Identity Justice and Ethnic Minorities: A Critical Review of Kymlicka’s Multicultural Citizenship

How can we encounter ethnic diversities in our society? How can we behave towards others? What is a fairer way? These questions are inevitably vital when we ask about social justice and when we are faced with the reality of diversity in contemporary societies. Since one of the most important parts of this reality is rooted in different identities that we recognize in everyday life, this article focuses on the problem of “identity justice” in a multicultural society and tries to find the relatively best possible answers through the perspective of Kymlicka in Multicultural Citizenship. Kymlicka, as a liberal thinker, describes the condition in which different ethnic and racial groups can live together fairly. His arguments show us a theoretical framework for protection of diversity from a liberal perspective and express serious concern over the political and sociological issues such as the connection between the individual and culture, group’s rights, freedom, and justice. This framework seems to be a political and theoretical guideline for public policy regarding the problematic connection between justice and identity which is called “identity justice” in this article.