Identity Politics (Political Science) Research Papers (original) (raw)

The book is devoted to the analysis of ethno-linguistic and socio-cultural foundations of the identity of Dagestanis. The author discribres
particularities of ethno-linguistic situation in the Mountainous and Lowland districts of Dageston, the influence of migration, urbanization, ethnic mixations on the cultural and language identity, as well as the correlation of ethnic and religious identitues, forms of actualization of ethnic and civil consciousness, ethnic stereotypes and other components of consciousness of Dagestanis. Special attention is paid to the problem of preserving the language diversity and cultural identity of the peoples of Dagestan.The book is intended for anthropologists, historians, philologists.
culture and a wide range of readers interested in Etnea-
takovymi and ethno-cultural problems.

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- Cultural Studies, Anthropology, Social Anthropology, Self and Identity

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

- by Thomas Clément MERCIER
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- Critical Theory, Discourse Analysis, Sociology, Cultural Studies

Since the Soviet dissolution in 1991, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have promoted the most active foreign policies in the region. From a wide perspective, they both have much in common. They both were under Russian domination along with being ruled by their respective irremovable leaders. Despite all those commonalities, they both have taken different foreign policy paths. This article explores and discusses the interconnection between national identity and foreign policy construction in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan by examining comparatively at the driving forces through which the regimes adopted identities based upon historical narratives of their demographics that have led to the formation of divergent foreign policies (Uzbekistan's unilateralism and Kazakhstan's multilateralism). This article adopts the constructivist approach to answer the puzzle, where the theory delineates the connection and perti-nence of national identity to foreign policy because the process of identifying the contrast of "self" and the "other" is socially constructed.

- by Jaechun Kim and +1
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- Comparative Politics, Foreign Policy Analysis, Identity (Culture), Post-Soviet Regimes
- by Carol Hardy-Fanta
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- Public Administration, Social Policy, Political Science, Economic policy

We continue the self-study tradition by examining an area that has not received much attention among political scientists: trends and patterns of multiple-authored journal articles in political science over time (for an exception, see Miller, Tien, and Peebler 1996a, Table 7). In the social sciences more generally, patterns of multiple authorship have increasingly become the focus of scholarly attention and concern (Endersby 1996; Fisher et al. 1998; De Maio and Kushner 1981; Hudson 1996; Wildavsky 1986). About half of all articles ...

- by Domenico Melidoro
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- Political Philosophy, Multiculturalism, Political Theory, Political Science

The United States has long grappled with the question of how to maintain an appropriate combination of religion and politics in the public sphere. The current electoral cycle is no different, as Presidential candidates attempt to negotiate both the political and religious landscapes. This essay introduces a special forum on rhetoric and religion in contemporary politics and touches on some recent instances of how religious differences have played out in the current political environment. Some of the issues discussed include the separation of church and state, Mitt Romney’s membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), Rick Santorum’s conception of the “war on religion,” and the controversy over contraceptives at religious institutions and Rush Limbaugh’s attacks on a Georgetown law student.

- by Brett Lunceford
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- Rhetoric (Languages and Linguistics), Religion, Sociology, Cultural Studies

Diplomatic and peacekeeping initiatives by the international community in emerging cultures in conflict have failed to stem the violence and resolve the underlying conditions. Based primarily on political analysis, such initiatives do not address the underlying causes of the civil war at the individual, family, and tribal levels. This paper examines the psychological and sociological motivations for the violence within and between the Arab and African tribes of Darfur, to include motivation exploration of ethnic defections, failing cultural identity markers, and the effects of cognitive dissonance of the personal and social identities of the Darfur tribes. Research suggests that the identities of the African and Arab tribes are deeply contested over ethnicity, tribalism, religion, race and the generational memory that historical narratives provide. This fundamental identity conflict is overlaid by decades of violent physical, psychological and emotional assault upon the population. The result is a fundamental change of the psycho-sociology of tribal life and threatens disintegration and disestablishment of large group identity. The resulting societal and leadership breakdown of and within the tribes creates conditions of warlord-ism commonly found in ungoverned states such as Somalia. The paper concludes that the international community will ultimately fail unless measures are taken to create conditions for survival of the tribes physically, psychologically and sociologically.

