Concept Of Collective Identity Research Articles

Understanding and Prospect of Identity Construction in ASEAN Integration

This article aims to provide insights into the concept of collective identity within the context of ASEAN integration. It delves into the transformation of Southeast Asia, which has shifted from a region under the dominance of European colonial powers to one that seeks to establish its unique identity and chart its own course. Additionally, it underscores the pivotal role played by collective identity in the process of integrating Southeast Asia while exploring the factors influencing its formation. In addition to theoretical exploration, this article posits that ASEAN’s collective identity, to some extent, finds resonance among elites, diplomats and technocrats but remains less prevalent among the general ASEAN population. Consequently, this article suggests the need for the development of a transnational mechanism or policy that facilitates and encourages the flow of people and information across borders. ASEAN should also consider reinterpreting its norms, promoting educational initiatives and fostering greater engagement with its citizens.

Social Exclusion as Spiritual Inclusion

Abstract Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2020–2021, this paper investigates how people experiencing poverty and social exclusion process their collective in-group/ out-group identity as the urban ‘others’ in faith-based food assistance in Finland. By building on the concept of collective identity and employing narrative construction, the analysis shows that not only does perceived social exclusion function as a stigmatizing self-category and symbolic boundary maker but also as a resource for resistance, especially in the theological accounts of the informants. When looking through the lenses of urban theology, the informants do not just tell a story about themselves, but they do theology as well. All in all, the others may be excluded from society and yet included in Spirit.

"A Sixth Part of the World": The Career of a Spatial Metaphor in Russia and the Soviet Union (1837–2021)

"A Sixth Part of the World"The Career of a Spatial Metaphor in Russia and the Soviet Union (1837–2021) Frithjof Benjamin Schenk (bio) On 23 December 2021, President Vladimir Putin of Russia held his annual large-scale press conference. It lasted almost four hours and was perfectly staged. Seated alone at an imposing desk, Putin took questions from hand-picked Russian and international journalists. Behind the president's podium, a massive map of the Russian Federation was projected onto a screen.1 The image served to remind those present, and those watching at home and around the world, that this was the political leader of a nation whose territory extends across more than 17 million square kilometers and 11 time zones. In other words, it served as a political statement, communicating pride in a literally great nation to the home audience and demanding respect for a great power from those watching abroad. The knowledge of living in the world's largest country had previously been a key performative point of reference for both the tsarist empire and the Soviet state, forming an integral component of concepts of imperial and national identity. For the few prominent voices that cursed the state's size and figured it as a burden, a greater number drew from it a sense of national pride and an imperial claim to dominion. Occasionally, pointing to the size of the national and imperial territory constituted a compensatory act that sought to distract both speaker and addressee from the fact that Russia, or the USSR, was not up there with the "big players" in other arenas of international competition, be that economic power or socioeconomic development. We continue to witness the use of this strategy today, with Putin's press conference of December 2021 providing an illustrative example. Russia is once more asserting the status of a great power, staking a [End Page 349] claim to be respected and feared on the international stage. In view of the lack of economic clout backing up the international ambitions of a country whose GDP is lower than that of Italy, Russia's government draws its claim to dominion from other resources: its status as a military and nuclear power, its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, and the sheer size of its territory.2 Taking a historical perspective covering the tsarist empire and the USSR and noting developments in the Russian Federation up to the present day, this article examines the interrelationship between discourses around the size of the national territory and conceptions of collective identity. The object of this case study is a history of the spatial metaphor of Russia/the USSR as "a sixth part of the world" from the 19th to the early 21st centuries. I argue that the idea of living in a country whose territory covers one-sixth of the earth has been a foundational element in the national and imperial self-image of Russians since the 1830s, strikingly surviving the historical cesuras of 1917 and 1991 relatively intact despite all the dramatic differences in the political forms taken by the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation and despite the fluctuations in the size of Russian/Soviet territory during the period under consideration. The image of Russia (and the Soviet Union) as a sixth of the world is part of the longue durée of the country's history over the last two centuries. Interestingly, historical research has yet to produce a close study of this spatial metaphor and of its strong identity-forging power. This article seeks to fill the gap, an endeavor that appears promising for three key reasons. First, the history of this metaphor may serve as a prism for the exploration of the relationship linking spatial discourses and imagined geographies to Russian conceptions of national or imperial identity from tsarist times to the post-Soviet era.3 Second, this history provides insights into how Soviet ideologues in the 1920s succeeded in presenting the new state as the antithesis to the [End Page 350] hated tsarist empire while simultaneously co-opting important elements of imperial self-presentation. Third, the discursive career of this image can cast new...

