Identity/security

Abstract

Identity is a social construct. So is security. Conventional approaches to security have, for long, denied the constructedness of both, offering instead a conception that takes identity as pre-given and its relationship to security as negative – i.e. identity concerns as a source of insecurity. Increasingly since the 1990s, critical approaches to security have revealed the identity/security nexus as one of co-constitution, which allowed for considering identity as a source of security as well. In doing so, critical approaches have looked into identity dynamics in broader terms – i.e. not only in terms of ethnic, religious, linguistic differences, but in terms of a wide range of ‘self-other’ dynamics.