- by PATRICK J A M E S CHRISTIAN
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- Sociology, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Social Psychology
- by Lisa Elkins Goodman
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- Religion, History, American History, Modern History
- by Nives Dolsak
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- Political Science, Identity Politics (Political Science)

Regional identity has become an important category in the ‘Europe of regions’, and one that is often taken as self-evident in the relations between a group of people and a bounded region. The movement of people, capital and information across spatial boundaries that takes place in the contemporary world challenges the supposed harmonious link between regions and people on all spatial scales. This paper analyses the meanings of region and identity, and the links between them. Regions are understood as historically contingent structures whose institutionalisation is based on their territorial, symbolic and institutional shaping. Regional identity is understood as an abstraction that can be used to analyse the links between social actors and the institutionalisation process. This paper suggests that an analytical distinction between the identity of a region and the regional identity of its inhabitants, i.e. regional consciousness, is useful for problematising these links. The conceptual arguments will be illustrated with analyses of identity discourses related to Finnish regions and of the mobility of the Finns between regions.

- by Anssi Paasi
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- Cultural Studies, Cultural Geography, Regional Geography, Media Studies

While much of the existing academic scholarship on Japan-Korea relations has focused on the ongoing political and historical disputes related to World War II, this paper analyzes the experience of ethnic Koreans living in Japan on a microeconomic and sociological level. Zainichi Koreans and the ongoing structural societal and economic challenges they face in Japanese society are analyzed from a historical perspective throughout this paper. Through a comparative historical analysis of the experience of Koreans from the point when Japan annexed the Korean Peninsula in 1910 until liberalizing reforms of the twenty-first century, this paper shows that the social rights, civil rights, and economic opportunities of Zainichi Koreans have remained fluid throughout much of the twentieth century. While the challenges faced by Japan's Korean population have marginally improved since liberalizing reforms in the 1990s, this paper demonstrates that ongoing scapegoating on the part of politicians and negative public perceptions of Zainichi Koreans continue to pose challenges to Japan's sizeable Korean minority population.

- by Matthew Heidenreich
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- Korean Studies, Political Science, Identity (Culture), Japanese History

Chapter on Identity Politics in Kashmir

This paper focuses on the urban graffiti painted with a political message by different
movements of the Italian political radicalism in the cities of Rome, Florence, Massa,
Carrara, Verona and Udine. For the purpose of this article, during the period from June
2011 to June 2012, a total of 165 graffiti have been photographed, of which 83 painted by
neo-fascist groups, 72 by extreme left groups and 10 by anarchist groups. These three
macro communities, made of different subgroups, emerged as the most active in expressing
their antagonism towards the parliamentary parties with their graffiti that combine semantic
(words) and semiotic (images) elements. An analysis of the collected graffiti’s language
form, meaning and context allows for the identification of the variety of styles of
communication adopted by the different political antagonisms and the different contents of
their communication through graffiti as well as the key elements of their political identities.
Key words: political radicalism, graffiti, linguistics

- by Nicola Guerra
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- Creative Writing, Critical Theory, Discourse Analysis, Semiotics

This article explores the relationship between the method of process tracing and the data collection technique of elite interviewing. The process tracing method has become an in- creasingly used and cited tool in qualitative research, a trend that is likely to accelerate with the recent publication of Alexander George and Andrew Bennett’s text (2005) on case study research. That book outlines and explores the process tracing method in detail, high- lighting its advantages for exploring causal processes and analysing complex decision- making. Yet while the book presents a rigorous and compelling account of the process tracing method and its critical importance to case study research, the value of method itself remains contested in some quarters and there are aspects of George and Bennett’s treatment of it that require further exploration.