The Political Dynamics of Southeast Asia and the Identity Transformation of ASEAN in Post-Cold War and Post-Economic Crisis 1997-1998

In general, regional integration takes the form of political economy initiatives focused on commercial interests to achieve broader socio-political and security goals. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is a regional organization in Southeast Asia. After the end of the Cold War, ASEAN underwent changes, especially in terms of norms, governance, and collective identity. This article aims to explain the institutional reform and transformation of ASEAN's identity as a regional organization after the end of Cold War era. Using Alexander Wendt's concept of Collective Identity, this article argues that the 1997-1998 crisis and political dynamics in Southeast Asia unraveled the weaknesses of ASEAN's traditional principles as a regional organization. This led to skepticism towards the credibility and function of ASEAN. In order to restore its image and credibility, ASEAN conducted institutional reform in some stages. The institutional reform started with conceptualizing shared ideas through the establishment of the ASEAN Community, which was then institutionalized in a set of norms through the ASEAN Charter. These institutional reforms gave birth to a common set of ideas and norms for the member states. These shared ideas and norms indicate the transformation of ASEAN's collective identity as a regional organization that is more in line with universal norms such as human rights, democracy, and good governance.

Социальная изоляция и одиночество

The article provides a characteristic of the modern global world through the prism of globalization and post-globalization, which determines the loneliness consideration in the context of social isolation. It gives a philosophical interpretation of the phenomenon of loneliness, the loneliness exegetics as isolation in the world of endless social transformations. The research methodology is a hermeneutic approach used for the global world analysis, understanding the world transformations in the context of the rationality dominance as a way to think and exist in this world (the classical stage - through the prism by E. Husserl, F.V. Hegel, post-classical one - in the con- text by N. Berdyaev, O. Spengler). A special emphasis is placed on understanding I in the context of the modern world, where human existence is accompanied by the concepts of multiple identity and identity crisis (F. Fukuyama considers the identity in the context of personality, S. Huntington’s – the concept of collective identity). To under- stand a person and loneliness, the emphasis is placed on the subjectivity of “I” in opposition to another world (in the interpretation by N. Berdyaev, K. Jaspers). The philosophical aspect of loneliness in a perspective gives rise to a new understanding of social isolation, thus the modern existential crisis is understood as a crisis of the dominant way of thinking and attitude to the reality world.

World Heritage and Human Rights: Lessons from the Asia-Pacific and Global Arena ed. by Peter Bille Larsen

