Migration and cultural diversity challenges in the twenty-first century

This chapter considers some of the challenges of theorising the new cultural – ethnocultural, ethnoreligious, and ethnoracial – diversities. These are both of how to use the resources of liberalism as well as noting that liberal understanding of equality and social identity are unable to do justice to the phenomenon of people having and valuing group identities. There is a sociological argument that the challenge of diversity, namely, the accommodation of a limited number of new, relatively stable groups has been superseded by ‘superdiversity’. We examine the claim that there are too many groups, constantly being added to by newer and ongoing flows of migration or the fragmentation of more stable groups such as Black or Asian, and that their groupness is along different cross-cutting dimensions – race, religion, language, national origins and further intersected by socio-economic factors, gender, sexuality – to be caught in a single policy framework. We discuss how multiculturalism some time ago ceased to have vitality or public support. The thread running through the chapter is that the presence and capacity of multiculturalism as a political perspective seeking to locate itself in contemporary liberal democracies is not negligible; while new rhetorics – integration, interculturalism, human rights – may have displaced it somewhat, it still seems to be growing as a policy tendency.