Summary Identity, Boundaries and Violence
Week 1
Lecture 1 - Introduction Identity, Boundaries and Violence (Social boundaries)
Boundaries
Border and boundaries are all around us. In this course we’ll explore the connection between
identity and violence through an emphasis on social, spatial and virtual processes of boundary
making and unmaking.
People draw social boundaries between who they are and who they are not
These forms of in- and exclusion are also manifested spatially
New technologies impact the ways in which boundaries are imagined and acted out (digital
borders and virtual boundaries)
Three forms
• Socio-political boundaries: group formation and maintenance
• Spatial boundaries: boundaries as real (concrete and tangible)
• Virtual boundaries: the rise of digital borders and remote control
Why?
Mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion are at the heart of the field of CS.
Conflict is about contested control/governance over population and territory. These two
components of governing people and governing territory (here: space) are discussed in this
course.
The analytical frames selected in this course allow you to study mechanisms of boundary
drawing in both subtle forms close to home, but also of extreme violence (urbicide, drone wars)
‘Conflict is a time at which the language of politics becomes a discourse of exclusionist protection
against a constructed enemy, who is deserving of any violence perpetrated against it’ - Jabri, 1996
Definitions
Contemporary wars
No precise beginnings or formal endings
Protracted
o no clear distinction between war and peace
Modes of warfare
o no clear-cut national armies but para-military, child soldiers, rebel armies, global networks
of trade and information
External support
o Diaspora groups, foreign mercenaries, and criminal mafia, but also international military
interventions, private security firms, shady M2M training operations
War economies
o no longer funded by taxation by the state, but sustained outside emergency assistance, and
the parallel economy
Due to new technologies, new wars seem to have become de-territorialized, networked, liquid.
Are fought by organizations claiming to represent identity groups. They either fight others such
as organizations or a (coalitions of) state(s).
Conflict
Any situation in which two or more entities or ‘parties’ perceive they possess mutually incompatible
goals.
Identity
Answer to the question Who are you?
A social identity is one kind of answer to the question ‘Who Am I’? that is based on membership
in a social group or category, together with its evaluative and affective connotations (Tajfel)
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,Social category
Sets of people given a label and distinguished by two main features”
(1) Rules of membership that decide who is and is not a member of the category
(2) Content that is sets of characteristics (such as beliefs, desires, moral commitments and
physical attributes) thought to be typical of members of the category, or behaviors expected or
obliged of members in certain situations (roles).
Ethnicity
The ethnic group is a communal group larger than social formations such as family, clan, age,
gender or neighborhoods
Primordialism: communal group by nature
Constructivism: socially constructed community
Nation
Nations are large, politicized ethnic group associated with specific territories over which they
seek a degree of autonomy. Nations are people who exercise, or hope to exercise, sovereignty
over a given territory.
The nation is a ‘shared culture’ recognized shared membership.
State
A state is a relatively centralized, differentiated, and autonomous organization successfully
claiming priority in the use of force within a large, contiguous and clearly bounded territory.
Nationalism
Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and national units should
be congruent.
Civic nationalism: outsiders can assimilate into the shared culture
Ethnic nationalism: outsiders can never become part of the nation
Articles week 1
Jenkins – Social identity
- Identification seems to matter, in every life and in sociology.
- Identity should not be taken for granted. There are doubts whether identity, in itself, actually
influences or causes behavior.
- Identity: the human capacity – rooted in language – to know who’s who.
- Identification: a process, not a ‘thing’; it is not something that one can have, or not, it is
something that one does.
- It’s an ongoing and open-ended process of identification; process of being or becoming.
- It’s a multi-dimensional classification;
- It’s contextual;
- It has to be made to matter.
‘The group’ is such a basic notion, in fact, that most social scientists take it completely for granted,
as part of the conceptual furniture.
