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the relationship between security and identity, that occupies a central role in contemporary British identity politics, and foresees its continued, increasing importance. The diagram of counter-radicalisation This book has sought to demonstrate that at the heart of Prevent lies an important development in how the state seeks to govern the possibility of future violence. Going beyond previous counter-terrorism strategies, as shown in chapter 3 , Prevent contains a temporal ambition to intervene early: to intervene
Identity is often regarded as something that is possessed by individuals, states, and other agents. In this edited collection, identity is explored across a range of approaches and under-explored case studies with a view to making visible its fractured, contingent, and dynamic features. The book brings together themes of belonging and exclusion, identity formation and fragmentation. It also examines how identity functions in discourse, and the effects it produces, both materially and in ideational terms. Taking in case studies from Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, the various chapters interrogate identity through formal governing mechanisms, popular culture and place. These studies demonstrate the complex and fluid nature of identity and identity practices, as well as implications for theorising identity.
In 1989, in the American journal The National Interest, Francis Fukuyama's conclusion was about the triumph of Western democratic liberal capitalism over communism. The forces of liberal capitalism that he saw as representing the end of history have unleashed a powerful wave of anger directed at the winning elites. This book is written with two purposes in mind. The first is to try to make some sense of what appears to be a world that is falling apart around us. The second is to try to advance an argument about where we go from here. One of the arguments of the book is that the Brexit and Trump results are a consequence of a series of failures. The book explores debates about methodology and political theory, and about the importance of context and thus of narratives. It discusses points from this debate between the behaviouralists and those in political theory. The book discusses the electoral results of Trump and of Brexit, offering an interpretation of what these results mean in the context of a post-fact world of identity politics. It argues for the importance of political responsibility and of how by recasting and re-emphasising the politics of responsibility becomes possible to address the current failures of our political leaders and political systems. The book suggests three elements to politics: the relationship between knowledge and power, with a particular emphasis on the role of interpretation; political responsibility or the politics of responsibility; and the significance of narratives or meaning (hermeneutics).
Northern Ireland is no longer the relentless headline-maker in the global media it once was, when multiple killings and bombings provided a daily diet of depressing news and images. This book commences with a review of the literature on essentialism and then in the three domains: what has come to be known as 'identity politics'; the nature of nationalism; and power-sharing models for divided societies. It draws out implications for key aspects of the Northern Ireland problem. The book is based on secondary sources on Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (B-H). A key resource is the independent journalistic network in the Balkans responsible for the production of Balkan Insight, successor to the Balkan Crisis Report, a regular e-mail newsletter. The book explores how policy-makers in London and Dublin, unenlightened by the benefit of hindsight, grappled with the unfamiliar crisis that exploded in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s. It shows that a taken-for-granted communalism has had very negative effects on societies recently driven by ethnic conflict. The book argues that conflicts such as that in Northern Ireland can only be adequately understood within a broader and more complex philosophical frame, freed of the appealing simplifications of essentialism. More than a decade on from the Belfast agreement, the sectarian 'force field' of antagonism in Northern Ireland remained as strong as ever. Unionism and nationalism may be antagonistic but as individual affiliations 'Britishness' and 'Irishness', still less Protestantism and Catholicism, need not be antagonistic.
There has been a lot of talk about the European Union's so-called 'democratic deficit', by which is meant its lack of legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens. This book provides a critical analysis of the democratic stalemate in European politics. It argues that the root of the 'democratic deficit' has more to do with the domestic political fields of the Union's member-states and the structure of the evolving European political field than with the relationships between supranational institutions. The book analyses the complex ways 'Europe' is integrated into domestic politics and shows how domestic political fields and cultures have prevented deepening integration. As a result of the formation of a European political field, political resources in European 'postnational' and 'postabsolutist' polities are being redistributed. The theory of structural constructivism proposed fuses French structural theories of politics and a 'bottom-up' approach to European integration. The book examines the relationship between French political traditions and the construction of a European security structure from the point of view of identity politics and the French post-imperialist syndrome. The educational and social homogeneity of French civil servants provides a political resource that certain individuals can use in Brussels, influencing the direction and form of European integration. Studying legislative legitimacy in the European Parliament elections, the book highlights that intellectuals are important players in French politics: the politics of the street has always been a key part of French political life.