Reviewed by: World Heritage and Human Rights: Lessons from the Asia-Pacific and Global Arena ed. by Peter Bille Larsen Michael Herzfeld World Heritage and Human Rights: Lessons from the Asia-Pacific and Global Arena. Edited by Peter Bille Larsen. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. xxii + 325 pp., 26 figures, 2 tables. Paperback US $43, ISBN 978-1-13822-422-3; Hardback US $124, ISBN 978-1-13822-421-6; E-book $27, ISBN 978-1-31540-278-9. Heritage and rights, ethical domains that sometimes overlap like Venn circles, also often erupt into discord, pitting local cultural values against a universalism born of colonial domination and still embedded in the lofty presumptions of what UNESCO recognizes as “Outstanding Universal Value.” Regional (Asia-Pacific) coverage is necessarily uneven both because the record is itself highly variable and because authors are treading on political eggshells. That much is clear from the nine case studies and five legal reviews laid out in this cautiously optimistic volume. Amid multiple contradictions in legal writ and practice, several important common themes emerge. Consent, participation, and prosperity, along with a near-worldwide commitment to according dignity to all, loom large as rights, including the right to heritage, but also the right to ask, “Whose heritage?” Ownership itself is a conceptual quagmire for socialist societies or where land and material objects are not culturally viewed as individual property. Micro-histories of struggles for recognition challenge the triumphalism of national and international heritage regimes. Larsen argues that the UNESCO World Heritage program’s “original sin” (p. 7) is reflected in the absence of people from narratives of success; Alexander H. E. Morawa and Gabriel Zalazar call for “cross-referencing” (p. 198), allowing local groups and the international bureaucracy to learn from each other. As Larsen suggests (p. 16), “vague win-win language” can mask a variety of damaging concessions to economic [End Page 487] power and cultural insensitivity. The ethnographic methods he and Kristal Buckley advocate can only partially redress this imbalance, given the capacity of the powerful to camouflage their actions. Some significant breaches have nevertheless now broken the silence of complicity among states, corporations, religious authorities, and international organizations, as in the recognition (reported by Jonathan Liljeblad) of fragile, unofficial, Hindu-derived rituals performed by self-professed Buddhists in Sambor Prei Kuk, Cambodia (pp. 74–76); danger still lurks with the prospect of World Heritage listing, which threatens these highly localized religious practices with official reabsorption as “culture.” Human rights demand a shift of focus from the inaccessibly abstract and universalist to the fragile and specific. Law, while rhetorically abstract and generic, in practice is always case-specific. The language of “community” may nevertheless still mask internal inequality and intrusive exploitation. While the contrast drawn by Amran Hamzah (p. 115) between “Western” and “indigenous” understandings of good governance reproduces a dichotomy redolent of such official thinking, he is right to insist on the intellectual capabilities and knowledge of local actors. Binaries, by contrast, tend to support nationalist and regionalist generalizations. Thus, the Vietnamese instrumentalization of “Asian values,” as Larsen shows (p. 185), does not automatically entail respect for local values, although official acceptance of activists’ calls for remedial action is encouraging. Elsewhere, as Buckley, Ian Lilley, and Helena Kajlich demonstrate for Australia (against the complex legal background usefully detailed by Ben Boer and Stefan Gruber), it has not been easy to establish respect for indigenous negotiation methods and concepts of collective identity. Moreover, as Anne Laura Kraak demonstrates for Bagan, internal differentiation also requires attention; local factionalism and class hierarchy may filter policy impact. The case of Vigan (described by Sara Dürr, Malot Ingel, and Bettina Beer), for example, shows that anti-poverty policies work selectively, their trajectories overdetermined by the influence of unequally distributed wealth and power. Bipin Adhikari’s historical and legal survey of Nepal’s evolving heritage policies shows why, before democratization, one dominant area— the Kathmandu Valley, itself an area where “social complexity” today impacts heritage conservation efforts (Sudarshan Raj Tiwari, Pranita Shrestha, and Hans Christie Bjønness, p. 147)—received almost exclusive attention. Overly generic policies often spring from convenient assumptions, as when Southeast Asian officials treat swidden agriculturalist...

BEYOND THE DREAMERS: COLLECTIVE IDENTITY AND SUBJECTIVITY IN THE UNDOCUMENTED YOUTH MOVEMENT

Based on longitudinal ethnographic research, this article explores what the concepts of collective identity and subjectivity contribute in the case of the undocumented youth movement in Los Angeles. I show that while the collective identity of the Dreamers has been used to organize undocumented youth from different backgrounds and regions into a recognizable collective actor successfully engaged in political action, nowadays the Dreamer identity is a matter of contention among undocumented youth. I show that the basis of subjective sharing and belonging is now less derived from the collective identity of the Dreamer and more from the shared subjectivities of undocumented youths, constituted by embodied experiences of exclusion, stigmatization, and empowerment. I thus argue for a stronger engagement with the concept of subjectivity in social movement research, as it offers a greater understanding of the profound effects of embodied and affective experiences of negative discursive positioning, trauma, emancipation, and healing.

