Affirmative action is a term applied to policies designed to redress inequalities created by historical legacies of racial, ethnic, and other types of group discrimination and disadvantage. Such policies have also been called affirmative discrimination, usually by those opposed to such measures, or positive discrimination, by proponents of these strategies. Like most social action aimed at redistributing resources and opportunities between groups, affirmative action is generally a controversial set of procedures and can lead to violent protests and opposition. The scope of affirmative action can be applied to a variety of different social institutions, but access to (higher) education, employment opportunities, and political quotas are the major arenas where affirmative action has been used. Differential group access to educational or employment positions is nothing new, as powerful groups in most societies have tended to monopolize life chances, even when the society claims to be based on egalitarian principles. What makes affirmative action so prone to conflict is that it represents an attempt to mitigate or reverse such inequalities for the sake of disadvantaged and generally less powerful groups.