Brubaker (2002) says that ethnic groups are generally conceptualized as clearly bounded and fairly
homogenous and distinguished from other groups of the same kind. But this is not real. What is real
is the shared sense of ‘groupness’ of group membership. By this argument the participants in ethnic
conflict are individuals and organizations rather than ethnic group. Group membership and identity
are likely to have some part to play, but they cannot be sad to determine anything. Whether they
are families, peer groups or friendship circles, our own experience tell us that groups are real.
The minimal reality of a group is that its members know that it exists and that they belong to it.
People categorize others, all the time and as a matter of course. Categorization is as much part of
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,our subject matter as self-identification. Categorization makes a powerful contribution to the
everyday reality of groups. The categorization of out-groups is intrinsic to ingroup identification.
To invoke the firs principle of social constructionism, groups are real if people think they are: they
then behave in ways that assume that groups are real and, in so doing, construct their reality. They
realize it. It is the distinction Brubaker draws between group and groupness that is an illusion, and
it does not help us understand the local realities of the human world.
Identification matters because it is the basic cognitive mechanism that humans use to sort out
themselves and their fellows, individually and collectively. This is a base line sorting that is
fundamental to the organization of the human world.
On the other hand, identification doesn’t determine behavior, and patterns of identification don’t
allow us to predict who will do what. We need to find a compromise between a complete rejection
of ‘identity’ in the style of Brubaker and Malesevic, and an uncritical acceptance of its ontological
status and axiomatic significance.
Similarity and Difference
In principle, the notion of identity applies to the entire universe of creatures, things and
substances, as well as to humans.
The dictionary offers a Latin root – identitas, from idem, ‘the same’ and four basic meanings:
- First, the sameness of objects, as in A1 is identical to A2 but tot B1
- Second, the consistency or continuity over time that is the basis for establishing and grasping
the definiteness and distinctiveness of something
- Third, to classify things or persons
- Fourth to associate oneself with, or attach oneself to, something or someone else (such as a
friend)
Identify ourselves, or others, is a matter of meaning, and meaning always involves interaction:
agreement or disagreement, convention and innovation, communication and negotiation.
- ‘Identity’ denotes the ways in which individuals, and collectivities are distinguished in their
relations with other individuals and collectivities
- ‘Identification’ is the systematic establishment and signification, between individuals, between
collectivities and between individuals and collectivities, of relationships of similarity and
difference.
Similarity and differences are the dynamic principles of identification, and are at the heart of the
human world.
Knowing who is who involves processes of classification and signification that necessarily invoke
criteria of similarity and difference.
Answer to ‘who or what am I?’ Based on membership in a social group or category. Processes of
classification, signification and identification invoke criteria of similarity and difference. Attending
to difference on its own, or even simply emphasizing difference, cannot provide us with a proper
account of how it is that we know who’s who in the human world. The outcome of agreement of
disagreement is always negotiable, it’s not fixed.
Social Categories (labels) are distinguished by two features:
(1) rules of membership that decide who is and who isn’t a member of the category
(2) content, sets of characteristics (beliefs, desires, moral commitments, and physical attributes)
thought to be typical of members of the category, or behavior expected or obliged.
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,Without identity there could simply be no human world, as we know it. This is the most basic sense
in which identity matters.
Gellner – Nations and nationalism
Nationalism
Nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy, which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut
across political ones, and, in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state should not
separate the power-holders from the rest.
Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political (state) and the national
unit (nation) should be congruent.
National sentiment is a feeling of anger caused by the violation of the principle, or satisfaction
aroused by its fulfilment. A nationalist movement is one actuated by a sentiment of this kind.
There are multiple ways in which the nationalist principle can be violated:
- The political boundary of a given state can fail to include all the members of the appropriate
nation;
- It can include them all but also include some foreigners
- It can fail in both these ways at once, not incorporating all the nationals and yet also including
some non-nationals
- A nation may live, unmixed with foreigners, in a multiplicity of states, so that no single state
can claim to be the national on
But there is one particular form of the violation of the nationalist principle to which nationalist
sentiment is quite particularly sensitive:
- If the rulers of the political unit belong to a nation other than that of the majority of the ruled,
this, for nationalists, constitutes an intolerable breech of political propriety.