Grassroots Associations and Collective Identity: Unity in a Midwestern Inland Lake Sailing Club

ABSTRACTThis article provides the theoretical basis for applying the concept of collective identity to the study of leisure groups. Although the concept of collective identity has been most thoroughly developed in studying social movement organizations, I argue that the concept is appropriate for examining other types of grassroots associations, including hobby groups. I explore the application through examining group unity created in a midwestern inland lake sailing club. Emerging from an analysis of interviews with members of the club were clearly articulated perceptions of elements that compose the collective identity process and an indication that the basis of collective action and unity in a leisure group is neither always obvious nor directly related to the group’s leisure activity. In this case, it was the club’s land that formed the basis of group unity instead of the sailing that the club was established to promote.

From Persianate pasts to Aryan antiquity. Transnationalism and transformation in Afghan intellectual history, c.1880–1940

This essay forms a case study of the transnational dimensions of Afghanistan's modern intellectual history through a focus on the practice of history. It traces the development of Afghan historical writing between around 1880 and 1940, with an emphasis on the revolutionary historiographical transformations of the 1930s. Prior to this decade, Afghan historians broadly continued the dynastic and genealogical traditions of the Persianate tarikh (‘chronicle’). After discussing several such texts, the focus turns to the new intellectuals associated with the Kabul Literary Society (Anjuman-i Adabi-yi Kabul) in its role as a crossroads for the importation and adaptation of European intellectual disciplines. Drawing on Anglophone and Francophone scholarship in their Dari-Persian publications, the Society's historians forged radically new conceptions of collective identity by adapting European linguistic and archaeological methods. An examination of the writings of two such historians, Ya‘qub Hasan Khan and Ahmad ‘Ali Kuhzad, documents the subsequent rise of the new historical ideology of Aryanism by which Afghanistan and its peoples were linked to the ancient Aryans and their homeland of Bactria qua Aryana.

The ‘Real Art School’: The Cultural Roots of Authenticity in Art Schools in the UK and China

This article investigates the identity of independent art schools, and art schools in multidisciplinary universities, in the UK and China, using the concept of collective identity from organizational management theory and drawing on semi-structured interviews with Chinese and British academics. It addresses the positive and negative aspects of art schools’ ‘image’. They are taken to be both the setting for creativity and innovation, and as being less effective than the other subject disciplines at contributing to economic growth. The article explores this not through an economic argument, but a cultural one. It shows that both independent art colleges and art schools in universities preserve ‘bohemianism’ in their organizational identity. It is not novel to note that in the West, this is based in Romanticism, however, it is possible to identify an equivalent, and more ancient, strand in Chinese culture that underlies the identity of ‘real art schools’ there.

Media Activism as Movement? Collective Identity Formation in the World Forum of Free Media

More than simply tools used by social movements to reach other substantive aims, media are increasingly becoming <em>subjects</em> of activism. This article contributes to advancing understanding of such media-focused activism through a case study of the World Forum of Free Media, a thematic forum for media activists and media advocacy organisations linked to the World Social Forum. Based on qualitative research conducted between 2008 and 2016—including participant observation, in-depth interviews and textual analysis—the article critically explores the extent to which the World Forum of Free Media can be considered a ‘free media’ movement in the making, and examines some of the challenges and contradictions that such a movement-building project entails. Drawing on social movement theory, specifically the concept of collective identity, it analyses efforts by forum organisers to mobilise a very diverse range of actors—from alternative media activists to policy- and advocacy NGOs—around a plural and inclusive ‘free media’ identity. While the World Forum of Free Media has to some extent succeeded in facilitating convergence around a set of core principles and ideas, it has so far struggled to develop a clear outwards-facing identity and mobilise a broad grassroots base.

