Belfast is the capital city of Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom and is therefore controlled by the British government based in London. It has a Protestant majority and a Catholic minority, the Catholic minority wants Northern Ireland to be reunited with the rest of Ireland into one nation. These political and religious differences have manifested themselves in the previous hundred years in bloody conflict and acts of terrorism and government persecution.

Although genocide can involve religious conflict, forced religious conversion, or spontaneous uprisings of ethnic violence, none of these answer choices is the best description of genocide. A “genocide” is a premeditated and deliberate attempt, usually sponsored by a government, to kill every individual from a particular ethnic group; to effectively eliminate that ethnic group’s presence from a region or from the planet. Famous examples of genocides include the Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Armenian Genocide.

Shi’ite and Sunni are the two major denominations of Islam. They have existed almost as long as the religion itself and the initial discord (to make a complicated issue as simple as is possible) springs from disagreement over who inherited the right to guide the direction of the Islamic faith following the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Most Middle Eastern countries have a majority that practices one denomination and a minority that practices the other. This had led to a great deal of conflict in the past century (and indeed for the past several centuries).

The Basque people are mostly concentrated in northeastern Spain, with some overlap into southwestern France. Basque is a language, a culture, and an ethnic group distinct from the rest of Spain and many individuals within the nationality have long sought an independent nation-state.

Kashmir is a region of Northwestern India that is contended between Indians and Pakistanis. It has a large Muslim population, many of whom wish to be part of Pakistan (a majority Muslim country) rather than part of India (a majority Hindu) country. This dispute has led to many deaths in the years since the Great Partition of India in 1947.

Due to its unique history of invasion, occupation, and population migration the Balkan region of Southern Europe contains a diverse mixture of ethnicities living in a relatively small piece of territory. For centuries the potentially violent tensions were contained by the powerful empires that occupied the region, but in the early 1990s, with the fall of Yugoslavia and the division of the Balkans into many smaller states, violence broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Sarajevo and Srebrenica neighbors of one ethnicity committed atrocities against neighbors of another ethnicity. The region is home to Serbs, Croats, Greeks, Albanians, Muslims, and Bosnians - many of whom have centuries long feelings of hatred and distrust towards one another. It is a volatile region of the world because of its ethnic diversity.

Cultural traditions are cohesive collections of ideas and customs that are unique or specific to certain regions. They can often be “syncretic” which means that they freely incorporate and mix cultural traits from a variety of sources. It is easy to remember this if you think of “syncretic” as being like “synthesize” which means to mix things into a cohesive whole unit.

The Caste System is an important aspect of Hindu and Indian culture, although its impact has faded slightly in the past half-century. Historians disagree as to how embedded in Indian society the Caste System was before the arrival of the Mughals and the British, but what is not debated is the impact that the Caste System has had on the lives of common Indian people. The Caste System states that all Indians are born into a “caste” or social grouping, such as “priest,” “warrior,” or “untouchable.” The “caste” an Indian is born into can determine what jobs he can get, what social groups he can move in, where he can live, and how he is treated by others.

Sometimes national literacy rates can be very deceiving when trying to study the literacy of individual countries. In some countries the experience of the people living in one part of the country could not be more culturally distinct from the experience of the people living in another part. Brazil is one such country. In the south, where Rio de Janiero and Sao Paulo are located the literacy rates are fairly close to ninety six percent; however, in the northeast, the poorest region of the country, literacy rates are closer to eighty percent. China has much less variable rates of literacy, but is nonetheless significantly variable by region. In developing countries with a large population that is spread over a large geographic area large variations in literacy are extremely common.

“Environmental determinism” is a theory of cultural geography that states that cultural traditions, and the differences between various cultures, are informed by environmental concerns. This had racial connotations during the age of European colonialism. It suggests that people in hotter and more challenging climates (most of the world, compared to Europe) possess cultures that are inherently different, and inferior, than European culture. This was used as an academic support for European colonialism.