Not all nationalisms can be satisfied, at any rate at the same time. The satisfaction of some spells
the frustration of others.
State
State (Weber): an agency within society which possesses the monopoly of legitimate violence.
Violence may be applied only by the central political authority, and those to whom it delegates this
right.
A relatively centralized, differentiated, and autonomous organization successfully claiming priority
in the use of force within a large, contiguous, and clearly bounded territory. It is an institution or a
set of institutions, specifically concerned with the enforcement of order.
Nationalism emerges only in milieu in which the existence of the state is already taken very much
for granted. The existence of politically centralized units, and of a moral-political climate in which
such centralized units are taken for granted and are treated as normative, is a condition of
nationalism.
The nation
Nations, like states, are a contingency and not a universal necessity. Neither, nations nor states
exists at all times and all circumstances. Nationalism holds that states and nations were destined
for each other; that either without the other is incomplete and constitutes a tragedy. But before
they could become intended for each other, each of them had to emerge, and their emergence was
independent and contingent. The state has certainly emerged without the help of the nation.
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, Two very makeshift, temporary definitions of the nation:
- Two men are the same nation if and only if they share the same culture, where culture in turn
means a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating
- Two men are of the same nation if and if only they recognize each other as belonging to the
same nation. Nations are the artefacts of men’s convictions ad loyalties and solidarities.
It is their recognition of each other’s as fellows of this kind which turns them into a nation, and not
the other shared attributes, which separate that category form non-members.
It’s probably the best to approach this problem by using this term without attempting too much in
the way of a formal definition, and looking at what culture does.
Drakulic - ‘The Balkan Express: Fragements from the Other Side of War’
My Father’s Pistol
The generation to which the writer belongs had grown up with the image of the brave partisans of
Tito against bloodthirsty enemies: Serbs and Nazis, so that the later civil war retained its heroic
character. The war was not meaningless, but meaningful.
Because the inhabitants have lived under the rule of the Soviet Union, they have not had a chance
to get to know democracy. The residents were oppressed and always seen as equals among
themselves. The war that resulted from the fall of Yugoslavia was therefore not surprising, the
citizens did not know how to cope with the change to a democracy.
Montgomery – The Archipelago of Fear
The Serena Hotel in Kabul was ‘an oasis of luxury in a war-ravaged city’. It was built from the
bombed-out skeleton of the sixty-year-old Kabul Hotel. It became a popular gathering place for
well-paid aid workers, security contractors, and consultants eager to escape the dust and the chaos.
Perhaps that’s what made it a target. Suicide bombers stormed the hotel, one of them exploded at
the Serena’s gate. It was the first suicide attack on a soft target in Kabul since the fall of the
Taliban. It was as though the building itself, with its high walls and unheard-of luxuries, had been
the real target, not the people in it. The Serena and places like it had a story to tell about the
relationship between architecture and violence.
International surveys show that the more people trust their neighbors, strangers and their
government, the more likely they are to help strangers, to vote and to volunteer. If better streets,
sidewalks, walls and building all improve the ways people engage with one another, then the
reverse should also be true: antagonistic architecture can corrode trust and fuel hostility. Kabul just
might be a laboratory of toxic urbanity.
Aggressive architectures such as high, bare cement walls have been found to produce a backlash of
vandalism and incivility in peaceful cities.
The compounds and roadblock have a psychological impact: it makes people feel as though they live
in a war zone, even though the city is not a war zone anymore. People must feel they are not a
charity case, a recipient of international aid but the reverse, where they were a source of world
civilization. They need houses that are similar to the one’s they had before, with mud walls.
Additionally, foreigners are segregated, isolated from the city by fear, insurance risk and
institutional fiat.
Archipelago: since the standards for employee housing require that guest houses have their own
generators, plus water, food, and fuel enough to sustain the residence for several days. Bomb
shelters are mandatory.
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