Who We Are Is What We Believe? Religion and Collective Identity in Austrian and German Immigrant Integration Policies

Immigrant integration is a contested policy field in which boundaries of membership are drawn and re-negotiated whereby groups of immigrants are partially included and excluded. Building on the concept of collective identity and theories of boundary making, this paper illustrates how religion functions as a category to mark and fill notions of self and otherness. As several studies have shown, immigrants in Europe are increasingly addressed as Muslims, a development that also serves the promotion of a Christian ‘us’. Focusing on Austria and Germany, two countries where this is especially observable, the paper outlines the functioning of religion as symbolic boundary. The empirical study on national integration policies demonstrates how—within the relational process of boundary drawing against Muslims—a Christian identity narrative is established, how it functions as a marker of unity and how it relates to liberal and secular notions. Results from the qualitative content analysis of governmental policy programs from 2005 onwards show different patterns of boundary drawing on religion and the way they shape and limit the possibilities of inclusion. To understand this development, we have to look at Christian-democratic policy-makers, who currently dominate the political struggle for the power to define features of collective identity in immigrant integration policies.

Deliberative Justice and Collective Identity

Drawing upon insights from virtue ethics, this essay develops a concept of collective identity specifically suited to deliberative democracy: a virtues-centered theory of deliberative justice. Viewing democratic legitimacy as a political phenomenon, we must account for more than the formal rules that must be satisfied according to deontological theories of deliberative democracy. I argue that common approaches to deliberative democracy are unable to account for the motivations of deliberation, or ensure that citizens have the cognitive skills to deliberate well. Next, I engage with critics of deliberative democracy who have moved toward broader and more humanistic concepts of deliberation but have stopped short of conceiving of justice as a virtue and, in their own way, neglected questions of collective identity. I reconstruct justice as a virtue from a deliberative perspective, combining virtue ethics’ emphasis on habituation with a weaker sense of collective identity that allows for value pluralism and disagreement, consistent with deliberative democracy. That is, deliberative democracy requires a shared and habituated civic culture of mutual understanding of differences. Finally, drawing from discourse on race in contemporary American politics, I conclude with brief illustrations of the need for a collective identity based on mutual understanding. Although deliberative democracy does not require a thick or intense sense of social solidarity, it does need citizens to share habits, inclinations, and capacities to engage in communication across their differences.

Reclaiming, proclaiming, and maintaining collective identity in the #YoSoy132 movement in Mexico: an examination of digital frontstage and backstage activism through social media and instant messaging platforms

This article starts from the recognition that digital social movements studies have progressively disregarded collective identity and the importance of internal communicative dynamics in contemporary social movements, in favour of the study of the technological affordances and the organizational capabilities of social media. Based on a two-year multimodal ethnography of the Mexican #YoSoy132 movement, the article demonstrates that the concept of collective identity is still able to yield relevant insights into the study of current movements, especially in connection with the use of social media platforms. Through the appropriations of social media, Mexican students were able to oppose the negative identification fabricated by the PRI party, reclaim their agency and their role as heirs of a long tradition of rebellion, generate collective identification processes, and find ‘comfort zones’ to lower the costs of activism, reinforcing their internal cohesion and solidarity. The article stresses the importance of the internal communicative dynamics that develop in the backstage of social media (Facebook chats and groups) and through instant messaging services (WhatsApp), thus rediscovering the pivotal linkage between collective identity and internal communication that characterized the first wave of research on digital social movements. The findings point out how that internal cohesion and collective identity are fundamentally shaped and reinforced in the social media backstage by practices of ‘ludic activism’, which indicates that social media represent not only the organizational backbone of contemporary social movements, but also multifaceted ecologies where a new, expressive and humorous ‘communicative resistance grammar’ emerges.

Pamięci opowiadane

The following article constitutes just another voice in a discussion on the social and cultural dimensions of remembrance and different relationships between different kinds of remembering and commemorating and biographical narration. On the basis of the subject literature and empirical materials, i.e. accounts of Macedonian refugees and re-emigrants from France who came to Lower Silesia after the Second World War, the author analyzes three levels of memory. They are the following: autobiographical memory seen from the angle of experience and narration, collective memory of a generation together with the concept of collective identity and the policy towards memory revealed mostly in different practices of commemorating.

