Identity and Religious Entrepreneurs
The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of French Protestants, François Dubois, 1572
Credit: Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne
Summary
Identity and religious entrepreneurs bring ethnic or religious referents into play in order to persuade others to subscribe to their political or social project. In so doing, they reshape the global political scene by becoming part of a system of international non-state networks which, depending on the context, lead to the fragmentation of political units and/or the internationalization of conflicts.
Among the transnational actors who succeed in blurring our understanding of international relations, identity and religious entrepreneurs are those most inclined to mobilize ethnic or religious referents in order to gain support and make their political or social projects bear fruit. They tend to accentuate the barriers between human communities that lay claim to these referents as a source of primordial and exclusive affiliation. Depending on the contexts, these mobilizations are liable to shatter political unity or lead to the internationalization of conflicts.
Identities presented as exclusive and monolithic
Ethnic and religious referents enable identity entrepreneurs to legitimize the authority they claim to exert over human communities; they are also able to assert their autonomy with regard to institutionalized political spaces, or to mobilize support for the causes they are defending, notably in cases of conflict.
The common denominator between these different types of mobilization is the exclusive and monolithic nature of the identities referred to. These are presented as both superior to and incompatible with other affiliations (national or community), and yet uniform (identity entrepreneurs assume the right to speak in the name of the communities they claim to represent, of which they themselves often determine the shape).
Identity mobilization driving the Partition of India
Comment: These two maps present the partition of the British colonial empire into two independent states (the dominions of India and Pakistan, divided into two regions that were very distant from one another) following the Indian Independence Act of 1947, and the redrawing of these countries’ boundary lines from 1949 to the present day. These territorial changes were produced by a hodgepodge of internal factors (mobilization of ethnic or religious representatives by political entrepreneurs like Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League, food crises, massive displacements of people); confrontations between the new states (Indo-Pakistani wars over Kashmir, separation of Pakistan into two states); and the interventionism of outside states (China, United States).
Depending on their nature, identity entrepreneurs can nevertheless be seen to have a vast range of objectives. The Saudi monarchy, for example, whose legitimacy rests on monopolization of the religious norm and promotes its conception of Islam internationally in order to establish its influence, behaves as a religious entrepreneur for the purpose of promoting social and political conservatism. Conversely, in the case of the Iranian revolution, Shiite Islam was mobilized by Ayatollah Khomeini’s followers for the purpose of challenging the status quo. Indeed, the mobilizing potential of religious identities makes them a powerful mainspring of protest, especially when they appear to cap the frustrations of populations in contexts where traditional political actors do not fulfill the roles expected of them.
Another characteristic of identity mobilization is that it only rarely cuts across state borders. This leads identity entrepreneurs to reconfigure the global political scene by mobilizing international solidarity networks. These constitute a resource for identity entrepreneurs in that they increase the visibility of their causes.
Balkan empires and states, 1878-2008
Comment: Over 130 years, the search for harmony between the borders of states established after the break-up of empires (Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian) and the resulting tangle of multiple identities, has contributed to the formation of a fragile patchwork of states, which are the products of open conflicts, population displacements, and successive attempts at ethnic cleansing.
Internationalization of identity mobilization
This phenomenon is particularly evident when identity entrepreneurs become involved in conflict situations. While ethnic or religious variables are never sufficient to explain the onset of violent action, they contribute to the aggravation of conflicts by encouraging commitments to support the cause (human, financial or logistic) outside the territories concerned. The mobilization of transnational systems of reference, particularly religious ones in the context of the conflicts which caused the break-up of Yugoslavia (notably Orthodox solidarity and Islamic jihad) well illustrate this phenomenon.
Identity mobilization is based on interpretations maintained by identity entrepreneurs, who convey their own view of the communities they claim to represent rather than a “natural” and immutable reality. However, the mobilization of ethnic or religious referents tends to make these views more visible, gradually concealing differences within the community and alternative interpretations of reality.
This phenomenon, in the context of intra-state conflicts, tends to lead on to the idea that communities are structurally incompatible and to demands for independence resulting from this, producing highly visible partition in the cases of ex-Yugoslavia, the Caucasus and present-day Iraq.
Each of these examples forcefully underlines the following paradox: if identity-based activism invariably results in territorial demands, satisfying these cannot constitute a solution to tensions because identity can never be completely aligned with territory. The union of identity activism with territorial demands tends therefore to end up in ethnic cleansing (genocide, massacres or population displacement), or else in a series of secessions.
In fact, the introduction of frameworks for understanding identities only succeeds in concealing the elements of social cohesion that are likely to serve as a basis for establishing pluralist political communities, thus undermining attempts at nation-building as well as attempts to reconcile identity-focused actors.
How the USSR counted its nationalities, 1970
Comment: Despite the initial Soviet plan to build a vast Socialist political community (the “Soviet people”), USSR censuses from the 1920s were based on categorizations by ethnologists (48 categories here), as was the construction of territorialized “nationalities” during the following decade. This paradoxical tension formed the crucible for independence demands and the subsequent break-up of the USSR. Even now, it continues to stir up endless violence. The map and graph show both the great diversity and the largely dominant role of Russians, in number and in territorial spread.
- transnational actors > Transnational actor
- Transnational actors function across the world space, either alone or in networks, outside the framework of nation-states. They partly escape state control and intervention.
