Identity Captured by Law


Book Description

In Identity Captured by Law, Sébastien Grammond explains how minority rights make identity legally relevant, providing a detailed account of struggles that have been fought concerning Indian status and admission to minority-language schools. Setting his analysis of the law in the wider interdisciplinary context of anthropology and political theory, Grammond assesses whether a group's membership rules are an accurate reflection of their ethnicity and are based on sound justifications of minority rights. He argues that membership rules do not violate equality rights if there is sufficient correspondence between the legal criteria that determine membership and the group's own cultural or relational conceptions of their ethnic identity. Comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and original in its comparison of indigenous peoples and linguistic minorities, Identity Captured by Law is an invaluable resource for legal and political scholars and students, as well as anyone interested in the controversies surrounding the legal recognition of identity.




Elite Capture


Book Description

“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests. But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests. Táíwò’s crucial intervention both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world.




Human Rights Law and Personal Identity


Book Description

This book explores the role human rights law plays in the formation, and protection, of our personal identities. Drawing from a range of disciplines, Jill Marshall examines how human rights law includes and excludes specific types of identity, which feed into moral norms of human freedom and human dignity and their translation into legal rights. The book takes on a three part structure. Part I traces the definition of identity, and follows the evolution of, and protects, a right to personal identity and personality within human rights law. It specifically examines the development of a right to personal identity as property, the inter-subjective nature of identity, and the intercession of power and inequality. Part II evaluates past and contemporary attempts to describe the core of personal identity, including theories concerning the soul, the rational mind, and the growing influence of neuroscience and genetics in explaining what it means to be human. It also explores the inter-relation and conflict between universal principles and culturally specific rights. Part III focuses on issues and case law that can be interpreted as allowing self-determination. Marshall argues that while in an age of individual identity, people are increasingly obliged to live in conformed ways, pushing out identities that do not fit with what is acceptable. Drawing on feminist theory, the book concludes by arguing how human rights law would be better interpreted as a force to enable respect for human dignity and freedom, interpreted as empowerment and self-determination whilst acknowledging our inter-subjective identities. In drawing on socio-legal, philosophical, biological and feminist outlooks, this book is truly interdisciplinary, and will be of great interest and use to scholars and students of human rights law, legal and social theory, gender and cultural studies.




Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia


Book Description

This book explores the legal culture of the Parsis, or Zoroastrians, an ethnoreligious community unusually invested in the colonial legal system of British India and Burma. Rather than trying to maintain collective autonomy and integrity by avoiding interaction with the state, the Parsis sank deep into the colonial legal system itself. From the late eighteenth century until India's independence in 1947, they became heavy users of colonial law, acting as lawyers, judges, litigants, lobbyists, and legislators. They de-Anglicized the law that governed them and enshrined in law their own distinctive models of the family and community by two routes: frequent intra-group litigation often managed by Parsi legal professionals in the areas of marriage, inheritance, religious trusts, and libel, and the creation of legislation that would become Parsi personal law. Other South Asian communities also turned to law, but none seems to have done so earlier or in more pronounced ways than the Parsis.




Taken Identity


Book Description

Imagine a president embroiled in scandal, an opposition party frothing at the mouth with his impending resignation or conviction, and the only thing standing between the other guys and the White House is the vice-president. Now imagine the remnants of a war thought long over that has at least one more battle to be waged. That is the premise of Taken Identity, the story of life-long friends trying to right a wrong, and prevent a disaster. From Washington to Maine to Europe and beyond, Taken Identity follows the course of events that puts the president in a precarious position and his most trusted advisors in the role of human shield. The relationships within the circle of friends, at times, are forced to withstand the most brutal of beatings. From high-tech to old fashioned footwork and know-how, Taken Identity introduces you to a by-the-people, for-the-people White House and an extended circle of aides who strive, like all of us, to adhere to the letter of the law, but sometimes are forced to bend it. Its easy to do the right thing, but much harder to do the wrong things for the right reasons.




