Whose Identity?: Rhetorical Commonplaces in “American” Wartime Foreign Policy

Abstract

The claim that important aspects of world politics are socially constructed should no longer appear controversial to IR scholars. Yet, debate about the proper role of identity in the study of world politics continues apace, with scholars on one extreme trying to force identity into a variable framework, and on the other arguing that the multifaceted nature of identity makes systematic study of world politics impossible. Scholars debate whether identity “matters” in world politics without having any real consensus on what it might mean for identity (or any other factor) to “matter,” and conduct research on identity using a variety of incompatible methods: textual analysis, interviews, polling data, cultural criticism, and so on. They also disagree about the extent to which identity should be regarded as socially constructed, with scholars placing the limits of this social construction in a number of different places. There is thus a good deal of confusion among scholars working on identity, and this confusion contributes to the field’s lack of consensus on these issues.