International Relations and Identity

Book excerpt: International Relations and Identity examines the issue of collective political identity formation and expands the concept of the international beyond the notion of states. Providing a dialogical approach to questions of identity and alterity in International Relations, the author considers how identity is formed, maintained and transformed in continuous processes with alterity. This innovative book seeks to broaden understanding of identity and difference by developing a process-based perspective. It shifts the attention from a dichotomising view of the international to the multiple ways by which identity and difference are related. It challenges traditional conceptions of the international and argues that it is constituted by the processes in which states and other actors participate and is more than a spatial dimension constituted by states. Guillaume illustrates this complex theory with a detailed case study of how Japanese political community has formed, performed and transformed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in light of the questions of empire and multiculturalism. International Relations and Identity will be of interest to students and scholars of international politics, international relations theory and Japanese studies.