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Multiculturalism has been used both as a descriptive and a normative term, as well as a term referring to particular types of state policies. As a descriptive term, multiculturalism refers to the state of affairs present in contemporary societies: that of cultural diversity. As a normative term, multiculturalism affirms cultural diversity as an acceptable state of affairs, and provides normative grounds for accommodating this diversity. As a policy-oriented term, multiculturalism refers to a variety of state policies that aim to accommodate people’s cultural differences—most notably, different types of culturally differentiated rights. The main focus of the debates on multiculturalism within political philosophy has been on normative multiculturalism, and the broader normative questions relating to the appropriate grounds for responding to people’s cultural differences. The debates on descriptive multiculturalism and on particular multicultural policies, however, feed into the debates on normative multiculturalism. One’s views on the nature of culture, the value of culture, and the appropriate means of demarcating group boundaries have implications on the ways in which one understands the proper objects of cultural accommodation, as well as the extent to which such accommodation should be applied. The different types of multicultural policies—including rights of indigenous groups, immigrants, and national minorities—incorporate slightly different sets of normative considerations that must be independently assessed and that also feed into the more general debates on the normative foundations for cultural accommodation. Equality-based and identity-based arguments for cultural concern provide strong grounds for the state to be concerned about people’s cultural differences and to aim to alleviate culturally induced disadvantages. The case for (or against) culturally differentiated rights as a means for responding to these disadvantages may, however, come from several sources, including approaches to cultural diversity based on equality, autonomy, toleration, and state neutrality. While there is relative (albeit not full) agreement among normative theorists of multiculturalism that differentiated rights may be acceptable, though not always required or even desired, responses to cultural diversity, disagreements about the normative bases, and extents of application, remain.

Brazil has boasted a vibrant and creative LGBT movement since the late 1970s. Early organizing focused on consciousness-raising, the formation of a collective identity, and political opposition to the military dictatorship (1964–1985). These years saw transformations in understandings of individual and collective identity, publications in an early homophile press, and successful experiences organizing in homosexual gay and lesbian groups. In the late 1980s, with the advent of HIV/AIDS and re-democratization, the movement began a turn to institutionalized politics and public policy. Strategic engagement with the state as legally registered civil society organizations established a framework for a routine and cooperative relationship in policy and policymaking. This occurred first for HIV/AIDS service provision and later for LGBT citizenship. By the 1990s, the movement embraced identity politics and grappled with an explosion of advocacy on behalf of identity groups that make up the alphabet soup of LGBT politics, particularly lesbian and transgender rights groups that had been less visible in earlier years. Movement successes, such as same-sex partnership recognition, gender-identity recognitions, and policy programs against violence, have been accomplished primarily through engagement with the judiciary and executive, not the legislature (nor electoral politics). The legislature and electoral politics have failed to produce significant gains in LGBT-friendly policy at the national level; however, state and municipal LGBT-friendly policy exists. Moving forward, persistent challenges include divisive partisan [identity] politics within the movement, concerted opposition from conservative evangelical politicians, and volatility of the national political context. These challenges jeopardize policy successes that the movement has made through rather precarious executive and judicial avenues.

Scholarship on the domestic sources of foreign policy has focused on parties, interest groups, and a generalized notion of public opinion, but it has neglected the societal dimension. This is a mistake given the multiethnic and multinational makeup of many of the world’s states. The focus here is on those European states which imagined themselves settled in the aftermath of war, empire, and the Cold War, yet now find themselves surprised by the new challenges of migration and multiculturality—meaning the growth in ethnocultural diversity as a form of everyday life. These states have adopted varying strategies—or none—in order to address the problems which arise, but did not at first realize the extent to which the domestic realm had become inextricably entangled with external relations—whether through the transnational activities of diasporas or through blowback from their own foreign policies in regions of the world where some of their minority communities have intimate connections. The subject of foreign policy and multicultural societies is thus a new but important one, politically as well as intellectually. To approach it we need both a grounding in foreign policy analysis and an understanding of the debates in political theory and sociology about multiculturalism, given that practitioners have increasingly to face inwards as much as outwards and that the distinction between the external and “homeland” dimensions of security is now blurred. Although the world has not fallen into a simple “clash of civilizations,” the challenges of managing diversity certainly now present themselves in a set of interlinked levels, crossing national boundaries and therefore significantly changing the context of foreign policy and its making.

The question of theoretical dominance has been the source of longstanding debates in the field of International Relations (IR). The folklore of the field tells of how realism fell from dominance and was replaced by liberalism in the 1990s. The systematic evidence, however, shows that neither theory was as dominant as many claimed. While the early period of postwar IR was dominated by realism, the past 35 years can be characterized by its plurality of theories. This plurality of theories, however, may not reflect a diverse field. Diversity denotes some degree of variation within an interacting community or system. Meaningful interactions between distinct research sects in IR appear to be very rare, as characterized by the so-called paradigm wars. Instead of a diverse field, IR may be characterized as insular, Balkanized sects that are hostile to differing theories and approaches.

