Shifting Paradigms, Changing Research Agendas: John Stone's Contribution to the Study of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

This article seeks to highlight some aspects of John Stone's unique and wide-ranging contribution to the study of racial and ethnic conflict. It argues that what is particularly interesting in his work is the way he seeks to explore the intersections between the social and political relations that help to shape the expression of forms of ethnic conflict. It is also argued that his emphasis on comparative perspectives is an important part of Stone's legacy for future research agendas, particularly through his role in setting up the international journal Ethnic and Racial Studies. The death of John Stone in late 2023 has deprived us of a key figure in the development of race and ethnic studies as an interdisciplinary field of scholarship and research. From the 1970s and 1980s onwards, he was an important voice in scholarly debates and research focused on the comparative study of race and ethnic relations. It is also relevant to mention in this context that he helped to establish the international journal Ethnic and Racial Studies, and in doing so, he was instrumental in creating an important space for the dissemination of high-quality research that addresses questions about the role of racial and ethnic relations in shaping global social and political relations. In this short reflective piece on his work and the scope of his influence, I would like to explore some key facets of his contribution and highlight the importance of his legacy to future generations of scholars and researchers. I shall focus, in particular, on his efforts to establish race and ethnicity as a field of research and the need for a comparative analytical frame in order to move theoretical and empirical research agendas forward. But before moving on to his scholarly and intellectual contributions, it is also important to highlight something that is more personal about him, namely the multiple ways he helped to support and mentor his colleagues and other scholars at all stages of their careers. My first encounter with John Stone came in the late 1980s, relatively early in my own academic career, when he invited me to give a seminar at Goldsmiths College in the University of London, where he was working at the time. At that stage, he was already an established scholar and the founding editor of the international journal Ethnic and Racial Studies. He was a very generous host and looked after me well on that occasion, as well as taking an active role in the conversation that followed my presentation. I mention this occasion since it strikes me as a good example of his ability to engage with scholars at different stages of their careers and his constant curiosity to get to know a range of research perspectives. On the various occasions that I met him in the decades after this first meeting, he was always engaging and supportive to me, even though in some ways we were from different intellectual backgrounds. He was always helpful at various points when the editorial team that took over from him in editing Ethnic and Racial Studies needed his advice as to how to deal with the challenges of moving the journal forward as it evolved alongside the rapidly growing and changing field of research and teaching. It was and remains rare in the context of academic life to find somebody as generous and supportive, and for that I am grateful. Moving on to his broader intellectual contributions, it is also important to note that from his graduate studies at the University of Oxford onwards, Stone was deeply interested in the role of empire and colonialism in shaping ideas about race and racism, both historically and in the present. His doctoral research on race relations in South Africa helped to highlight in his mind the need to locate studies of race and ethnicity within a broader historical frame. It also helped him to develop a deeper understanding of the similarities and differences between the ways in which ideologies based on race and ethnicity emerged and took form in different national and regional contexts. In this context, it is important to acknowledge the ways in which Stone's work was influenced by the work of his mentor at Oxford, Kenneth Kirkwood, who had strong research interests in the history of empire and racial relations in Africa (Kirkwood et al. 1986). Stone's interest in South Africa remained important in his later work as well, as was evident in his reflections on the changing politics of both white and black forms of ethnonationalism in the aftermath of the end of the Apartheid system (Stone 2002). At a broader level, it is important to note that Stone's experience in South Africa was instrumental in forging his lifelong commitment to the study of racial and ethnic conflict and the social and political relations that helped to shape it. As he argued forcefully through much of his published work, the emergence of modern forms of racial and ethnic conflict needs to be understood within the broader context of empire and colonialism and the sets of ideas and values that they helped to shape. It is also important to note, however, that he was drawn to comparative research not only through his doctoral work in South Africa but from his experience as a visiting scholar at Columbia University in the United States during the early 1970s. This period in his life helped to shape his long-standing interest in the complex ways in which questions about race helped to shape American society over the past few centuries. This allowed him to explore both the similarities and differences between the South African and the American context of racial relations in more detail, both from a historical and a more contemporary angle. As compared to many of the scholars of his generation, he was able to address the need for a comparative lens in trying to make sense of the complex histories of race and racial ideas. An important facet of his contributions to scholarship and research during the 1970s and 1980s focused on the changing dynamics