Exploring the politics of ethnic domination

Faculty of Arts and Science researcher John McGarry has authored a new book, The Politics of Domination - Taking, Keeping, and Losing Control over Other Peoples (Oxford University Press, 2026). It explains the life cycles of ethnic domination regimes - that is, their establishment, maintenance, and end.

This book represents the first attempt by researchers to examine these issues for domination regimes in the post Second World War era.

“The book is important because it involves innovative research,” Dr. McGarry (Department of Political Studies) says. “It explains to academics how to identify domination regimes, how domination regimes try to dominate, and how such regimes may be disincentivized, or ended, with the help of outsiders. It also helps other academics by opening up several research areas that need to be developed further.”

Dr. McGarry says an example of this is that while his research shows that external interventions are invariably needed to end the domination of particular communities, external intervention on their behalf can also be terribly counterproductive, causing the regimes to escalate from domination to genocide (as in Rwanda in 1994).  

“We need further research, therefore, on forms of intervention that will not have counterproductive effects, and on the circumstances in which these forms of intervention might work. Another question for future research is how we can best ensure that the end of domination is replaced by something that is normatively attractive rather than say, civil war, or a reversal of domination (a situation in which the dominated and dominating simply change positions, which appears to be currently happening in Syria).”

This is the next step in researching this complex issue.

“The broad normative goal of the research is to end domination. Towards this end, the book’s conclusion has lessons for the three sets of agents that are relevant to the survival of domination regimes, i.e., outside countries and international alliances, the domination regime and its supporters, and the dominated community and its elites.  It explains to the regimes themselves, for example, how domination can be counterproductive and destabilizing, and how core regime goals may be possible without it.”

Dr. McGarry is a world leader in the politics of domination, meaning ethnic domination, where one ethnic community and its elites control a state or autonomous region and deliberately subordinate and repress another ethnic community (or communities).

“You can think of the way that Canada (or the USA) treated its Indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century, or how, under the apartheid regime, a white South African minority dominated and repressed a huge African majority, until that regime ended in 1994,” he explains. “Another example is how white people in the southern United States after the US Civil War dominated African Americans between the 1870s and 1960s. Yet another example is the domination of Catholics by a Protestant government in the autonomous region of Northern Ireland between 1921 and 1972.”

Learn more about the book and a related article on the Oxford University Press webpage and the Frontiers in Political Science webpage.