Second Wave of Multiculturalism: Justice Within Groups

The early debates on multiculturalism asked a fairly simple question: should the state recognise and protect cultural minorities, and if so, how? Thinkers like Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor built powerful arguments for granting special rights to disadvantaged cultural groups so they could survive within a larger society. But by the late 1990s, a new generation of scholars began asking a sharper, more uncomfortable question. What happens to the vulnerable people inside these protected groups? When the state grants a community the right to follow its own customs, who within that community pays the price? This shift in attention marks what political theorists call the second wave of multicultural writings, and it fundamentally changed how we think about diversity, rights, and justice.

From justice between groups to justice within groups 🔗

The first wave of multiculturalism was concerned with inter-group justice, that is, fairness between the cultural majority and minority communities. The argument was that a supposedly neutral liberal state actually favours the dominant culture, its language, its holidays, its norms. To correct this imbalance, minorities deserved group-differentiated rights such as language protections, religious exemptions, or self-government.

The second wave did not reject this concern. Instead, it added a crucial layer. Scholars argued that cultural groups are not homogeneous blocks of identical people. Every community contains internal hierarchies based on gender, caste, age, sexuality, and status. Protecting a group as a whole can end up protecting the power of its dominant members, often older men, while leaving its weaker members, frequently women and sexual minorities, with even less recourse than before. The focus therefore moved to intra-group justice, meaning fairness within communities. The University at Albany’s research project on justice and multiculturalism captures this concern, noting that injustice based on individual characteristics such as gender, race, religion, and sexuality persists even as societies become more diverse.

This is the heart of what is sometimes called the “minorities within minorities” problem. A religious minority might be vulnerable in relation to the national majority, but a woman within that religious minority can be doubly vulnerable: marginalised by the larger society and subordinated within her own community.

Kymlicka’s distinction: internal restrictions and external protections 🔗

Much of the second wave debate engages with a distinction made by Will Kymlicka in his influential book Multicultural Citizenship. Kymlicka separated two very different kinds of group claims.

External protections 🔗

External protections are rights a minority group claims against the larger society to reduce its vulnerability to outside economic and political pressure. Examples include language rights, land rights, or guarantees of representation. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains that these are designed to reduce a minority’s vulnerability to the economic and political power of the larger society. Kymlicka argued that a liberal state should support these.

Internal restrictions 🔗

Internal restrictions are rights a group claims against its own members, typically to limit the freedom of individuals in the name of group solidarity or cultural survival. This might mean restricting a member’s right to leave the faith, to marry outside the community, or to challenge traditional gender roles. Kymlicka argued that a liberal theory of minority rights cannot accept internal restrictions because they violate individual autonomy.

In short, Kymlicka treated external protections as “good” group rights and internal restrictions as “bad” group rights. The problem the second wave identified is that the two are not always easy to separate in practice. Granting a group the autonomy to govern itself (an external protection) can hand it the power to oppress its own members (an internal restriction). As critics have pointed out, respecting the self-government of a community may simultaneously permit discriminatory membership or family rules within it. The two can be different sides of the same coin.

The feminist critique: is multiculturalism bad for women? 🔗

The most famous intervention in the second wave came from the feminist political philosopher Susan Moller Okin. In her 1999 essay, provocatively titled Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, she argued that there is a real and often ignored tension between the goals of gender equality and the goals of cultural accommodation.

Okin’s core claim was that most cultures are deeply structured by practices and ideologies that disadvantage women relative to men. When the state grants special rights to a group in order to preserve its culture, it often ends up entrenching exactly those patriarchal practices. She pointed to issues like polygamy, child marriage, unequal divorce rights, and control over women’s bodies and movement. Her concern was that much of this discrimination happens in the private sphere of the family, precisely the area that cultural accommodation tends to shield from state scrutiny.

Okin’s essay was deliberately one-sided to provoke debate, and it succeeded. Fifteen leading thinkers responded in the published volume, and the responses were sharp. Some critics, like the legal scholar Leti Volpp, argued that pitting feminism against multiculturalism obscures the way women exercise agency within their own cultures and masks the very real violence within Western societies too. The worry was that Okin’s framing risked portraying minority cultures as uniquely oppressive while treating the majority culture as already enlightened, an assumption that can fuel prejudice rather than justice. Even so, Okin’s challenge could not be dismissed. It forced multiculturalists to take intra-group inequality seriously.

Kymlicka’s response 🔗

Kymlicka replied that feminism and multiculturalism are actually allies, not enemies. He argued that both movements aim at a more inclusive idea of justice and both challenge the old liberal assumption that equality requires identical treatment. The solution, in his view, was not to abandon group rights but to support only the external protections while firmly rejecting internal restrictions that harm women. Critics responded that this neat distinction is hard to enforce, because a state rarely has full knowledge of what happens inside a community’s private and family life.

