To explain how globalization rebuilt public policy and social behavior, we study the different political, economic, and social actors - public or private, individual or collective - and the exchanges and interactions between them that are remaking international relations. This course is inspired by a French sociological and historical approach to international relations. This course is also available in french version: www.coursera.org/learn/espace-mondial-fr/
The Danger of Ethnicization
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来自 Sciences Po 的课程
Espace mondial：法国视角下的国际研究
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从本节课中
Identities
Identity has to be revisited and considered as a social and a political construct.
与讲师见面
Bertrand BadieProfessor
Marie-Françoise DurandProfessor
Let’s move now to the global level,
let’s consider the world
as it results from this manipulation,
this stronger and stronger
political manipulation of identities.
What is the impact
of this identity manipulation
on the global order?
How can we consider the world now
in this atmosphere of emergence
and development of the identity factor?
The identity factor as structuring
the new world order.
The problem is that conceding
an important role,
an important political role,
to identity is probably a source
of a new instable order.
I will try to point five figures
of this new order,
new when it is strongly affected
and structured by these identity strategies.
First we can consider this identity strategy
as an instrument of a political strategy,
and then we have to consider
three kinds of figures.
The first one will be using
identity for governing,
that's to say for strengthening
a government order which seems
to be weak or unable to reach its own goals.
For instance,
when the Rwandan president Habyarimana
tried to mobilize the Hutus against the Tutsis.
The idea was to use the Tutsis
as a scapegoat able to mobilize Hutus
around himself
and to strengthen a weakened power.
This was as you know
the starting point of this terrible genocide
which took place in 1994 in Rwanda,
this genocide which probably made
something like 800 000
or even one million people dead,
was caused by a manipulation of identities
in order to strengthen a political order
which was weakened by a lack of legitimacy
of president Habyarimana.
It’s exactly the same now in Syria
where the present president Bachar al-Assad
tries to mobilize minorities,
Alawi minority
but also Christian minority
for trying to tackle a support
in the present Syrian civil war.
That’s why it is a very common
but also a very dangerous
and often a very bloody strategy
for reinforcing a political order
which is not able to work
and to work correctly.
The second particular use of identities
is to be found in the protest,
organizing protests
inside authoritarian systems.
Inside authoritarian systems, identities,
and especially religious identities,
is the best way for
expressing a deviant vision,
a deviant voice against the power
which is settled and which is contested.
The Iranian revolution was mobilizing
religion and religious identity
for fighting against the Shah regime
which didn’t tolerate any kind
of political opposition.
Identity has to be used and manipulated
as a substitute of lack
of political opposition.
The third one will be to use also
the identity for fighting against
a deficient political
and institutional order,
in which identity is conceived
as a possible substitute to a social contract
which would be contested inside a society.
This is a very common manifestation,
a very common construction
of identity in the present world order.
The second one will be
to try to territorialize identity.
Territorializing identity
is one of the main strategies
which are used for questioning
the political geography
and the political organization
of the international arena.
But this territorialization should be,
for being successful,
an enforced territorialization,
that's to say it implies ethnic cleansing
and even more genocide,
as it was the case for instance
during the Yugoslavian war.
But as it is also the case
in many other parts of the world
in which grouping individuals
identifying themselves to the same group
would imply to reject all the others
who are coexisting with them.
And this is the problem of Caucasia
this is also the problem in Kurdistan.
If Kurdish people
wants to build up a Kurdish state,
it has to clean up the territory,
and to reject population who are not Kurds
inside the Kurdish supposed territory.
The third expression
of this identity manipulation
will be found in something
which is a grave danger,
which is jeopardizing our international order,
that’s to say ghettoization,
It’s the contrary of territorialization.
Ghettoization means to confine a group,
an identity group, which is rejected,
in a territory in which it is shut up.
That was the case of the black majority
in South Africa
during the Apartheid period,
but it’s also the case
of Palestinian people now
which are enforced to settle
in kinds of ghettos
inside Cisjordania or in Gaza,
that’s to say without any chance of contact
with foreign countries and with other people.
This ghettoization is also
one of the characteristics
of the Dayton agreement in 1995,
when the Dayton agreement
tries to reshape Bosnia according
the identity similarities,
and it was resulting in a very complex
and sophisticated map
in which the chance of communication
and of coexistence was very low.
We have to take care of this trend
which is jeopardizing
the spirit of the world order,
that’s to say if every identity
is shut up in a ghetto
what does the international coexistence
and international order would mean?
And we can easily imagine how these ghettos
are producing violence,
feeling of revenge,
and many kinds of strong
and negative reactions are coming from
the frustrations of the concerned people.
The fourth figure
of this ethnicization of the world
would be the growing influence
of new ideologies,
ideologies which are no more based
on political vision,
on a political project of building up a new city,
but ideologies which are deriving,
which are coming from the apology of an identity
and the willing to build this identity
as a finality of the political action.
This is true for instance of this new radicalism
that we can find in Judaism
but also in Islam but also in Christianity,
which area kind of apology of these identities
without taking into account
the global order of the world
and the project of creating a new politics.
But there is also another derivation
which is concerning now populism.
Populism is this kind of ideology
which is widely coming from identity
and manipulating identity
without being concern by the main trends
of the new political issues
and the new political goals.
We can commonly find this kind of populism
in many countries which are
really impacted by the identity issues,
I mentioned for instance many countries
in Central Europe and especially for instance
the evolution of Hungary in the present context.
And finally the fifth figure
of this ethnicization of the world
is conflictualization of identities.
It is something like a back clash
of Samuel Huntington thesis.
When Samuel Huntington considers
that there was an essence
of antagonism in each civilisation,
it’s exactly the contrary that we can observe.
That’s to say the more we use identity
as a political instrument,
the more identities are evolving
to a conflictual project
and to a very risky and dangerous competition.
And now more and more the present world today
is made of this competition of identities
and so is conflictualizing the identity rivalry
and the identity competition.
So these are the five main features
of this ethnicization of the world.
You can observe that this ethnicization
of the world at each level
is really jeopardizing the international order,
that’s to say threatening peace,
threatening respect, tolerance, coexistence.
And that’s why
the main challenge of the present world order
is to contain
the political instrumentalization of identity
in order to contain the risk
of making it so dangerous.
