Identity and Identification: The Politics of Calling Names

Abstract

The panel will aim to offer a relational and interdisciplinary approach to the study of ‘identity’ and ‘politics’. This perspective will blur the distinction between inside and outside, society and state, life within sovereign nations and life within a system of sovereign nations, distinctions that have enabled the belief that society and international relations work in different realms with different rules. Theoretical and methodological resources will be drawn from arenas as varied as law and political science all the way to history and philosophy. The panel will seek to deepen the concept of identity by examining the practices of identification. This focus displaces the analysis from a static viewpoint to a dynamic one. Once this move is made, one understands that there are no given identities, there are only identifications. In Bourdieusian terms, this is symbolic violence: to establish an identity, to name actors is to impose ‘a social essence’ that prescribes what one has to be via ‘objectivising categories’. This shows that all identities are transindividual: there exists no autonomous reality, whose identity would take form outside social processes. Through the operation of identification, an individual or a group is isolated and a set of characteristics is assigned to them. This panel’s papers will scrutinise the political implications of this process in three different contexts: in the classification of ‘fragile states’ through ‘practical sense’, in the power-knowledge dispositive that construct European extreme left-wing actors and in the seemingly mundane acts of resistance that serve to ‘securitise’ immigration in Sweden. These works apply ethnography, prosopography, discourse analysis, controversy mapping and genealogy in the context of the recently established international political sociology branch of international relations.

Title	Details
The Naming and Defining of the Extra-Parliamentary Extreme Left-Wing Actors by Europol	View Paper Details
The Ambivalences of Identity	View Paper Details
The Role of Social Capital in the Formation of Collective Identities: The Case of European Identification	View Paper Details
Eurabian Nights: From Narrative Identities to Imagined Communities	View Paper Details