Collective Political Identity Research Articles

Navigating Political Borders Old and New: The Territoriality of Indigenous Inuit Governance

ABSTRACTThis article looks at the ways in which borders have and continue to construct, define, and redefine Arctic collective political identities, the Arctic’s political geography and finally the implications of changing borders for Arctic policymaking. The article begins by engaging with critical international relations and geography literature regarding border construction as a physical entity and as an intellectual construct. The following two sections focus on the making and remaking of Inuit borders and the reconceptualization of political space which has accompanied this process. Through a case study of what is defined here as the Inuit polity (Shadian, J. M. 2014. The Politics of Arctic Sovereignty: Oil, Ice, and Inuit Governance. New York: Routledge), sections three and four re-examine the sedimented and traditional notions of borders, the newly created borders carved out of the land claims, those political entities which transcend state borders through Inuit Arctic politics, and the less well-defined borders that exist between water and land, ice and land, ice and water. The article then turns to the specific policy case of Arctic Search and Rescue and the tensions between conventional state-centered policy and Inuit political spaces. The point is to draw out the ways in which conventional thinking about borders limits the complex realities and challenges for Arctic Search and Rescue. Lastly, this paper brings this critical analysis of borders and territoriality to think about what critical political geography may impart regarding questions of governance, legal space, and policy in the Arctic.

An Exploration of the Concept of Community and Its Impact on Participatory Governance Policy and Service Delivery in Poor Areas of Cape Town, South Africa

ABSTRACTThe inclusion of citizen participation as a means to the equitable delivery of public services has distinguished South Africa’s democratic development trajectory over the last 20 years. While equitable resource allocation remains high on the agenda of more recently democratised states, most of which have highly diverse and unequally resourced populations. Influencing the design of more inclusive participation is the notion of a universal citizenship that applies the concept of the equality of individuals to the needs, identities and sense of agency of citizens both between and within states. The liberal democratic theoretical conceptualisation of the individual centres on the notion of universal citizen, who is the recipient and embodiment of democracy through the rights bestowed through the democratic model. This conceptualisation has been criticised for its inability to deal with the imprecision of individual and collective political identities, especially as these evolve in newly democratic contexts. The construction of a single identity citizen living in communities imbued with homogenous characteristics is carried forward into the policy construction of participatory governance. This article explores and challenges the notion of the single identity citizen that belongs to one homogenous community that can be identified and drawn into formally constructed government spaces. The paper explores the construction of political and socio-economic identities and how notions of community are constructed by citizens, on the one hand, and government policies, on the other.

Out and Asian: How Undocu/DACAmented Asian Americans and Pacific Islander Youth Navigate Dual Liminality in the Immigrant Rights Movement

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) represent the fastest-growing racial category in the U.S., largely due to its increasing immigration from the Asia-Pacific region (AAJC 2015). Of the 10.9 million undocumented immigrants residing in the U.S., 14% (1.5 million) are from Asia (Migration Policy Institute 2014). In response to immigrant youth organizing, President Barack Obama initiated the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2012, which offers temporary relief from deportation to approximately 2 million undocumented childhood arrivals (Ibid). Yet, the unique perspectives of AAPI youth have gone unheard, and their political activities have been rendered invisible in public discourse on undocu/DACAmented youth in the immigrant rights movement. This study aims to capture political identity formation through what I coin “dual liminality” that leads to political participation for undocu/DACAmented AAPI youth. It considers how their status as undocumented or DACA, as being marginalized from both mainstream and co-ethnic claims to belonging, helped them form a collective political identity and engage in political activities. The use of strategic storytelling (Polletta 2006) throughout the process of their political development also led to their return to organize co-ethnic communities against internalized stereotypes of both “Model Minority” and “Yellow Peril”. This study involves 12 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with politically active AAPI, ages 20–26, from four major cities on the East Coast, conducted between 2014 and 2015. The interviews demonstrate how these youths’ choices to reveal their status shape their collective identity formation that leads to their political engagement. Through strategic storytelling, they use their dual liminality to shape their narrative framing in both the immigrant rights and in AAPI communities, enhancing their political participation across inter-racial boundaries.

