diffusion of the term is provided. It now addresses a wide variety of social differences, while at least six distinct facets or goals of diversity policy can be discerned. Ambiguity, multivocality and banality are key characteristics of diversity discourse, but these function to strengthen, rather than weaken, the spread and acceptance of the notion. In many settings the commitment to diversity is mainstreamed, expected, and even taken-for-granted. Diversity discourse is related to ongoing processes of social diversification, but its diffusion is not driven by these processes. Overall, despite its many imprecisions, the impacts of the diversity corpus entail a transformation, or at least refinement, of the social imaginary.

Immigrant cultures are routinely posed as threats to national culture. Particular understandings of immigrant and national cultures underlie cultural politics. Culturalism-conceiving cultures as reified, static, and homogeneous across bounded groups-imbues these understandings. Representations of immigrant and national culture are mutually constituted in policies, state institutions, the media, and everyday perceptions surrounding key categories such as borders, illegality, and the law. Furthermore, coupled with a popular or commonsense structural-functionalism that sees all cultural values and practices as inherently interlinked, many modes of cultural politics are contextually stimulated by anxieties about cultural loss. At critical junctures, certain representations gain powerful roles in cultural politics through synecdoche, when specific symbols stand for an integrated set of cultural attributes. Examples include Muslim head scarves in France and the \"ground zero mosque\" in the United States. Anthropologists can usefully mitigate culturalism and contribute to public debates by promoting more processual and distributive understandings of culture.