Identity Politics and the Clash of Values

Abstract

Is identity politics is uncompromising? Is this because of a ‘clash of values’? And if so, of what form? Studies of ethnic and national conflict suggest that there may be less value difference between protagonists than is often supposed. For example, surveys in Northern Ireland from the 1960s show that Protestants and Catholics, nationalists and unionists, have converged in moral principle; in the new European regionalism, as Keating has shown, the values of oppositional nationalists often highlight the democratic and modernising values which have also characterised contemporary European states. Is the clash of values then an elite, ideological construct, with limited effect in everyday interactions as Brubaker et al show in Cluj? Or are some sorts of identity politics (religious) accompanied by stronger and more pervasive value clashes than others (ethno-national)? For example, do international and state conflicts focus on values more than do ‘ethnic’ wars? Or - following Bourdieu - does the clash of values exist in radically divergent practical judgements and intuitive responses rather than in moral principle, and thus is less easily open to quantitative measure? These are some of the issues that need to be addressed. We invite papers from a range of perspectives, disciplines and methods that address them, or indeed focus on other types of value-clashes and identity politics.