Assessing Politicized Sexual Orientation Identity: Validating the Queer Consciousness Scale

ABSTRACTBuilding on psychological theories of motivation for collective action, we introduce a new individual difference measure of queer consciousness, defined as a politicized collective identity around sexual orientation. The Queer Consciousness Scale (QCS) consists of 12 items measuring five aspects of a politicized queer identity: sense of common fate, power discontent, system blame, collective orientation, and cognitive centrality. In four samples of adult women and men of varied sexual orientations, the QCS showed good test-retest and Cronbach’s reliability and excellent known-groups and predictive validity. Specifically, the QCS was positively correlated with identification as a member of the LGBTQ community, political liberalism, personal political salience, and LGBTQ activism and negatively correlated with right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. QCS mediated relationships between several individual difference variables and gay rights activism and can be used with both LGBTQ people and allies.

‘Freedom can only exist in an ordered state’: harmony and civic education in Singapore

This paper uses the concept of stories of peoplehood to examine how the Singapore government has constructed a story of harmony and to consider how this story has influenced two important school subjects focused on civic education: Social Studies and Character and Citizenship Education. Stories of peoplehood, including constitutive, economic and political power stories, play a central role in the political project of people-making which involves defining the nature of membership in a political community and promoting a collective political identity. This study provides an alternative way of conceptualizing the goals and curriculum content of civic education and it also offers an example of how a nation state with a strong Confucian tradition has chosen to address the educational goal of living together through the promotion of values such as social cohesion and community relationships within a story of harmony. The study also shows how Singapore political leaders construct a narrow and limited discourse of harmony within the curricula and use it to legitimize policies that privilege particular groups, limit political freedoms, marginalize groups with less power or status, and circumscribe the kinds of actions a citizen can legitimately take.

Analysis of dynamics of politicized collective identity in post-Dergue Ethiopia: A sociological and social-psychological analysis

The identity issues in post-Dergue Ethiopia deserve empirical and analytical considerations that may provide insights about how to deal with identity-based contestations and violence. This paper makes a sociological and social-psychological analysis of various dynamics of politicized collective identity in post-Dergue Ethiopia. It assesses the social-psychological meanings of the political and social processes, practices and structures that give rise to reconstruction and re-negotiation of identity and identity-based contestations. It focuses on the political, social and psychological dimensions of identity and identification processes. The paper draws on various research outcomes and theories of identity construction to explain the dynamics of identity processes and their implication for inter-group relationships mainly in the geographical margins of the country where such groups share natural resources and socio-cultural communalities. The paper critiques also the conceptual and ontological limitations of academic writings that participate in the objectification of ethnicity in their effort to forge the political, social, cultural and ethnic modalities predisposed to define the essence of identity groups.

Against Utopia: Fantasies of Emancipation in Ana Teresa Torres's Nocturama (2006)

Through its dual allegorical structure, Ana Teresa Torres's novel Nocturama (2006) negotiates the antagonisms between two conflicting ideologies at work in contemporary Venezuela. The novel is narrated by ‘Aspern’, a pseudo-intellectual who tells crude versions of Venezuelan Independence and Bolivarian Socialism in tandem. Aspern's foundational fable, which parodies the figure of Simón Bolívar, explores the demands of a primitive community in search of a collective political identity that, in turn, promises emancipation. Meanwhile, Aspern's accounts of the twenty-first century, as experienced by amnesiac Ulises, detail the restrictions to civil liberties upon the empowerment of the popular classes. Fleeing from encroached collectivity, Ulises escapes into a world of consumerism and privacy governed by marketisation. Theoretically, these narratives of common identity and individualism are at odds. Yet Torres's interweaving of the allegories in Nocturama prevents them to be understood separately. Read together, both stories emerge from Utopian visions that promise to their adherents absolute freedom upon their realisation. Rather than engender emancipation, however, Utopian thought as an ideological blueprint creates dystopian conditions. Against the notion that Utopian thought will liberate an oppressed society, Nocturama suggests that the recourse to Utopianism in ideology ultimately results in segregation and discontent.

