Montenegro’s Minorities in the Tangles of Citizenship, Participation, and Access to Rights

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between citizenship, participation, cultural and socio-economic rights of minorities in Montenegro by focusing on the divergence between policies and their implementation. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it combines insights from law with ones from social and political studies. The paper is divided into three sequential analytical sections. The first section focuses on the definition of minorities in Montenegro, examining the relation between the status of minority and citizenship. The second section relates the previously analyzed concepts of citizenship and minority to representation and participation. It seeks to examine electoral legislation within the framework of ‘authentic representation’ of minorities, enshrined in the 2007 Constitution of Montenegro. The final section assesses minority access to cultural (group) and socio-economic (individual) rights. The section brings forward the argument that, despite the existing legal guarantees, many of these rights are too complex to realize in practice, particularly those related to language and education in one’s own language.