- by Oisin Tansey
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- Political Science, Identity Politics (Political Science)

Kwame Anthony Appiah (London, 1954) is one of the most renowned philosophers of contemporary thought. His work in the field of ethics and moral reach diverse subjects as sexual orientation, nationalism, social discrimination on ethnic or religious reasons and responsibility of governments and international organizations in development and poverty eradication.

This paper is focused on the dangers and opportunities for Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland presented by Brexit. It argues that the difficulties cannot analytically be understood nor the opportunities seized until we disaggregate ‘identity politics’, seeing it not as a function of a homogenous identity but of identity change. Once set in place, however, identity politics takes on its own dynamic. Exogenous shocks can open the opportunity of alternative aims, alliances and identity-coalitions, and then the task is to find the institutional and political incentives to guide identity change in more open, deliberative and dialogic directions. That is what a constitutional moment provides. I argue that the exogenous shock of Brexit opens the way for such a period of North-South deliberation and reconstruction. The paper begins with the general argument, and goes on to show how Brexit stimulates Irish government action and can lead to a constitutional moment, one focused not on the state in control in Northern Ireland but on creating deliberative political communities on the island and in its two parts .

En este texto quiero proponer una reflexión sobre los procesos de comunicación local. De entrada no tengo un interés de etiquetarlos con alguno de los tantos nombres que Benjamín Ferrón (2006) ha coleccionado para definirlos, dentro de los cuáles los más comunes podrían ser comunicación alternativa, comunitaria o participativa. Simplemente hago referencia a procesos localizados bien sea en un municipio, una comuna, un barrio o por qué no, una región, y generados desde sus propios habitantes. Procesos de comunicación materializados ya sea en medios, como lo son los periódicos, las radios o televisiones comunitarias; o en colectivos de comunicación, nucleados alrededor de la producción audiovisual, la creación artística, o la divulgación comunitaria del cine o del vídeo.

- by Andrea Teti
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- Middle East Studies, Middle East & North Africa, Religion and Politics, Politics

This book abounds in unsettling analyses, personal conviction, and practical recommendations for peace promotion. As such it not only joins much of Johan Galtung’s well-known lifework - it also defies any easy summary. Its object of study is peace in the Pacific region. Contrary to what the title suggests, the book is better understood as a stocktaking effort of peace and conflict dynamics in this particular geographical area, as terrorism and globalization are not actually being addressed. Overall, the book shows in detail how historical grievances emerged and how they are being perpetuated in Pacific historiographies. As an accomplished stock-taking effort dedicated to the impact of grievances on international conflict relations, the book is a worthwhile contribution to regional Pacific studies in general, but also to security studies and peace research more widely. Yet, readers will inevitably note a set of deeper structural and conceptual problems that affect the book’s overall contribution. One such problem is the book’s haphazard organization; another weakness is the manuscript’s nebulous scholarly basis.

- by Arthur Miller
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- Political Science, Identity Politics (Political Science)
- by Mohamed A Eno
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- Critical Theory, Sociology, Political Sociology, Social Psychology

The idea of focusing a conference on Palestinian Identity in relation to time and space is indeed pertinent. The development of the Palestinian Identity has been the focus of many studies and conferences. However, all of the studies so far concentrate on the emergence of this identity in the last hundred years. Although several papers in this book still have dealt with the development of the Palestinian Identity in late Ottoman and early British Mandate Palestine, another focus of the event was however on analyzing the understanding of the Palestinian Identity in relation to the biblical story, history and archeology and how this understanding has been reflected in poetry and the art. The self-Understanding of the Palestinians of themselves in relation to time and space and their relationship to other marginalized groups is a question of high political and social relevance.
The participation of scholars from different parts of the world in the event did not only bring an international scope, persuasions and perspectives, but helped fostering an ecumenical, interdisciplinary, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural environ, dialogues and philosophy.

