Paradoxes of identity change: Integrating macro, meso, and micro research on identity in conflict processes

Abstract

Identity change is a core element of political conflict and transformation. Most relevant are changes towards and away from dyadically opposed identities. Defining an ‘enemy’, narrowing, or broadening the inner and outer circles of belonging to include or exclude the Other, are integral to conflict processes at international, state, group, and individual levels. This Special Issue brings together scholars with varied sub-disciplinary interests to engage with a set of common paradoxes surrounding identity change, in order to generate more synthetic comparative understandings of these processes. It aims to synthesize insights from different approaches and to show how change from dyadically opposed identities takes place in different contexts.

Everyday Nationalism and Making Identity Count

“…22 IR theorists are indeed primarily interested in regime changes, revolutions, military defeats, natural catastrophes (and similar chance events), world-level power transitions, and other similar large-scale events and processes as a way of analyzing change. See inter alia Thies and Nieman (2017), Rumelili and Todd (2017), and Hopf (2017). On the value of comparisons in interpretivism, see Yanow (2014).…”

Normative Power Europe as an Ingroup Projection? The EU’s Response to the Arab Uprising

“…Intergroup similarities may increase the tendency toward ingroup projection because they threaten positive distinctiveness (Mummendey and Wenzel 1999). Differentiation tends to persist even when there is intensive intergroup contact; when the self and other become increasingly familiar and alike, one must be aware of and protect what differentiates the self from the other (Rumelili and Todd 2018). The NPE discourse relies on both the exclusivity and normative differentiation of the European identity in foreign policy.…”

“…In this study, we conceive the EU's ingroup projection as a discursive/cognitive practice of NPE discourse as a wide discursive strategy The EU's response to the Arab uprisings serves to substantiate the assumptions of the paper insofar as uprisings involve first and foremost a cognitive change of the EU's other in the Mediterranean region. A change produced by Arab people both reclassifies the people themselves and changes the meanings and boundaries ascribed to their former identities (Rumelili and Todd 2018), developing a new Arab Mediterranean identity. Hence, focusing on the new intergroup relationship between the EU and the new Arab identity, the paper presents a concrete illustration of how ingroup projection as a discursive/cognitive practice of othering can explain the EU's response to the Arab uprising.…”

The politics of identity change and conflict: An agenda for research

“…This Special Issue takes identity change as a key area for research, focusing in particular on identity change in conflict processes. Rumelili and Todd’s (2017) analysis of the paradoxes of identity change shows the need to move beyond paradigmatic thinking and linear methodologies to show a political field of intersecting processes, contradictory forces, and intense activity producing seemingly persistent ‘identity politics’. By emphasizing paradox, they show the importance of moving beyond theoretical paradigms to comparative and empirical research on identity change.…”