Law and Society: Ethnicity and Social integration Through Norm Contestation

that contemporary communities around the globe are facing. However, while ethnicity has been weaponized to serve as a basis for political mobilization or counter-mobilization, neither ethnic difference nor ethnicity in itself is the cause of tensions or violence as they have been portrayed to be. Ethnic-related violence is the consequence of politically driven naturalization and reification of ethnicity, the institutionalization of ethnic divisions, the ethnification and racialization of social/group relations, and the ethnicization of territories, cultures, and societies. Therefore, departing from the naturalists’ tendency of group relation dichotomization where ethnicity and race are perceived as distinct, pre-given, instinctual, tangible, bounded, static, and ancestrally linked singularity, this article argues that they should be conceptualized in relational, intersectional, processual, dynamic and multidimensional terms where “multiple diversity governance” and multi-level social integration is possible.