The Routledge Handbook on Identity in Byzantium


Book Description

This volume is the first to focus solely on how specific individuals and groups in Byzantium and its borderlands were defined and distinguished from other individuals and groups from the mid-fourth to the close of the fifteenth century. It gathers chapters from both established and emerging scholars from a wide range of disciplines across history, art, archaeology, and religion to provide an accurate representation of the state of the field both now and in its immediate future. The handbook is divided into four subtopics that examine concepts of group and specific individual identity which have been chosen to provide methodologically sophisticated and multidisciplinary perspectives on specific categories of group and individual identity. The topics are Imperial Identities; Romanitas in the Late Antique Mediterranean; Macro and Micro Identities: Religious, Regional, and Ethnic Identities, and Internal Others; and Gendered Identities: Literature, Memory, and Self in Early and Middle Byzantium. While no single volume could ever provide a comprehensive vision of identities on the vast variety of peoples within Byzantium over nearly a millennium of its history, this handbook represents a milestone in offering a survey of the vibrant surge of scholarship examining the numerous and oft-times fluctuating codes of identity that shaped and transformed Byzantium and its neighbours during the empire’s long life.




Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law


Book Description

We are witnessing in the last decade of the twentieth century more frequent demands by racial and ethnic groups for recognition of their distinctive histories and traditions as well as opportunities to develop and maintain the institutional infrastructure necessary to preserve them. Where it once seemed that the ideal of American citizenship was found in the promise of integration and in the hope that none of us would be singled out for, let alone judged by, our race or ethnicity, today integration, often taken to mean a denial of identity and history for subordinated racial, gender, sexual or ethnic groups, is often rejected, and new terms of inclusion are sought. The essays in Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law ask us to examine carefully the relation of cultural struggle and material transformation and law's role in both. Written by scholars from a variety of disciplines and theoretical inclinations, the essays challenge orthodox understandings of the nature of identity politics and contemporary debates about separatism and assimilation. They ask us to think seriously about the ways law has been, and is, implicated in these debates. The essays address questions such as the challenges posed for notions of legal justice and procedural fairness by cultural pluralism and identity politics, the role played by law in structuring the terms on which recognition, accommodation, and inclusion are accorded to groups in the United States, and how much of accepted notions of law are defined by an ideal of integration and assimilation. The contributors are Elizabeth Clark, Lauren Berlant, Dorothy Roberts, Georg Lipsitz, and Kenneth Karst.




Identity


Book Description

The New York Times bestselling author of The Origins of Political Order offers a provocative examination of modern identity politics: its origins, its effects, and what it means for domestic and international affairs of state In 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American institutions were in decay, as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to “the people,” who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole. Demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today. The universal recognition on which liberal democracy is based has been increasingly challenged by narrower forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, which have resulted in anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicized Islam, the fractious “identity liberalism” of college campuses, and the emergence of white nationalism. Populist nationalism, said to be rooted in economic motivation, actually springs from the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means. The demand for identity cannot be transcended; we must begin to shape identity in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy. Identity is an urgent and necessary book—a sharp warning that unless we forge a universal understanding of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict.




Indigenous Peoples in International Law


Book Description

In this thoroughly revised and updated edition of the first book-length treatment of the subject, S. James Anaya incorporates references to all the latest treaties and recent developments in the international law of indigenous peoples. Anaya demonstrates that, while historical trends in international law largely facilitated colonization of indigenous peoples and their lands, modern international law's human rights program has been modestly responsive to indigenous peoples' aspirations to survive as distinct communities in control of their own destinies. This book provides a theoretically grounded and practically oriented synthesis of the historical, contemporary and emerging international law related to indigenous peoples. It will be of great interest to scholars and lawyers in international law and human rights, as well as to those interested in the dynamics of indigenous and ethnic identity.




The Abuse of Constitutional Identity in the European Union


Book Description

The idea of constitutional identity has been central to the negotiation of authority between EU and national constitutional orders. Many national constitutional courts have declared that the reach of EU law is limited by certain core elements of the national constitution, often labelled 'constitutional identity'. With the rise of illiberal democracies within the EU, the idea of constitutional identity has increasingly come under criticism, being seen as easily embedded in authoritarian, nativist rhetoric and vulnerable to being abused. In The Abuse of Constitutional Identity in the European Union, Julian Scholtes provides novel insights into how European authoritarians have utilised the concept of constitutional identity to further their illiberal goals. Employing a comparative theoretical perspective, his book identifies the factors behind legitimate constitutional identity claims and critically analyses the ways in which these claims can be abused. Scholtes examines abuses of constitutional identity in three distinct theoretical dimensions: generative, substantive, and relational. The generative dimension looks at how constitutional identity claims come about, while the substantive dimension examines a claim's broader relation to a normative theory of constitutionalism. The relational dimension, on the other hand, considers how constitutional identity claims are advanced and whether they are employed as a means of constitutional dialogue or constitutional disengagement.