Identity Challenge or Identity Challenged? National and International Conflicts and Processes

With crises in Syria and Ukraine being prolonged in recent years, the issue of Identity being one of the main triggers and/or leverages of peace and violence has been clearly manifested. Thus, there is a pressing need to focus academic attention on possible scenarios and “exit strategies” that may be applied both internally and externally to current conflict areas worldwide. The issue of Identity has long cast a strong impact on further construction of international security architecture, as it can trigger the (re)escalation of violent political contestations fuelled with identity-based struggle for recognition and autonomy. The results of referendum on Brexit in the United Kingdom, 2016 presidential campaign in the United States as well as on-going power struggles in the MENA region, Greater Middle East and Eastern Europe leave several questions crucial to the study of International Politics unanswered. Among those are problems of the underestimation of the role that national, subnational and any other type of group identities continue to play in a globalized world, issues of recognition based on these identity manifestations, as well as factors of reinforcing political autonomy of contested regions both within national states and transnationally that continue to challenge and (re)shape a reforming global political landscape. Moreover, the widening area of various states’ interference into ongoing conflicts worldwide poses a clandestine threat to the manifestation of ethnic (or any other) Identities as such: the more Identities are used to trigger violence and\protests, the stronger is the desire of the State to suppress them. This is being demonstrated in the case of Catalonia versus Spain. In this Section we propose three Panels dedicated to different aspects within a broader context of recognition of identities being a leveraging factor of political contestations.