Minorities, Scarcity and Conflict

This volume places scarcity as a defining aspect of minorities’ experience and as a tool to comprehend ongoing and unresolved societal friction and global environmental challenges, strategies for survival and reproduction of the status quo, and aspirational desires for social mobility. The book is an experimental collective intellectual project departing from conventional approaches to scarcity solely as a resource-based economic or demographic concept. Boldly, the book looks at the ways in which disadvantaged social groups navigate their lives through scarcity, and how these circumstances are endured, interpreted, accepted or challenged.

In a thought-provoking turn, the book makes a novel contribution to minority studies by engaging with scarcity not only concerning resources but also emotion, memory and affect. In analysing scarcity as a multidimensional analytical framework and interrogating it from manifold angles, the book unpacks uncharted ramifications of debates around scarcity and opens new lines of enquiry.

The collection will be a valuable resource for academics, researchers and policymakers working in the areas of law, political anthropology and sociology.

Antonio Montañés Jiménez is a Margarita Salas postdoctoral fellow affiliated with the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford, UK, and ISOR (Research in Sociology of Religion) at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain. He previously held an Economic and Social Research Council postdoctoral fellowship at the University of St Andrews, UK.

Camila Ferreira Marinelli holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews, UK and is Co-Coordinator of the MSCA Staff Exchanges Project (2024-2027) funded by Horizon Europe.

Stavroula Pipyrou is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Founding Director of the Centre for Minorities Research at the University of St Andrews, UK.