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Identity politics is ascendant once again, accompanied by a resurgence of nationalism in countries across the world. Issues surrounding race and ‘Americanness’ dominate current US politics. Likewise, the rise of majoritarian right-wing nationalism in India has reignited debates about the country’s values and identity. Anti-globalist backlash and identity politics were also an important aspect of the UK’s ‘Brexit’ from the EU for example. Questions of national identification have become salient in many societies today, with contestation over competing national conceptions turning into conflicts that risk destabilizing polities. Since disputes over and reconfiguration of national self-conceptions have far-reaching consequences for both domestic and international politics, the concept of national identity merits scholarly engagement. Therefore, this workshop focuses on the problems of conceptualizing and measuring ‘national identity’ as a form of collective identity. Current contestations over conceptions of national identities in domestic politics demand attending to unresolved questions concerning the study of this collective identity. Since the formation of identities is an ongoing process and there are always multiple and often contested identities within societies, an important question when adopting national identities as a variable is how to avoid essentialist readings of the concept. At the same time, this understanding of identity poses measurement challenges. If identities are contingent and always in a state of “becoming rather than being” (Adler 2013, 113), how can they be identified and measured? These issues raise further questions about identity formation, the conditions that enable stability and change in identity, whether such changes occur suddenly or unfold gradually over time, and what functions identities perform. These gaps persist in part due to the lack of rigorous data that can capture continuities and transformations in identifications as well as a paucity of comparative studies. Mixed methods designs that rigorously combine quantitative and qualitative methods may offer a promising way forward. Furthermore, given that identity is “a social category that varies in terms of content and contestation”, how can we capture the “degree of agreement” within the ‘nation’ regarding the content of shared national self-conceptions (Abdelal, et. al. 2009, 9)? Hopf and Allan (2016) presents a first attempt to build a rigorous database of national identifications covering ten great powers since 1950 employing discourse analysis. Studies of identity discourses in India by Hayes (2016) and Kumar (2016), for example, find that conceptions of national identity can vary across different classes, regions, or languages, highlighting the importance of understanding how national identity intersects with alternative forms of collective identification within societies including race, gender, and ethnicity among others. With the emergence of social media as an important site for the expression of discontent and construction of competing narratives as well as its role in empowering marginalized voices, how can we study these discourses to track the emergence new self-identifications and the transformation of existing ones?
Identity has been a productive variable in the study of international politics since Wendt’s seminal argument that state behavior depends not only on the distribution of power but also the ‘distribution of identities’ (1999). Building on perspectives from sociology and social psychology, contemporary constructivist scholarship conceives identity as intersubjectively constituted by ideas, norms, symbols, discourses, and practices. This perspective stresses the contingent, contextual, and relational nature of identities, pointing to their important role in providing cognitive stability (Kowert 1999; Hopf 2002), informing interests (Wendt 1999; Lebow 2008), and serving as a moral compass in guiding behavior (Reus-Smit 1999). In the past two decades, scholars have advanced productive definitions and conceptualizations (eg: Wendt 1999; Hopf 2002; Kowert 2010). Insightful analyses have explored the dynamic of identity formation through processes such as bordering, bonding, socialization, and recognition (eg: Weldes 1999; Laffey 2000; Berenskoetter 2014; Subotić 2015; Faizullaev & Cornut 2016; Thies & Nieman 2017). Despite complaints about the difficulty of finding “indicators that sufficiently approximate” constructivist concepts (Schneider 2005), scholars have adopted a range of qualitative and quantitative techniques to usefully investigate identity including discourse analysis, surveys, and content analysis (eg. Abdelal et. al. 2009). Hopf (2002, 2012) has demonstrated the usefulness of inductive discourse analysis for generating rich data, emphasizing the value of ethnographic and interpretive sensibilities, a concern echoed by Rumelili and Todd (2018). More recently, scholars have begun using discursive methods to study social media narratives pertaining to identity (for example: KhosraviNik & Zia 2014; Bouvier 2015; Zhang 2020). This workshop seeks to address the following broad questions: - How can national identity be defined and conceptualized without risking essentialist or static understandings? - How can national identity be measured systematically with due regard to the different groups that constitute a nation? - How are national identities transformed? For example, how do marginalized or peripheral identities become more salient over time? Conversely, how do some widespread national identities become less salient? - How does national identity relate to and affect other domestic and international social, cultural, economic, technological, and political processes? This workshop is intentionally framed broadly to allow fruitful exchange among both junior and senior scholars studying this concept across theoretical and methodological traditions and using diverse research designs. We invite papers that make conceptual and/or methodological contributions to the study of national identity, as well as single-country or comparative studies exploring the role of national identity in domestic and international political processes. We are especially eager to see proposals that adopt multi- and mixed-methods research designs; incorporate new techniques involving machine learning and computer-assisted text analysis, social media analysis, web scraping and big data approaches; explore national identity in highly plural societies; or, study the processes of identity contestation and change. The overarching goal of this workshop is to spur engagement with crucial conceptual and methodological issues to revitalize and help advance the study of national identity. We intend this workshop to be the first step towards an edited volume on new approaches for studying national identity.
Papers will be avaliable once proposal and review has been completed.