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Chapter Seven: Identity and the Transition
- State University of New York Press
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THE ARGUMENT FOR CONSTRUCTIVIST POLITICAL IDENTITY The transformation of a social order is an overwhelmingly complex phenomenon. While this complexity makes it nearly impossible to study the South African transition as a whole, it does make it amenable to analysis from a wide variety of perspectives . Indeed, the demise of apartheid has been studied from the viewpoint of Marxist classes, neoliberal economics, constitutional politics, elections, ethnicity, political parties, gender, biographies of individuals involved, regional politics, peace agreements, and a whole host of other heuristic positions. Each study represents an attempt to sort, organize, and understand either some aspect of the whole or, more ambitiously, the entire transformation from a particular perspective . As such, each is also an assertion of what is important about the transition. The differences in these studies reflect larger differences in the theoretical systems adopted by analysts. These systems help the analyst know which questions to ask and which aspects of the transition deserve attention in the search for answers. The questions and the analytical criteria for this study are based in a social constructivist theory of political identity. This perspective evokes questions about the role of identity in social power. How do networks of ideas about identity mediate the relationships between members of a society and between members and their social order? Chapter 2 proposed a heuristic for organizing such ideas based on a conceptual distinction between the identity of a person (whether an 169 Chapter Seven Identity and the Transition Conclusions for the Political Theory of Social Change individual or a corporate entity) and the identity labels that constitute that identity . This theory problematizes the dominant Western understanding of identity that fixes a person’s identity as a constitutive core indicative of a nature and achieved through development. Theories of identity in Global Politics that assume this Western conceptualization tend to limit their analysis to one manifestation —nation or class or race—and to reify identity into the unit of analysis with which they are most concerned, usually either the state or the individual. While at their best these theories help explain changes to a single category of identity, they are not equipped to deal with the multiple and shifting meanings through which the often implicit negotiations of social change are carried out. The analysis built here begins with the assumption that the power of identity flows not from any correspondence between descriptive labels and an entity’s posited internal character, but rather from the labels themselves, which have power because they are imbued with meaning. The ways in which persons differ from each other become categories of political identity when members of a society act as if these differences are important. In this understanding, the descriptive identity labels that make up individual and group identities are better thought of as communal property, part of the public commons. Both the meanings of the labels and the rules by which they are applied to individuals are part of the lived consensus of the social order. Among other things, this status means that the labels are available for study through the texts that constitute social discourse. Identity labels are methodologically important because they occupy an intermediate point in the process by which agents and structures co-constitute both each other and social reality generally. Constructivism posits that the social world is made in the recursive and power-laden interactions between agents and existing social patterns. If we choose to emphasize identity in this process, identity labels become codes that allow actors to organize their behavior; at the same time, they are the means by which behavior is systematized into the social order. As such, identity labels provide an excellent opportunity to study both the process by which social arrangements direct the actions of society’s members and the way that agents change the social order. This theoretical framework can be applied to a wide variety of social phenomena. This book is my attempt to use it to understand processes of social change. I argue that this theory provides a basis for understanding not only the power of particular identity labels, but also the dynamics of labels within agents’ identities and within the systems of power and resistance that produce larger social change. This perspective is based on a number of assumptions about social change. To begin with, it assumes that societies (as well as individuals, identities, and most everything else) are continuously changing. Most of the changes are minor adaptations that preserve the integrity of the overarching...