Theme Group: Identity and Conflict

Maggie Helwig and Biljana Kasic

This theme group will explore the role that different forms of collective identity can play in conflict situations; we will be looking at how collective identity can both create conflict and how it may be used to mediate conflict, and try to explore ways of creating new and non-exclusive forms of identity.

Beginning with the participants' own experiences in defining their identity as part of one or several groups (as a woman, as gay or lesbian, as Muslim, as a pacifist, as Black ...) or having collective identity imposed upon them, we will examine the reasons that people adopt, or are given, collective identities and how those identities can come to be meaningful and deeply emotionally invested for them.

We will look at how collective identities can become exclusivist, and the ways in which this has created and fed armed conflict, particularly in the cases of national and religious identity.

We will examine identity as a form of oppression - examples include the essentially arbitrary nature of "race" as it has been defined and used in, for instance, apartheid-era South Africa, or the United States; or the forcible designation of individuals as "Serb", "Croat" or "Muslim" in former-Yugoslavia.

We will also look at how some collective identities have been used to mediate conflict - for instance, in some conflict situations, women's groups have communicated across enemy lines because they felt more united by their identity as women than divided by their national identity - and both the strengths and perils inherent in this use of collective identity.

On the "gender day", we will examine gender identity in particular. While the collective identity of "woman" has been used through most of history to keep women in a subordinate position, many women have also found, in this collective identity, a source of strength and a means of resistance. We will look at how this collective identity has created and reinforced movements against violence against women, and feminist-oriented peace movements; but we will also look at some of the dangers, the ways in which women's identity has been co-opted to serve exclusivist nationalist agendas, for instance, and the ways in which traditional gender roles may be replicated and reinforced even by "women-centred" activism.

Meanwhile, men are only beginning to examine their collective identification as men (having long assumed masculinity as the unexamined norm). We will look at the positive and negative aspects of this identification as well - on the one hand, the possibility that men can look at and re-define masculinity in a new, nonviolent form, and on the other hand the danger that men could "retrench" into old, domination-based understandings of their gender identity.

We will also look at how people and groups can create forms of identity that include an appreciation of multiple identities and a non-exclusivist understanding of the collectivity. In particular, we will explore ways that nonviolent activists can understand and draw on the power of collective identification as a woman, as a member of a particular ethnic or cultural group, indeed as a radical pacifist, and make these identities work in a positive way; and how we can begin to undermine the destructive and exclusive forms of collective identity - the means by which we can make room, in the face of conflict, for flexible and multiple understandings of who we are.