From a Collection of Identities to Collective Identity

We studied collective identity and psychological well-being in Bulgarian adolescents (305 mainstreamers, 278 Turkish-Bulgarians, and 183 Muslim-Bulgarians). Turkish-Bulgarian and Muslim-Bulgarian minorities (ethnic Bulgarians converted to Islam during the Ottoman Empire) have been subjected to severe assimilation policies until recently. A multigroup confirmatory analysis showed that ethnic, religious, and familial identities were significantly and positively related to a single underlying factor we labeled collective identity. Bulgarian identity was unrelated to collective identity in the Turkish-Bulgarian group. As expected, mainstream adolescents showed a stronger Bulgarian and weaker religious identity than Turkish-Bulgarian and Muslim-Bulgarian adolescents. In all groups, individuals with a stronger collective identity reported higher levels of well-being. We conclude that the concept of collective identity is useful to link various identity components to well-being of youth from different ethnic groups.

Can charity and rights-based movements be allies in the fight against HIV/AIDS? Bridging mobilisations in the United States and sub-Saharan Africa

The activist-fuelled responses to HIV/AIDS around the world have resulted in unprecedented changes to the way infectious disease is defined and treated and in the mobilisation of resources for treatment in developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. However, the communities that have been critical sources of response are widely divergent. In the United States, where the epidemic was first identified, the strongest response was within the gay community, with its attendant rights-based orientation. In sub-Saharan Africa, faith-based communities have been critical actors, and have generally taken a charity-based approach to their work. As globalisation and the successes of the global AIDS movement draw these groups into closer contact, the question of whether these divergent approaches can work in alliance becomes ever more important. In this paper I use the concepts of collective identity and framing to examine the development of both approaches and to suggest that the activity of frame extension may be a helpful tool in bridging divergent approaches.

To be truly British we must be anti-German New Zealand, Enemy Aliens and the Great War experience, 1914-1919

'To be truly British we must be Anti-German' was a statement voiced by Mrs Ida Boeufve to the Women's Anti-German League at a 1916 rally in Napier. The attitudes and social forces backing that declaration form the subject of Andrew Francis's recent book on the treatment of New Zealand's German-speaking settlers during the First World War. Adapted from his PhD research, 'To Be Truly British We Must Be Anti-German' approaches the period not simply to catalogue wartime anti-Germanism in its own right, but to consider the extent to which larger developments - immigration patterns, conceptions of collective identity and citizenship - set the tone for wartime reaction. This effort tocontextualize anti-alienism in New Zealand's war effort and larger history is taken one step further by considering the subject within a comparative context.

Interplays between Collective and Organizational Identities: A Temporal Perspective

The concepts of collective identity and organizational identity constitute two parallel, often separate, research streams in organizational studies. This paper explores how their interplay influences organizational responses to a perceived threat in the institutional environment. The analysis of a global brewer’s response the issue of ‘alcohol-related harm’ suggests the presence of a first and second wave of interpretation. The first wave, guided by collective identity claims, helps to shield the organization from an industry-wide threat via shared industry actions. The second wave, entailing a shift towards organizational identity claims, enables organizational differentiation via the construction of an organizational response aligned with dominant organizational identity claims. The study contributes with insight into how organizational identities are contextualized within collective identities; this relationship shifts over time in response to the intensity of the external pressure and organizational a...

Legitimating Nascent Collective Identities: Coordinating Cultural Entrepreneurship

The concept of collective identity has gained prominence within organizational theory as researchers have studied how it consequentially shapes organizational behavior. However, much less attention has been paid to the question of how nascent collective identities become legitimated. Although it is conventionally argued that membership expansion leads to collective identity legitimacy, we draw on the notion of cultural entrepreneurship to argue that the relationship is more complex and is culturally mediated by the stories told by group members. We propose a theoretical framework about the conditions under which the collective identity of a nascent entrepreneurial group is more likely to be legitimated. Specifically, we posit that legitimacy is more likely to be achieved when members articulate a clear defining collective identity story that identifies the group's orienting purpose and core practices. Although membership expansion can undermine legitimation by introducing discrepant actors and practices to a collective identity, this potential downside is mitigated by growth stories, which help to coordinate expansion. Finally, we theorize how processes associated with collective identity membership expansion might affect the evolution of defining collective identity stories.