- by Mitri Raheb and +4
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- Social Identity, Place and Identity, Identity (Culture), Sociology of Identity
- by Zenonas Tziarras
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- History, Cultural History, Political Sociology, Comparative Politics

In recent years, there has been an increasingly vivid discussion on the question and role of civil society. In Sweden, several voices have regarded civil society as the sphere through which the empowerment of citizens and the realization of democratic and even multicultural ideals are possible. The question whether civil society can fulfil this vision, and a corresponding critical examination, is the focus of this study. The problem of democracy and multiculturalism in relation to civil society must take into consideration different functions, tensions and even antagonisms between civil society, state and market, as well as between civil society and local hegemony. Local communities, with their civil societies, should be contextualized in relation to specific local hegemonies, as at the same time both established and changing orders of dominance, relying on combinations of and compromises between different social forces. Civil society is certainly essential for solving problems currently confronting Western democracy, but not as the sole playground for democratic influence and multicultural democracy. Questions of democratization, empowerment and multiculturalism have to be understood within a wider problematic connected to a larger hegemonic project and long-term struggle for changing predominant power structures and unequal distributions of or accesses to resources in society.

Feminist theory is assumed to be political by definition, but this view tends to occlude the different ways in which feminists think about politics. This essay discusses competing understandings of politics and examines how it is that things come to count as political within feminism. To think of relations of subordination of political, it is argued, is not simply to
discover a relation of power that was already there but to constitute that relation as unjust and subject to change. This is the predicative moment of feminist practice that brings the political into being.

- by Linda M G Zerilli
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- Politics, Identity Politics (Political Science), Feminism, Freedom
- by James Endersby
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- Political Science, Identity Politics (Political Science)
- by Lance Bennett
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- Political Science, Identity Politics (Political Science)

Building on past survey-based studies of ethnic identity, we employ the case of Ukraine to demonstrate the importance of taking seriously the multidimensionality of ethnicity, even in a country that is regarded as deeply divided. Drawing on relational theory, we identify four dimensions of ethnicity that are each important in distinctive ways in Ukraine: individual language preference, language embeddedness, ethnolinguistic identity, and nationality. Using original survey data collected in May 2014, we show that the choice of one over the other can be highly consequential for the conclusions one draws about ethnicity's role in shaping attitudes (e.g., to NATO membership), actions (e.g., participation in the Euromaidan protests), and the anticipation of outgroups' behavior (e.g., expectations of a Russian invasion). Moreover, we call attention to the importance of including the right control variables for precisely interpreting any posited effects of ethnicity, making specific recommendations for future survey research on ethnic identity in Ukraine.

- by Olga Onuch and +1
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- Sociology, Political Sociology, Ethnic Studies, Eastern European Studies

Liberalism is a term employed in a dizzying variety of ways across the humanities and social sciences. This essay seeks to reframe how the liberal tradition is understood. I start by delineating different types of response – prescriptive, comprehensive, explanatory – that are frequently conflated in answering the question “what is liberalism?” I then discuss assorted methodological strategies employed in the existing literature: after rejecting “stipulative” and “canonical” approaches, I outline a contextualist alternative. On this (comprehensive) account, liberalism is best characterised as the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, over time. In the remainder of the article I present an historical analysis of shifts in the meaning of liberalism in Anglo-American political thought between 1850 and 1950, focusing in particular on how John Locke came to be seen as a liberal. I also explore the emergence of the category of "liberal democracy". I argue that the scope of the liberal tradition was massively expanded during the middle decades of the twentieth century, such that it came to be seen by many as the constitutive ideology of the West. This capacious (and deeply confusing) understanding of liberalism was produced by a conjunction of the ideological wars fought against “totalitarianism” and assorted developments in the social sciences. Today we both inherit and inhabit it.

- by Duncan Bell
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- Critical Theory, American Literature, British Literature, Business Ethics

Based on in-depth oral interviews carried out in Mogadishu, Somalia, and countries neighboring Somalia in 2009 and 2013, our purpose in this study is to map the nature of prejudice and hate discourse used by Somalis against the Bantu Jareer and the Yibir, Gabooye, and Tumaal communities in Somalia. The hate discourse used against the Yibir, Gabooye, and Tumal outcast communities is premised on assumptions of their supposed unholy origin and their engagement in occupations and social activities that are despised by the so-called Somali noble groups. The prejudice and hate discourse against the Bantu Jareer Somalis is derived from their African origin and alleged African-like physical characteristics in comparison with the features of other Somalis.