The politics of Nigeria have often been considered a matter of managing social diversity in a political economy whose extremes have been exaggerated by oil money. But this story is incomplete without thinking instead more deeply about inequality, about political party origins and ideologies as well as identities, and about politics beyond parties and elections. Bureaucracy, mass mobilization, and everyday practice are equally important issues in Nigerian politics as the country moves through another economic transformation. Nigeria’s political structures have been built around questions of managing diversity and allocating resources, and the country’s federal system embeds a tension between how much power is managed from the center and how much is devolved to the constituent states and local governments. As well as parties, legislatures, and executives, security institutions have been prominent in the country’s political formation, and public institutions are both formed around, and are vectors of forming, elite social networks. Partly due to long-standing models of social legitimacy and partly as a result of the kind of identity politics Nigeria has chosen to manage diversity, models of citizenship based on localized belonging are pervasive drivers of political patterning. Political factions and parties, often characterized as election-winning aggregations of patron-client networks, also however embed distinct historical ideological traditions, which chart Nigeria’s movements between liberal capitalism and state-directed development and which have driven both domestic debates and a continental and regional leadership role. Tensions around inequalities and the realm of the political more generally cannot be understood as a matter of governmental institutions alone but bring in religion, gender construction, labor movements, the media, civil society, and new social movements, as well as the “ineffable politics” of tactic, techniques, norms, and practices that fix the realm of the political as a key part of everyday social and economic life.

The LGBT movement in the United Kingdom has had considerable success in its campaign for equal rights and legal protection, in common with LGBT movements across the world. Early organization took place in secret in the late 19th and early 20th centuries before the heyday of LGBT political campaigning in the 1960s and 1970s. Key organizations in the United Kingdom included the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, the Gay Liberation Front, the Scottish Minorities Group, the Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association, and the lesbian groups Kenric and Sappho. In the 1980s, the LGBT movement responded to the twin threats of HIV/AIDS and the Section 28 (or 2A in Scotland) legislation through a renewed campaigning vigor. The 21st century ushered in a period of celebration and commemoration through the advent of Pride and the establishment of heritage projects and academic research, although significant political and policy challenges remain, particularly for trans* people and for immigrants and asylum seekers.

Human resource management in public administration considers the civil service broadly to include all those employed in mostly noncommercial entities funded by the state. These entities may range from government bureaus and departments to agencies and authorities with varying degrees of uniformity, at both the central and local levels, and include those in such nonprofit services as health and education that are completely or mostly publicly funded. The terms civil servants, government employees, and public servants are used interchangeably. Human resource management may include such functions as planning, recruitment and selection, performance management, training, compensation, and labor relations. Key challenges of managing human resource functions include motivating and compensating public employees to reward passion for public service, managing the political roles of civil servants and their political responsiveness, selecting for salient identities to achieve representation and diversity, and reforming the civil service. These challenges impact individual and organizational performance. Motivation and compensation focus on what binds individuals to organizations and energizes those individuals. One approach, inspired by rational choice, identifies self-interest and extrinsic incentives, including performance-based pay, monitoring and surveillance to manage employees. A second approach, inspired by self-determination theory, focuses on altruism and prosocial values, and prioritizes intrinsic incentives, job design, and careful selection to nurture a passion for public service. A key challenge is to identify and nurture those with public service motivation, and reward competence and passion for public service. Selecting and nurturing those with a passion for public service includes taking care that compensation policies and practices do not crowd out public service motivation. An additional challenge focuses on the political roles civil servants play in government and the extent to which civil servants are politically responsive. Selecting civil servants based on merit, with separate career structures for politicians and civil servants, is generally associated with more effective governance and economic growth, with some important exceptions. The tasks, role perceptions, and behavior of the senior civil service are dependent on historical tradition and political culture, and on structural characteristics, such as the presence or absence of political advisors, and the support civil servants receive or need beyond government from clients and interest groups. The role of senior civil servants also depends on their specialization and the capacity of political appointees. Systems that encourage more explicit political roles for senior civil servants do not appear to sacrifice public interest. Preparing senior civil servants for these roles is a critical human management resource challenge. Authorities also use human resource tools to increase political responsiveness, including training, discipline, and changes to civil servants’ security of tenure. As identities such as race and gender become politically salient, representation becomes another key challenge for human resource management in public administration. Passive representation has had wide currency in both Western-style democracies and in the developing world. Passive representation has symbolic effects and may increase citizen trust in the bureaucracy, making bureaucratic action more legitimate in the eyes of minority communities. Moreover, minority civil servants may affect outcomes directly—for example, by influencing the implementation of a policy—or indirectly—for example, by influencing minority clients to change their behavior, or influencing nonminority bureaucratic colleagues to change their behavior or influencing organizational policy. Active representation may thus affect overall public service performance. Representation is mediated by a number of variables including discretion, salience of identity, agency mission, socialization, professionalism, and administrative level among others. Human resource managers also need to manage diversity training, which can improve outcomes. The final challenge, civil service reform, cuts across public human resource functions and themes. Civil service reform is a fraught domain, littered with experiments and not amenable to evaluation, which is a long-term enterprise. Still, some radical reforms have fundamentally altered the terms of the public service bargains between politicians and civil servants. Introducing “radical” reform, such as at-will employment, undermines commitment and fails to produce the expected performance payoffs.