Braveheart - Harff + Gurr - Ethnic Politics

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Krystina A. Romero Prof. Daniel Lake Ethnic Politics Braveheart In 1820, the England king, Edward I, invaded and conquer Scotland after it's king, Alexander III, died and left no clear heir to the throne. Scotland's nobles fought the english king over the throne, but they could not succeed because they were struggling between themselves to decide who was going to reign Scotland. Wallace, who did not have a personal interest as for example becoming the king of Scotland, fought England to free it's people and stop the injustices the english rule were committing. The reason for his first attacks against the english soldiers was to seek revenge for the killing of his wife. The main task for this assignment is to decipher whether the political mobilization depicted in "Braveheart" is consistent with the model of Harff and Gurr which explains under what circumstances ethnic conflict will occur. This model consist of 7 concepts which are: the degree of group discrimination, the strength of group identity, the degree of cohesion among leaders and followers, the type of political environment, the severity of force used by governments against ethnic groups, the extent of external support and the degree of international economic status. The first concept, the degree of discrimination, is defined as the extent of socially derived inequalities in ethnic group members' material well being or political access in comparison with other social groups. There are two types of discrimination presented in the book, the economic discrimination and the political discrimination. The indicators of economic discrimination that best fix to the movie are low income, poor housing, and proportionally few group members in commercial, managerial, or professional positions. We

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