The Indian context: personal laws and gender justice 🔗

These debates are not abstract for India. The country runs a system of religion-based personal laws that govern marriage, divorce, inheritance, and adoption differently for different communities. This is, in effect, a form of multicultural accommodation. It recognises the cultural and religious autonomy of communities, an external protection in Kymlicka’s terms. But it also raises exactly the intra-group justice worries the second wave identified, because these laws have historically disadvantaged women.

From Shah Bano to Shayara Bano 🔗

The Shah Bano case of 1985 became the symbol of this conflict. When the Supreme Court granted a divorced Muslim woman maintenance under the general criminal code, it triggered a political backlash, and Parliament passed a law that was widely seen as reversing the verdict to preserve community sentiment. The case brought the tension between personal laws, gender equality, and religious freedom to the centre of national debate. It is a textbook example of how protecting a group’s autonomy can come at the cost of the rights of women within that group.

Decades later, the Shayara Bano case of 2017 revisited the same fault line. The Supreme Court struck down the practice of instant triple talaq (talaq-e-biddat) as unconstitutional, with the majority holding that it could be reviewed and was not protected as an essential religious practice. Crucially, the litigation saw wide participation from Muslim women’s groups themselves, which points to an important lesson of the second wave: the people inside a community are not passive victims waiting to be rescued. They are active agents demanding reform on their own terms. At the same time, scholars have noted that even this landmark verdict engaged only weakly with the deeper question of gender equality, leaving practices like polygamy and nikah halala unaddressed.

These cases also feed into the long-running debate over a Uniform Civil Code under Article 44 of the Constitution. The dilemma is genuine: a uniform code could advance gender equality, but critics worry it might erase legitimate cultural diversity or simply impose majority norms on minorities. This is precisely the knot the second wave tried to untangle, balancing inter-group respect with intra-group fairness.

Beyond gender: sexual minorities and animal welfare 🔗

The second wave’s insight extends beyond women to other vulnerable members inside communities.

LGBTQ+ individuals within cultural communities 🔗

Sexual minorities often face a double bind similar to women. A queer person belonging to a conservative religious or cultural community may experience marginalisation from mainstream society while also facing rejection, secrecy, or coercion within their own group. When cultural autonomy is used to justify suppressing non-conforming sexualities, the logic of internal restriction is once again at work. Recognising this, second wave thinking insists that a community’s claim to preserve tradition cannot automatically override the dignity and freedom of its individual members.

Animal welfare and cultural practice 🔗

A further dimension that some writers raise is the ethical treatment of animals within cultural practices. Many traditions involve animals, through sacrifice, sport, or ritual, and these practices have come into sharp conflict with animal welfare concerns. In India, the controversy over jallikattu, the bull-taming sport in Tamil Nadu, is the clearest example. When the Supreme Court initially banned it on cruelty grounds, the response was massive public protest framing the sport as a matter of Tamil cultural identity and pride.

Commentators have observed that both the jallikattu issue and debates over cattle slaughter become heated precisely because bans are perceived as impinging on the rights of cultural minorities. This creates a genuine tension between cultural autonomy and the welfare of non-human beings, and it raises a difficult question. The clash, as one analysis frames it, sits between a universalist position that extends moral consideration to all beings and a communitarian one that emphasises cultural specificity. Animals, of course, cannot speak for themselves at all, making them in some sense the most voiceless party of all within a cultural practice.

What the second wave teaches us 🔗

The lasting contribution of the second wave is a more nuanced and honest approach to diversity. It refuses two easy answers. It rejects the idea that the state should simply leave communities alone to do as they please, because that abandons the vulnerable people inside. But it also rejects the idea that minority cultures should be forced to assimilate into the majority, because that erases legitimate difference and often disguises majority prejudice.

Instead, the second wave asks for a careful, case-by-case balancing. Cultural accommodation is valuable, but it should not be a shield behind which internal injustice hides. The goal is to protect groups from external domination while ensuring those same groups do not dominate their own members. Importantly, the people best placed to lead this reform are often the marginalised members themselves, as the participation of women’s groups in India’s personal law debates shows. Justice within groups, not just justice between them, becomes the true measure of a fair multicultural society.

What do you think? When a cultural practice protected as a minority right harms a vulnerable member inside that community, where should the line be drawn between respecting cultural autonomy and protecting individual freedom? And who do you think should have the authority to decide that line, the state, the community’s leaders, or its most affected members?

References

1. https://www.albany.edu/scj/research/justice-multiculturalism
2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/multiculturalism/
3. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/will-kymlicka
4. https://shc.stanford.edu/arcade/interventions/introduction
5. https://www.law.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Feminism-versus-Multiculturalism.pdf
6. https://iisppr.org.in/a-study-of-personal-laws-in-india-uniform-civil-code-vs-personal-freedom/
7. https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/triple-talaq-and-womens-rights-in-the-indian-supreme-court/
8. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/24730580.2018.1510162
9. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24730580.2018.1453750
10. https://m.thewire.in/article/society/the-cultural-politics-of-animal-welfare-in-india
11. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/10/8/475