Identity Politics in the Public Realm: Bringing Institutions Back In ed. by Avigail Eisenberg and Will Kymlicka (review)

This volume is part of an Ethnicity and Democratic Governance series, which engages the timely question: “How can societies respond to the opportunities and challenges raised by ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural differences and do so in ways that promote democracy, social justice, peace, and stability?” The book’s title references Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol’s classic Bringing the State Back In (1985), which pulled states out from the theoretical/empirical background to which they had been relegated in the social sciences and presented them as actors whose organization/interests have independent effects on political processes/outcomes. In a similar vein, Eisenberg and Kymlicka focus on how public institutions mediate (or fail to mediate) the politics of identity.

The introduction frames the research at the intersection of two analytical streams. A more normative approach addresses the potential for identity politics to expand the scope of freedom and equality within a political community. A more empirical approach delineates how the political mobilization of identity can distort rather than reflect group identity/interests. The book promotes a normative approach that attends to these latter concerns, “to identify some of the factors that either sustain or subvert the emancipatory potential of identity politics” (8) and thereby to understand better “the scope for a progressive politics of identity” (9).

The editors hold that if identity politics has no preordained political effects, then to a significant degree, “the risks and dilemmas of identity politics signal not a failure of identity politics per se but a failure of states to democratize their political processes” (25). They find this to be especially true of liberal democracies, where open political space for an engaged citizenry requires public institutions that possess the capacity/determination “to develop procedures and guidelines for addressing [identity] claims in ways that are compatible with the rule of law, constitutional principles, and public reason” (9). Such processes are not, the editors stress, simply domestic but can be influenced by international actors and norms.

The ten well-written and clearly argued chapters that follow can be divided roughly into two sets. The majority address the identity politics implications of group classification and enumeration by public institutions (through censuses and other mechanisms) on the grounds of race, ethnicity, religion, and/or indigeneity. They explore how such processes, while central to the acquisition of certain resources (e.g., equal/privileged access to goods/services) as well as less material forms of recognition/inclusion within the body politic, also confuse, distort, limit and even exclude group identities/interests. These are not, therefore, neutral/objective exercises but rather are freighted with power struggles, competing interests and inequalities between/within groups.

The second set explores evolving uses of laïcité/secularism in France and Canada, tracing how the concept of neutrality has been shifted from issues of race/ethnicity to religion, and from the state to the broader public space. This has occurred with a corresponding move from a concern over inclusion to social cohesion/order. In the process, non-Christian religions as defined by public institutions have become identified more as inhibitors of inclusion and challengers to social cohesion/order.

For Canadian readers, who will have long understood that public institutions play a vital role in shaping identity politics, this volume demonstrates how other political communities have addressed and continue to address societal diversity. The first set of cases in particular draws widely from African, Asian and Latin American examples, allowing for a fruitful comparative context, as with Melissa Nobles’ revealing comparison of the politics of race in the United States and Brazil. And while there is a certain familiarity to many of the conclusions offered in these chapters, there are also constant insights, as with Villia Jefremovas and Padmapani L. Perez’s observations on the effects of online knowledge production on definitions of indigeneity in the Philippines.

For all of its many narrative and...