Dual Identification and the (De‐)Politicization of Migrants: Longitudinal and Comparative Evidence

AbstractThe article examines the role of dual identification with both the ethnocultural ingroup and the society of residence in the politicization of migrants. The researchers employed a longitudinal and comparative research design with members of the two largest, but sociologically very different, migrant groups in Germany as research participants (i.e. Turkish migrants and Russian migrants). In line with prior work that has shown that, among members of aggrieved groups, dual identity functions as a politicized collective identity, we found that dual identification fostered political engagement among Turkish migrants. In contrast, Russian migrants reported no substantial grievances, and dual identification negatively affected their subsequent political engagement. The contributions of these findings to an articulation of research on politicization with research on intergroup conflict and a more comprehensive understanding of political phenomena driven by dual identification are discussed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

‘On my mind's world map, I see an Africa’: Bando de Teatro Olodum's re-routing of Afro-Brazilian identity

A group of black children in the city of Salvador da Bahia, intrigued by their teacher's explanation that black Brazilians are descendants of Africans, embark on a quest to search for Africa. This is the central plot of Áfricas – Bando de Teatro Olodum's theatre production for young people that premiered in 2007 (Teatro Vila Velha, Salvador da Bahia). In this critical reflection I focus on the productive intersections between diaspora and race, and consider the ways in which Áfricas claims a diaspora sensibility for Afro-Brazilians by enacting, both for the performers and for the audience, an awareness of themselves as an ethnic group with transnational roots. Drawing on understandings of diaspora as a contingent process rather than a way to reify certain communities, I argue that Áfricas' staging of the connections between Brazil and Africa opens up a space in which young audiences can engage in what Chantal Mouffe calls ‘agonistic pluralism’ (2007), a debate in which passions and affects critically inform ‘the creation of collective political identities’. I assert that the show's exploration of new formulations of Afro-Brazilian identity serves a therapeutic function for the black community in Salvador, who are often excluded in a country where the whiter one looks ensures greater access to social and economic privileges.

Untold Crimes: The First World War and the Historical Crime Fiction of Jean Amila and Didier Daeninckx

This article considers how Jean Amila's Le Boucher des Hurlus (1982) and Didier Daeninckx's Le Der des ders (1984) expose hidden crimes committed by figures of French military authority during the First World War; how they reject the myth of a France united by combat embodied in the heroic and steadfast poilu; and how they complicate and pluralise memories of the war through the existence of a counter-memory and a counter-myth founded upon the figure of the mutin de guerre. It illustrates how the French historical crime novel resolves the tension between the historian, concerned primarily with collective ideas and responsibility, and the judge, seeking to ascertain the extent of individual guilt, thereby constituting an intermediary, marrying the ethical, the factual and the political. It concludes, however, by exploring the limits of memory, narrative and collective political identity proposed in both works, but also considers the readership of such crime fiction as a contemporary counter-community.

Movimento 5 stelle. Identità, poteri, corpi

This article, Movimento 5 Stelle. Identities, Powers, Bodies, concerns the collective and relational nature of the identity on which the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S) is based. Identity and participation are analysed in relation to reticular power and 2.0 rituality, both performed by this political subject. Attention will be drawn to the thematization of the idea of the web as a place in which and from which moving and participating, the initiatory place of the collective political identity: a net which represents an essential moment for those who want to experience the new political identities that are developing on different relational and representative orders.

Identity and state: Ethnic conflicts and internal (non)legitimacy of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Political legitimacy is closely related to the concept of identity and it is, to the certain extent, dependent on it. In order for the state to possess internal legitimacy it is necessary for her citizens to share some sort of collective political and/or national identity. This condition, however, is extremely hard to fulfill in multinational states whose societies are deeply divided across ethnic and political lines, and that do not have historical continuity, which is, among the others, the case with Bosnia and Herzegovina. Although the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina had ended almost two decades ago, the political situation and relations in this country are still very complex, which destabilizes the situation and prevents the establishment of the stable and sustainable political system. The main problem in Bosnia and Herzegovina are opposed interests and wishes of the political parties, as well as the constituent peoples. Exclusive national politics dominate the whole of the country, which prevents integration of the institutions at all levels and limits the capacity for political reforms. On the one hand, national politics do not leave any space for the activities of political options that could extend beyond ethnic borders, while, on the other, conflicting national interests prevent any, even minimal, consensus, which could lead to the normalization of the situation in the country, establishment of the long term stability and internal legitimacy.

Collective Identity and Despotism: Lessons in Two Plays by Bahram Beyzaie

With an overview of identity as a dominant theme in Bahram Beyzaie's artistic creations, this article examines two of his, arguably, most political plays: Chahar Sanduq (Four Boxes, 1967) and Khaterat-e Honarpisheh-ye Naqsh-e Dovvom (Memoirs of the Actor in a Supporting Role, 1981) to examine his reflections on the nature, function, and vulnerability of collective social, political, and cultural identity in authoritarian societies. Both plays illustrate that the tyrannical rulers of such societies perpetuate their dominance over their subjects through exploiting the individual's self-interests, thereby isolating him and stripping him of collective and, inevitably, individual identity. Beyzaie's allegorical and rather abstract approach in these plays contributes to conveying a less topical, culture-specific, and more universal message.