- identity > Identity
- The concept of identity is ambiguous, multifaceted, subjective, and frequently exploited and manipulated. No identity is foreordained or natural – so it is better to talk of identity construction, or of the processes of constructing self-representations developed by an individual or group. These constructions are neither stable nor permanent, defining the individual or group from multiple perspectives: on its own terms, in relation or opposition to others, and by others. The way individuals and groups use identity varies according to their interests and the constraints inherent in their specific situation: identity, therefore, is a construct based on interaction. This combination of affiliations, allegiances and internal and external recognition is a complex process, involving various degrees of awareness and contradiction, constantly being amalgamated and reconfigured.
- entrepreneurs > Political entrepreneur
- An entrepreneur, as defined by Max Weber, manages an organized group that has an administrative management and pursues a specific goal. An identity or religious entrepreneur, then, is an actor who mobilizes symbols of identity or religion for the benefit of their political, social or economic capital.
- ethnic > Ethnicity
- Ethnicity is a descriptive category that appeared at the end of the 19th century, constructed by anthropologists and disseminated by colonial administrations. Unlike “race” it does not reference biological criteria but designates a group of individuals with the same origin, the same cultural tradition, whose unity is based on language, history, territory, beliefs and the awareness of belonging to an ethnic group. Ethnicity, which some have claimed to be a natural phenomenon, is in fact a social construct, externally imposed or claimed, at once arbitrary and evolving. Proposed as an exclusive identity, it becomes all the more powerful as an instrument of political mobilization when the state is in difficulty. Ethnocentrism consists in understanding the world exclusively through the lens of one’s own culture and seeking to impose this interpretation.
- conflicts > War
- Violent confrontation between armed groups over values, status, power or scarce resources, in which the aim of each party is to neutralize, weaken or eliminate their adversaries. This organized, collective, armed violence can be undertaken by states (via their national armies) or by non-state groups; it can bring several states into opposition (interstate war) or occur within a single state (civil war). The former, progressively codified within a legal framework, have become rare, while the latter, today primarily caused by state institutional failure, are tending to become more international in scope, to last over time (sometimes decades) and to be extremely devastating, especially for civilian populations.
- national > Nation
- Political community based on an awareness of shared characteristics and/or a will to live together. It is common practice to contrast political and cultural concepts of the nation – which in practice are mutually influential and tend to converge. In the political concept, the nation is invented and produced by a state: the territory precedes the nation and defines its contours (this is known as the French concept, based on the republican melting pot and jus soli, right of the soil). In the cultural understanding of nation, a shared common culture produces the nation. The national project consists in bringing this population together on a single territory (the cultural or romantic or German concept of the nation, based on jus sanguinis, right of blood). The latter concept intrinsically produces conflicts and can lead to ethnic cleansing or genocide (Nazi Germany, Greater Serbia, etc.).
- community > Communitarian
- Notions that appeared in the late 1970s on the political science, denoting the development of identity, a sense of belonging, and allegiance on ethnic, linguistic, religious, or sociological grounds, aside from or even against the state and the social contract it is supposed to guarantee. Contemporary globalization is profoundly altering the role of states and individuals, as well as the complex relationships between the universal and the particular, thus opening up spaces for multiple forms of communitarianism to emerge.
- identities > Identity
- The concept of identity is ambiguous, multifaceted, subjective, and frequently exploited and manipulated. No identity is foreordained or natural – so it is better to talk of identity construction, or of the processes of constructing self-representations developed by an individual or group. These constructions are neither stable nor permanent, defining the individual or group from multiple perspectives: on its own terms, in relation or opposition to others, and by others. The way individuals and groups use identity varies according to their interests and the constraints inherent in their specific situation: identity, therefore, is a construct based on interaction. This combination of affiliations, allegiances and internal and external recognition is a complex process, involving various degrees of awareness and contradiction, constantly being amalgamated and reconfigured.
- borders > Border
- The line that marks the limit of state sovereignty, as distinct from the hazy boundary zones or limits of empires. In no way natural, these long-term historic constructs, which can be more or less endogenous and more or less subject to dispute and violence, are being profoundly altered by contemporary globalization processes. Regional integration processes are transforming and diminishing them – even erasing them, and pushing them back; transnational actors are crossing them or bypassing them; at the same time, they are being closed to migration, while new borders (social, cultural) are being constructed.
- networks > Network
- Classical geography tended to place too much importance on surface areas, territories, countries and soil, but network analysis has now become central to its approach. Networks are defined as spaces in which distance is discontinuous and consists of nodes linked by lines. Some are physical (networks for the transportation of people, goods and energy, IT cables and information super highways), others not. When they are partly virtual (such as the internet), they also involve individuals and organizations. Philosophers (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), sociologists (Manuel Castells), political scientists (James Rosenau), and economists use this concept to analyze the interconnected functioning of individuals.
- territorial > Territory
- Surface area occupied by a human group. This term has different meanings in different social science disciplines. For geographers it is a socialized, constructed space in which distance is continuous, with more or less defined borders, such as, but not confined to, states. For sociologists and political scientists, a territory is a socially constructed space confined by borders which provide the structuring principle for a political community and enable a state to impose its authority and control on the population. It is linked to the context, history and actors of its construction. For Max Weber, the modern, rational and legal state is closely linked to territoriality.
- genocide > Genocide
- Crime codified by the international Genocide Convention of December 9, 1948. Its definition specifies acts committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
- displacement > Displaced
- According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the term describes persons or groups who have been forced or obliged to flee or leave their homes or their habitual place of residence, in particular because of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, or to avoid the effects of these, but who have not crossed an internationally recognized state border. These are known as IDPs (internally displaced persons).