of forms of racial and ethnic conflict. Perhaps his most influential work from this period is the book on Racial Conflict in Contemporary Society, a study that sought to provide an overview of the changing role of forms of racial conflict during much of the twentieth century (Stone 1985). It was a text that drew on his experiences of research questions about race in the context of both South Africa and the United States. Although this text was written at a time when the sociological study of race relations remained somewhat marginal to the discipline as a whole, it was instrumental in helping to guide students who wanted to explore the relationship between race and social and political inequalities. Rather than seeing racial conflicts and inequalities in isolation, he emphasized the need to locate them within a broader understanding of social and political relations. This interest was something he shared in common with race relations scholars of an earlier generation, including Michael Banton and John Rex. It is also important to note that Stone was deeply engaged with the question of how best to develop teaching that allows students to let their sociological curiosity ask questions rather than presenting to them narrow conceptual and analytical frames that they are expected to follow during their studies. Arguing against a trend to narrow the boundaries of the study of race and ethnicity, Stone sought to emphasize the need to develop pedagogic tools that encourage students to ask questions, pursue their curiosity, and enrich their historical and contemporary knowledge of key issues in this field (Stone 2003). This concern to introduce students to questions that encourage their curiosity and imagination reflected his concern to eschew ideological and theoretical certainties in favour of a more pluralistic and open approach to teaching. Another recurrent theme in Stone's work over his long career was a concern to develop high quality research that explored the evolving dynamics of racial and ethnic relations in the world around us. When he reflected on the first 20 years of Ethnic and Racial Studies in 1998, he argued forcefully that the drive to establish the journal was the need for a peer reviewed journal to publish the emerging research in this field in Europe, North America and more generally (Stone 1998). Part of his concern in setting up the journal was the need to provide the emergent field of racial and ethnic studies with a journal that would help to both reflect and to some extent shape research agendas and teaching. But he was also insistent throughout the first 12 volumes of the journal that he edited on the need to publish research with a comparative focus. Drawing on his own experience of research from the earliest stages of his career, he insisted on the need for a more comparative frame to both conceptual and empirical research on racial and ethnic relations. This approach is reflected in an influential edited collection he produced in the late 1970s on Race, Ethnicity and Social Change (Stone 1977). This collection drew on his own experience of working in South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States by bringing together scholarship from a wide range of intellectual traditions, as well as a historical and empirical focus. He noted the tendency for research agendas to develop in parallel rather than together, often involving limited conversations between researchers working in these scholarly environments. This strong interest in comparative research can be found at all stages of Stone's scholarship and research (Stone 1972, 2016; Stone and Dennis 2003; Stone et al. 2020). Indeed, part of the enduring legacy of his work can be found in his insistence that both scholars and students of racial and ethnic relations needed to broaden their field of vision to encompass the diverse forms that race, ethnicity and nationalism take across the globe rather than assume they were uniform either ideologically or in practice. Thus far we have focused on Stone's efforts to help shape the study of racial and ethnic relations, particularly from the 1970s onwards. But it is also important to mention that he continued to explore in his more recent work key issues that face us in the present as we try to make sense of the evolution of new debates about race, ethnicity, and nationalism. This facet of his work is reflected in works like The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism, a volume he edited with colleagues and students towards the end of his career (Stone et al. 2020). In this collection, he sought to bring together scholars working on these issues to reflect on the development of research and scholarship as well as to look forward to the challenges we face in the first few decades of this century. It is also interesting to note that one of the areas he was able to contribute to was related to the emergence of new forms of nationalist populism, such as the politics linked to Donald Trump. In a joint chapter with Ioanna Christodoulaki (Stone and Christodoulaki 2018) he explores the changing meanings of nationalism in the era of rising populism. What is interesting in this contribution is that Stone and Christodoulaki argue that it is wrong to see Trumpism as a form of nationalism or patriotism in the traditional sense. Rather, they suggest that it is best seen as a highly contradictory form of populism that combines the language of nationalism with a commitment to American exceptionalism. In developing this account of ‘rising populism’, they suggest that there is a need to rethink the ways in which nationalism is evolving in the contemporary environment. In this challenging environment, it is important that scholars working on race, ethnicity, and racial conflict pay attention to the work of John Stone during his long academic career. There is much that we can celebrate and hold on to in developing contemporary research agendas. We have explored some facets of his work here, but there are many other aspects of his oeuvre that will continue to attract the attention of scholars and students alike.