An Aboriginal Perspective on Canada’s Human Rights “Culture”

It was a profound achievement for Indigenous peoples to be recognized as peoples with associated rights under international law. As active contributors in international human rights arenas, Indigenous people have weighed into debates on how to substantiate collective rights while complementing individual rights. They assert a collective political identity that strives for rights to protect cultures, livelihoods, and governance systems. However, these achievements at the international level may fall short in impacting lives at the domestic level. This inquiry is based on a model of human rights socialization to consider whether Canadian attitudes and behaviours, as well as institutions and systems, promote human rights values and norms. Despite seemingly progressive human rights legislation in Canada, the perceptions and experiences of select Aboriginal people suggest significant barriers to substantiating rights through current institutions and problematizes Canada’s rights “culture.”

Revisiting the National Question and Identity

The struggle against apartheid left many questions relating to the various meanings of non-racialism, identity and political practice unresolved, and there are some questions that have arisen since South Africa's transition to democracy for which previous understandings of non-racialism and the National Question may be inadequate. The debate about which groups constitute ‘national minorities’, how they should be defined and how their ‘essential attributes’ could be identified has never been resolved. The debate was deferred and subordinated to the exigencies of political mobilisation and organisation, which took the existence of races for granted. This article shows how the idea of recognition and anti-essentialism drawn from contemporary social theory can contribute to a re-conceptualisation of collective political identities in ways that have the potential to contribute to a deepening non-racialism as an egalitarian political project in a constitutional democracy.

Gender, Politics, and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage in China by Louise Edwards (review)

Reviewed by: Gender, Politics, and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage in China by Louise Edwards Xiaoping Sun (bio) Louise Edwards. Gender, Politics, and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage in China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. xii + 334 pp. Hardcover $60.00, isbn 978-0-8047-5688-4. Louise Edwards presents the first comprehensive study of Chinese women’s suffrage movement in Gender, Politics, and Democracy. Tracing the evolution of the pragmatic struggle of Chinese suffragists in the first half of the twentieth century, Edwards uncovers women’s agency by revealing their militant challenges to gendered political norms. Rejecting a teleological view of the suffrage movement from no female franchise to female franchise, Edwards unveils the intertwined relationship between feminism and nationalism in China’s rapidly changing political contexts, and, therefore, pinpoints the fluidity and adaptability of both feminism and nationalism at particular historical junctures. As Edwards has forcibly shown, even under the hegemony of nationalism, Chinese women developed a clear feminist agenda and created a collective political identity across party and class lines that changed China’s gendered political landscape. The running theme of the book is how Chinese suffragists strategically used the twin logic in the gender argument—women are equal to men versus the two sexes are essentially different—at appropriate historical moments to advance their cause of winning the vote and improving women’s lives. As chapter 2 reveals, in the last decade of the Qing dynasty, women revolutionaries used the equality argument to promote a new identity as equally capable citizens who deserved the right as much as men to serve the nation in the political realm. Upholding nationalism with a clear anti-Manchu tone, women radicals like Qiu Jin participated in political and military actions to overthrow the Manchu rule. Institutionally excluded from political power in imperial China, women revolutionaries hoped that their contribution to establishing a constitutional democracy would legitimize their access to political rights as independent, individual citizens equal to men. Yet the new republic consistently betrayed its women revolutionaries by denying them suffrage rights. The first few years of the fragile republican democracy, however, witnessed continuing militant efforts of women suffragists to push their political cause forward, as depicted in chapter 3. Women fought their way through lobbying, demonstrations, marching on parliament, and even window smashing in order to get the phrase “regardless of sex” inserted in the constitution to safeguard women’s legal equality. Although radical women’s organizations were banned and women’s suffrage offices raided, their challenges to male privilege laid the foundation for later success. Up until the mid 1910s, the Chinese women’s suffrage movement had an elitist outlook and had been led by enlightened women fighting for political rights that had only been enjoyed by elite men. The intellectual ferment of the iconoclastic New Culture Movement changed the discursive milieu of women’s suffrage, making [End Page 252] it a more acceptable notion among the educated. Chapter 4 demonstrates that women suffragists successfully lobbied the Guangdong and Hunan governments to add gender equality into provincial constitutions in the early 1920s. However, political fragmentation in the warlord era made a similar victory at a national level impossible. While devoting their energy to national unification, the new meaning of nationalism of the time, women activists began to show an increasing awareness of class. They started to mobilize the argument for gender difference to stress the collectivity of women as a politically disadvantaged group relative to men. Women became recognized as a disadvantaged group in the era of the first United Front, when both the Nationalists and the Communists endorsed the principle of equality between men and women. As Edwards shows in chapter 5, both parties privileged their political goals, focusing on national unification or class struggle over the suffrage movement. The Communists in particular remained skeptical of suffragists and dismissed their efforts as bourgeois feminism. Women suffragists, however, maintained the momentum of the franchise movement through their continued lobbying, with the logic that women deserved political representation because of their collective unity of disadvantage. Edwards convincingly argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, feminist activism was not silenced by the White Terror and did not lose its strength under the...

