`migration' is in fact a suf®ciently coherent conceptto be explored in a single text. In sum, this is animportant and stimulating contribution to thepopulation geography literature and deserves to

be widely read and discussed.

TONY CHAMPION

University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK

WORLD DIRECTORY OF MINORITIES edited byMinority Rights Group International. MinorityRights Group, London, 1998. No. of pages:xvi� 840. Price: 100 (hardback). ISBN 1 873194 36 6.

Population geographers with interests in interna-tional migration, diasporas and ethnic minoritieshave been well served in recent years by a numberof important studies which offer an overarchinghistorical and geographical perspective at a globalscale. Now, following on from Stephen Castles andMark Miller's Age of Migration (1993), Aaron Segal'sAtlas of International Migration (1993) and RobinCohen's Cambridge Survey of World Migration (1995),we have this weighty encyclopaedic tome on theworld's ethnic minorities.An obvious key question is: how is a minority to

be de®ned? This volume bases its de®nition on thatoffered by the UN Sub-Commission on the Preven-tion of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities:a minority is `a non-dominant group; its membersmust possess ethnic, religious or linguistic char-acteristics differing from those of the rest of thepopulation; and they must also show, if onlyimplicitly, a sense of solidarity, directed towardspreserving their culture, traditions, religion orlanguage'. The Minority Rights Group (MRG),however, extends this formulation in two ways,by including non-dominant groups who mayactually be in a numerical majority in a state, andthose who are not necessarily nationals or citizensof the state in which they reside. In practice, it iswell-known that minorities suffer marginalisationand are unable to take decisions about their owndestiny; their populations frequently suffer highlevels of illiteracy, poverty, discrimination andsocial exclusion. Moreover, these and other pro-blems are often suffered more acutely by somesections of minority populations, such as women,children and older people.A second key question is: how many minorities

are there worldwide, and what proportion of totalworld population do they make up? This is muchmore dif®cult to answer. The Directory lists 700minorities, but there are probably some thousands,

bearing in mind that some are very small and thatthe notion of a minority is often expressed hier-archically there are minorities within minorities.Population statistics on minorities are controversial;the numbers are generally underestimated by thegovernments of the states in which they reside, andoverestimated by the minorities themselves. A verybroad estimate would be that minorities make up1020% of the world's population, but some wouldsay more. Excluded from this count would be othertypes of minority such as sexual minorities andpersons with disabilities; they are also excludedfrom the MRG Directory.

The Directory is organised on a geographicalbasis: 11 sections on major regions of the world(North America, Central and South America andthe Caribbean, Western Europe, Central and East-ern Europe, the Commonwealth of IndependentStates, the Middle East, North Africa, Central andSouthern Africa, South Asia, East and South-EastAsia, Oceania) and, within these regions, an alpha-betical sequencing of countries, some 200 in all. Thepro®le for each country provides information onlanguages spoken, religions practised and popula-tion statistics (which may be estimates) for the mainminority groups. Minority groups are then dis-cussed in the text, under each country, in descend-ing order of population size. Space is broadlyallocated according to the size of the minoritygroup and the availability of information. Whilstthe country-by-country approach is appropriate formost situations, it is less suitable for groups such asthe Kurds and the Roma which span severalcountries. The treatment of the Roma is particularlyuneven, included in Finland and excluded in Italyfor example.The production of this survey of the world's

minorities is undoubtedly a major achievement. Itwill be of great value to scholars, students, journal-ists, human rights campaigners, refugee and devel-opment agencies and, not least, to members of theminority communities themselves. The survey hasbeen compiled by a team of 22 specialist writers,assisted by a further 50 consultants and readers.Despite this major collaborative effort, it is clear that

Copyright # 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Int. J. Popul. Geogr.5 151±155 (1999)

154 Book Reviews

some of the expertise has been spread thinly overthe areas covered. Rather too often one reads that`information on these communities is not available',and the bibliographic coverage is patchy. A ®nalgripe concerns the maps; the slavish adherence tothe Peters projection for the cover and for thesectionalised maps in the text ignores the avail-ability of several other equal-area projections thatyield far less distortion of shape.

RUSSELL KING

University of Sussex, UK

REFERENCES

Castles, S. and Miller, M. J. (1993) The Age ofMigration: International PopulationMovements in theModern World (London: Macmillan)

Cohen, R. (ed.) (1995) The Cambridge Survey of WorldMigration (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress)

Segal, A. (1993) An Atlas of International Migration(London: Hans Zell)

Copyright # 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Int. J. Popul. Geogr.5 151±155 (1999)

Book Reviews 155