International Studies Compendium Project

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Comment on this article   “Identity” has been one, if not the , conceptual shooting star in International Relations (IR) scholarship since the 1990s, at least among scholars seeking an alternative to the realist-rationalist vocabulary. And for its protagonists the concept is central to our understanding of international politics. David Campbell notes that “identity is an inescapable dimension of being. No body could be without it” (1992:9). Ted Hopf suggests that a world without identities would be a “world of chaos, a world of pervasive and irremediable uncertainty, a world much more dangerous than anarchy” (1998:175), and Anthony Burke claims that “there is […] no world politics without identity, no people, no states, no international system” ( Burke 2006 :394). According to these authors, “identities” manifest our ontology of the international and play a central role in politics. Bruce Cronin notes, “identities provide a frame of reference from which political leaders can initiate, maintain, and structure their relationships with other states” ( Cronin 1999 :18). These are strong claims, and reviewing them, that is, reviewing the place of “identity” in IR scholarship and assessing its analytical value, is not an easy task. Crudely put, locating identity in IR can take two forms: one could try to abstract from different usages among scholars in the field and focus on what these ... log in or subscribe to read full text