Is identity politics (hereafter IP), in its various historically and spatially contextually diverse forms, conducive to sustained social justice? Or does it hinder struggles to achieve a resiliently just and sustainably egalitarian world? These questions stimulated a conference roundtable discussion late in 2021.Footnote 1 Given the current widespread practice of IP, however, they merit further discussion. This article introduces a collection of essays focused on diverse contemporary manifestations of IP and their relation to social justice. The collection sheds light on various context-specific forms in which identities underlie political action and modes of organisation, driven by activists, academics, government policies, or market forces. The resulting scenario allows for broader reflections, which we briefly attempt here.
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Many contemporary progressive political struggles seem, often to a great extent, to mobilise IP. In doing so they frequently rest to some degree on ‘strategic essentialism’, since each instance in practice requires some working agreement about acceptable forms and contents of the particular identity/ies being mobilised, and thus crystallises each of them into a specific form. Such identity based struggles include, among many others, identitarian heritage and memorialisation claims, identitarian calls for political autonomy, identitarian demands for enforcement of equity employment laws that challenge inequalities based on gender or race in hiring or pay gaps, and identitarian calls for revision and diversification of teaching curricula with unequal identity representations. In what follows, we consider a variety of strategies that might be used to define IP, and whether, and how, they encompass other social phenomena which are not commonly understood as exemplifying IP – for example, governmental migration policy that regulates mobility based on identities, or far-right nationalist agendas of exclusion of national or ethnic others. To this end, we begin by considering whether IP can be neatly defined, and then discuss various critiques of IP, many presented in the collection’s articles, which question its potential to achieve sustained social justice. We conclude with a brief reassessment of the usefulness of the concept of IP.
Challenges for defining identity politics
The notion of IP is difficult to define and, in writing this introductory article, we have struggled with how, and whether, to do so. This is a question to which we return in our conclusion. As is evident in the articles included in our collection, IP is utilised in a plurality of ways: contributors to this collection have understood and used the concept differently from each other and related it to diverse social phenomena. Such a multiplicity of meanings might not, however, be conducive to comparative analyses or general assessments of practices that might be considered to exemplify IP at work. Hence some of the challenges we faced when preparing this overview.
IP can, from one perspective, be understood as a concrete historically practised phenomenon, bound to the socio-historical specificities in which it occurs. Moran (2020), who works from this perspective, argues that the term should be limited to those forms of political action that mobilise explicitly around identity, which, she adds, is a phenomenon that arose in the second half of the twentieth century along with nascent uses of the term in academic literature. Similarly, many trace IP to specific non-governmental progressivist movements, mainly stemming from the social justice struggles of the 1960s and 1970s in the USA. Its origin is often traced back to the Combahee River Collective Statement (2017[1977]) – a manifesto arguing for a type of IP that reflects the specificity of the oppression faced by queer racialised women. In our view, however, such an understanding limits application of the term to a specific socio-historical manifestation and renders it a concept of limited theoretical utility. For us, examples of what we currently call IP can be found across history and socio-geographic contexts, even if the vocabulary of the time or place did not categorise those forms of political action as such.
An alternative to this approach is to view IP as a conceptual tool for categorisation, analysis and comparison of diverse socio-political forms. This is the path we have chosen for our discussion of the concept as a general analytical tool instead of as an historically specific phenomenon. We begin, in this section, by considering the various characteristics that might lead to practices being considered as IP, and the extent to which such characteristics can or cannot be seen as definitional (that is, as necessary and sufficient conditions for a specific kind of political activity to be understood as IP). In doing this we also focus on various counter-arguments, as we believe that a precise understanding of IP, and of what practices are best described by that couplet, is related to how one deals with various critiques of the concept and its operationalisation. The recurring characteristics we identify can be divided into three distinct, albeit sometimes overlapping, sets which we consider in three separate subsections focused, respectively, on political grievances, on political practices, and on the political aims and outcomes of a particular array of processes and actions.
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three different possible ways of characterising IP in relation to specific facets of (or phases in) political processes: identitarian grievances, mobilisation of identities, and identitarian aims and outcomes. Nevertheless, in producing these characterizations we found that all of them are insufficient to establish when, exactly, a political process is (or is not) definitively an exemplar of IP as it is commonly understood today. This lack of consensus over what comprises IP, the imprecision in how the term is used, hinders its use as a comparative analytical tool. Does that mean we need to generate and then demand general use of a thoroughly considered and therefore very precise definition? Or does it mean that we should abandon use of the term and improve our precision when we describe socio-political phenomena in detail? Efforts to use the term for classificatory purposes require something akin to the former; efforts to be analytically clear may be possible by following the latter path.
This choice is particularly delicate as IP is far from being a merely conceptual issue: it is a political tactic that is currently being applied and defended in all sorts of contexts around the world. The practices usually described by the couplet have gained what Pérez (2023) calls a monopoly within change-oriented social movements and now have currency well beyond the confines of the social sciences, with diverse and often incompatible meanings attached to it. In this context, we would suggest that investing effort into defining what constitutes IP has little if any value. Rather, what is needed is assiduous analysis of concrete political interventions in which identitarian thinking is present, and of the extent of success those have in achieving sustained social justice.