Since the early 2000s, global, underground networks of insurrectionary anarchists have carried out thousands of acts of political violence. This book is an exploration of the ideas, strategies, and history of these political actors that engage in a confrontation with the oppressive powers of the state and capital. The vast majority of these attacks have been claimed via online communiqués through anonymous monikers such as the Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI). The emphasis of the insurrectionary, nihilist-infused anarchism is on creating war-like conditions for opposing capitalism, the state, and that which perpetuates structural violence (e.g. racism, poverty, speciesism, gender roles). To connect the various configurations of post-millennial, insurrectionary resistance, the book explores explore three of its most identifiable components, the FAI, Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (CCF), and emergent networks in Mexico. In his discussion of guerrilla warfare and terrorism, conflict theorist Richard Rubenstein points to a two-stage understanding advocated by Vietnamese leader and military strategist General Vo Nguyen Giap. The book also examines the strategy of Blanquism, the contribution of "classical anarchists," the influence of theorists such as Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee. It seeks to construct the basis for an insurrectionary framework based around a shared politic. The feminist methodology and ethic of research adds a great deal, including a reading of identity politics, standpoint theory, action-orientated research, and embedded, emotive and sincere participatory involvement. The design and methodological intent of the book is to embrace a "militant" form of inquiry which is counter to the project of securitization.
In the social sciences, recognition is considered a means to de-escalate
conflicts and promote peaceful social interactions. This volume explores the
forms that social recognition and its withholding may take in asymmetric armed
conflicts. It discusses the short- and long-term risks and opportunities which
arise when local, state and transnational actors recognise armed non-state
actors (ANSAs), mis-recognise them or deny them recognition altogether.
The
first part of the volume contextualises the politics of recognition in the case
of ANSAs. It provides a historical overview of recognition regimes since the
Second World War and their diverging impacts on ANSAs’ recognition claims. The
second part is dedicated to original case studies, centring on specific conflict
phases and covering ANSAs from all over the world. Some examine the politics of
recognition during armed conflicts, others in conflict stalemates, and others
still in mediation and peace processes. The third part of the volume discusses
how the politics of recognition impacts practitioners’ engagement with conflict
parties, gives an outlook on policies vis-à-vis ANSAs, and sketches
trajectories for future research in the field.
The volume shows that, while
non-recognition prevents conflict transformation, the recognition of armed
non-state actors may produce counterproductive precedents and new modes of
exclusion in intra-state and transnational politics.
an interpretation of how to understand these electoral results. This discussion turns on the role of identity. When interpretation and narrative function as the means by which we engage with the world, identity is never far behind. Our narratives are necessarily linked with our identities. However, as identity politics has come to play an increasingly important role in the public sphere, we have lost sight of how identity functions and instead turned identity into a variable for conflict. This is the problem in many debates about multiculturalism, minorities, and
some time, questions of identity have been fixated on ‘identity politics’, which has pitched class against gender, race, sexuality and other status-based social movements which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in response to post-industrial change. Neo-Marxists upheld class as the main social movement through which to address structural inequality and promote social change (Bernstein 2005, 66). As such, identity politics based on other social status is regarded as a distraction to achieving wider social justice and is thus non-political (despite the intersection of
– such as the ones about Austria – mobilised national culture and identity politics in their audio-visual rhetoric. 27 Although the MP films about Greece follow this trend, their projection of a ‘humanitarian narrative’ is consistently related to a historical dialectic between modern and classical Greece that positions the MP aid within a dual perspective of national reconstruction and universal necessity