- by Mohamed A Eno and +1
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- Critical Theory, History, Ethnohistory, Sociology
- by İlknur BEYAZ ÖZBEY
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- Cultural History, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Social Change

The concept ‘federalism’ in political science, like many other concepts in the social sciences, is without a universally accepted definition. As an ideology on one hand, federalism performs not only the function of explaining and orientating people on the federal phenomenon, but also empowers them to evaluate it and lastly guide political actions and programs to be undertaken in a federation. As a system of government on the other hand, it spells out the power relationship between at least two levels of government i.e how sovereignty is divided between the central government and the federating component units. Why do nations federate?, what are the factors or conditions that necessitated the adoption of federalism by independent nations?, how is a federation to be organised?, how is power to be shared between the said levels of government?, is federalism a means to an end or an end itself?, why do some federations succeed and others fail?. Answering these questions in time past and in recent years has been what the proponents of the diverse theories of federalism have preoccupied themselves with – legal-institutional theory; sociological theory; political/bargaining theory and lastly process/developmental theory. The historical and analytical approaches were adopted over the course of this study with secondary sources of qualitative data as the research methodology.

- by Diana Petkova
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- Sociology, Cultural Studies, Social Psychology, Intercultural Communication

Buku bungai rampai ini akan menelusuri serta menguak kasus-kasus intoleransi dan politik identitas yang terjadi di berbagai wilayah di Indonesia. Data terkini yang telah dikumpulkan melalui observasi mendetail di lapangan serta wawancara eksklusif dengan narasumber yang kompeten akan dianalisis dengan metode ilmiah untuk menghasikan suatu temuan dan kesimpulan yang berkualitas.

- by Evan Smith
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- History, Criminology, Political Sociology, Social Movements

Until the conclusion of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, there were roughly 750,000 Jews living in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, Algeria and Palestine/Israel. A comparative electronic survey of some 900 journals reveals that when scholars referred to these individuals collectively during the last 200 years they employed some twenty different signifiers. The question I address is simple yet potentially foundational: which collective signifier can define and capture most productively, inclusively and comprehensively the socio-political and cultural experiences of those who comprised the Arab Middle East's ten indigenous Jewish minority communities prior to their dispersal (in the post-1949 armistice period)? I propose that the signifier ‘Arabized-Jews’ exhibits explanatory properties that outweigh those of its alternatives both quantitatively and qualitatively. As such, ‘Arabized-Jews’ denotes Jews who were culturally and/or linguistically Arab yet who did not self-define primarily as Arab, let alone in political terms. In exploring the dialectic interface between ethno-politics, terminological formations and the production of meaning, this article suggests that it makes sense for contemporary scholars to employ ‘Arabized-Jews’ to refer collectively to Jews across the modern Arab Middle East.

- by Moshe Behar
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- Semiotics, Sociology, Social Movements, Ethnic Studies

As was the case with many newly independent African nations, Somalia was beset by a language problem whose complexity had begun well before independence and the unification of British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland in 1960. With three languages (English, Arabic, and Italian) used as media of communication in government offices and in schools, various Somali administrations struggled to contain the impasse but found no tangible solution. Barely three years after Mohamed Siad Barre seized power in October 1969, he had his military regime introduce the Somali orthography in the Latin alphabet. Based on this milestone, Siad Barre's military rule is highly commended for taking a remarkable step forward in what came to be known as the Somalization project. However, officials of the government and Somali scholarship failed to

- by Mohamed A Eno
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- Critical Theory, Languages, Cultural History, Cultural Studies
- by Nicola Guerra
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- Religion, History, European History, Military History
- by Basil Chulev
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- Religion, History, European History, Modern History