Accounting for Blind Spots

This essay is concerned with the challenges that moral “blind spots” create for the presence and endurance of democratic virtues under conditions of pluralism. A moral blind spot refers to the occlusions in individual moral perceptions and the limits that circumscribe moral sympathies owing to our ineluctable partialities as socially embedded beings. Blind spots constitute a tragic feature of human perception and moral judgment that facilitate and undermine human agency at once. Yet, far more problematic from the perspective of democratic epistemology and normative ethics is the denial or willful forgetfulness of their place in our individual and collective lives, and the concomitant failure to account for moral blind spots so as to check their most pernicious effects. Accounting for moral blind spots in practice requires actively planning for their presence through the cultivation of the “pathos of distance” towards ourselves and our collective political identities and social institutions.

American Identity in the USA: Youth Perspectives

National identity, how one sees oneself as a member of a given nation, is an important form of social identity. Feelings toward one's country are a matter of both individual and collective concern. In an increasingly diverse world, the issue of identifying with a nation is complex and consequential for individual identity formation as well as collective political identity. How do young people think about what it means to be an American in the United States of America today? Using an in-depth interview approach, I investigate youth experiences in micro-contexts, the local contexts in which young people have concrete experiences that inform their developing identities, to illuminate important elements of the multiple pathways to American identity. Results point toward specific experiences that affect how young people form American identity: attachments to the ideals of America, the mismatch between American ideals and reality, experiences with diversity, opportunities for civic and political participation, and ideas about concepts such as the American dream.

The Politicization of Migrants: Further Evidence that Politicized Collective Identity is a Dual Identity

The article examines the role of collective identification processes in the politicization of Russian migrants in Germany. Building on the assumption that politicized collective identity (PCI) is a dual identity, the authors predicted and found that dual identification as both Russian and German was positively related to politicization among members of the Russian minority in Germany. This relationship held up even when the influences of several sociodemographic variables, past political activity, and other forms of collective identification were statistically controlled. In addition, perceived maltreatment of Russian migrants in Germany moderated the relationship between dual identification and politicization in keeping with the theoretical assumption that the development of PCI presupposes high awareness of shared grievances. Finally, dual identification was unrelated to acceptance of political violence, but positively related to self-restriction to peaceful political means. The constructive role of politicization driven by dual identification in social integration is discussed.

Terrorist Organisation Offences and the LTTE: R v Vinayagamoorthy

The sentencing on 31 March 2010 of three Tamil Australians for providing resources to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) underscores the inherent problems with laws designating organisations as ‘terrorist’. The defendants — Vinayagamoorthy, Yathavan and Rajeevan — pleaded guilty to charges under the Charter of the United Nations Act 1945 (Cth). The Victorian Supreme Court found that their actions were not for a terrorist purpose, although some of the resources provided to the LTTE were found to have a direct military purpose. It is significant that the Court took into account, as relevant to sentencing, the political status of the LTTE and the legitimacy of diasporic support for homeland reconstruction. This Comment argues that these considerations partially subverted the purpose of terrorist organisation law to criminalise self-determination. The conduct of the case, however, reveals the devastating criminalisation inflicted on the Tamil diaspora by acting against collective ethnic political identity. This prosecution also reflects how Australian terrorist organisation laws functioned to legitimate Sri Lanka's bloody war — not only against the LTTE, but also its war crimes against the Tamil people.