International Relations and Identity examines the issue of collective political identity formation and expands the concept of the international beyond the notion of states. Providing a dialogical approach to questions of identity and alterity in International Relations, the author considers how identity is formed, maintained and transformed in continuous processes with alterity. This innovative book seeks to broaden understanding of identity and difference by developing a process-based perspective. It shifts the attention from a dichotomising view of the international to the multiple ways by which identity and difference are related. It challenges traditional conceptions of the international and argues that it is constituted by the processes in which states and other actors participate and is more than a spatial dimension constituted by states. Guillaume illustrates this complex theory with a detailed case study of how Japanese political community has formed, performed and transformed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in light of the questions of empire and multiculturalism. International Relations and Identity will be of interest to students and scholars of international politics, international relations theory and Japanese studies.

Drawing on Freud, Mead, Erikson, Parsons and Habermas, William Bloom relates mass psychological processes to international relations.

A comparative study of how and why people identify with their countries and the implications for foreign policy.

This collected volume draws together essays written by International Relations scholars from a variety of regional, methodological and theoretical perspectives to confront the challenges of identity-centered analysis. In particular, the contributors seek to elucidate the general meaning and methodological implications of the commonly state yet largely unexamined, assertion that identities are relational, fluid, constructed, and multiple.

The New York Times bestselling author of The Origins of Political Order offers a provocative examination of modern identity politics: its origins, its effects, and what it means for domestic and international affairs of state In 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American institutions were in decay, as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to “the people,” who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole. Demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today. The universal recognition on which liberal democracy is based has been increasingly challenged by narrower forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, which have resulted in anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicized Islam, the fractious “identity liberalism” of college campuses, and the emergence of white nationalism. Populist nationalism, said to be rooted in economic motivation, actually springs from the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means. The demand for identity cannot be transcended; we must begin to shape identity in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy. Identity is an urgent and necessary book—a sharp warning that unless we forge a universal understanding of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict.

The trajectory of Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP) rule offers an ideal empirical window into puzzling shifts in Turkey's domestic politics and foreign policy. The policy transformations under its leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan do not align with existing explanations based on security, economics, institutions, or identity. In Identity Politics Inside Out, Lisel Hintz teases out the complex link between identity politics and foreign policy using an in-depth study of Turkey. Rather than treating national identity as cause or consequence of a state's foreign policy, she repositions foreign policy as an arena in which contestation among competing proposals for national identity takes place. Drawing from a broad array of sources in popular culture, social media, interviews, surveys, and archives, she identifies competing visions of Turkish identity and theorizes when and how internal identity politics becomes externalized. Hintz examines the establishment of Republican Nationalism in the wake of imperial collapse and examines failed attempts made by those challenging its Western-oriented, anti-ethnic, secularist values with alternative understandings of Turkishness. She further demonstrates how the Ottoman Islamist AKP used the European Union accession process to weaken Republican Nationalist obstacles in Turkey, thereby opening up space for Islam in the domestic sphere and a foreign policy targeted at achieving leadership in the Middle East. By showing how the "inside out" spillover of national identity debates can reshape foreign policy, Identity Politics Inside Out fills a major gap in existing scholarship by closing the identity-foreign policy circle.

The central assertion of this book is that states pursue social actions to serve self-identity needs, even when these actions compromise their physical existence. Three forms of social action, sometimes referred to as ‘motives’ of state behaviour (moral, humanitarian, and honour-driven) are analyzed here through an ontological security approach. Brent J. Steele develops an account of social action which interprets these behaviours as fulfilling a nation-state's drive to secure self-identity through time. The anxiety which consumes all social agents motivates them to secure their sense of being, and thus he posits that transformational possibilities exist in the ‘Self’ of a nation-state. The volume consequently both challenges and complements realist, liberal, constructivist and post-structural accounts to international politics. Using ontological security to interpret three cases - British neutrality during the American Civil War (1861-1865), Belgium’s decision to fight Germany in 1914, and NATO’s (1999) Kosovo intervention - the book concludes by discussing the importance for self-interrogation in both the study and practice of international relations. Ontological Security in International Relations will be of particular interest to students and researchers of international politics, international ethics, international relations and security studies.

"This book theorizes and problematizes the politics of vicarious identity in International Relations, where vicarious identity refers to processes of 'living through the other'. While prevalent and recognised in family and social settings, the presence and significance of vicarious identification in international relations has been overlooked. Vicarious identification offers the prospect of bolstering narratives of self-identity and appropriating a sense of reflected glory and enhanced self-esteem, but insofar as it may mask and be a response to emergent anxieties, inadequacies and weaknesses it also entails vulnerabilities. The book explores both its attraction and potential pitfalls, theorising these in the context of emerging literatures on ontological security, status and self-esteem, highlighting both its constitutive practices and normative limits and providing a methodological grounding for identifying and studying the phenomenon in world politics. Vicarious identification and vicarious identity promotion are shown to be politically salient and efficacious across a range of scales, from the international politics of the everyday evident, for instance, in practices associated with (militarised) nationalism, through to interstate relations. In regard to this latter the book provides case analyses of vicarious identification in relations between the US and Israel, the UK-US 'special relationship' and Denmark and the US, and develops a framework for anticipating the conditions under which states may be more or less tempted into vicarious identification with others"--

How do states sustain international order during crises? Drawing on the political philosophy of Lyotard and through an empirical examination of the Anglo-American international order during the 1956 Suez Crisis, Bially Mattern demonstrates that states can (and do) use representational force--a forceful but non-physical form of power exercised through language--to stabilize international identity and in turn international order.

Addresses the central problem of international relations - security - and constructs a novel framework for its analysis.