An Ontological Rethinking of Identity in International Studies 3031308824, 9783031308826

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PSIR · PALGRAVE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

An Ontological Rethinking of Identity in International Studies

Yong-Soo Eun

Palgrave Studies in International Relations

Series Editors Knud Erik Jørgensen, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark J. Marshall Beier, Political Science, McMaster University, Milton ON, Canada

Palgrave Studies in International Relations provides scholars with the best theoretically-informed scholarship on the global issues of our time. The series includes cutting-edge monographs and edited collections which bridge schools of thought and cross the boundaries of conventional fields of study. Knud Erik Jørgensen is Professor of International Relations at Aarhus University, Denmark, and at Ya¸sar University, Izmir, Turkey.

Yong-Soo Eun

An Ontological Rethinking of Identity in International Studies

Yong-Soo Eun Department of Political Science and International Studies Hanyang University Seoul, Korea (Republic of)

Palgrave Studies in International Relations ISBN 978-3-031-30882-6 ISBN 978-3-031-30883-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30883-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Phillip Thurston This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In memory of my mother, Ok-Hee Kang (1955–1991)

Acknowledgements

My intellectual and affective debts in the writing of An Ontological Rethinking of Identity in International Studies are many. Before recording my deep appreciation and heartfelt gratitude for their help, I would first like to express one hope. I hope that this work is read as an “essay”, not a monograph, and that it has some of the virtues of that genre. As Carl H. Klaus writes, an essay is a “means of thinking on paper, of trying things out in writing”; as such, it has exploratory and tentative qualities. In An Ontological Rethinking of Identity in International Studies, I am trying out new ideas and exploring new territory. To be sure, the limitations of the essay form and character, including the lack of definitiveness of new ideas or the oversimplification of old ones, are evident enough in my work here. To these must be added the limitations of the author, myself. Despite these shortcomings and limitations, many have engaged with me with the generosity of spirit and given freely of their time and expertise in discussing the arguments made in this essay. For this, and much more, I am deeply grateful. Especially, I am indebted to Peter Katzenstein. He was kind enough to read an earlier version of this essay with enthusiasm, challenging questions, and innovative suggestions. Equally, I am extremely grateful for the perceptive and thought-provoking feedback that I received from Karin Fierke. This work is no doubt much strengthened as a result.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Also, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors of Palgrave Studies in International Relations for their probing engagements with this work. Their thoughtful review helped me greatly to better hone my arguments. Similarly, I sincerely thank a number of colleagues at the Korean International Studies Association for helpful critical feedback, and for arranging a forum that allowed me to try out and sharpen my ideas. For generous institutional support, I appreciate Hanyang University (Grant No. 202200000001579). Admittedly, this essay is only one of the many formations of or formulations for engaging with the world of identity (studies). Also, I admit that my intervention still leaves several gaps in our understanding of that world. I would like to express another hope: that the reader will nevertheless find this essay a provocative conversation and one to which you may wish to add.

Contents

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Introduction: A Thorny Problem

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A Typology of Identity Research in IR

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Re-Grounding Identity in Ontology of Immanence

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Illustrations and Implications

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Index

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List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 4.1

Typological map of conventional constructivist research on identity Typology of identity research in IR Re-grounding identity in an ontology of immanence

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: A Thorny Problem

Abstract In this introductory chapter, I present rationales and contextual background for this book which aims to address the question of how we, International Relations (IR) scholars, can deepen our understanding of identity. Although the contributions of IR scholars, specifically those of constructivist IR scholars, to the study of identity are dense, it is true that the discipline’s identity scholarship remains divided and incoherent. A thorny problem embedded deep within the contemporary identity scholarship in IR is that the single term “identity” is used to describe both “sameness” and “difference” and to make sense of contradicting realties, designating “both a foundational, essential element of human action and a fragmented, fluctuating Self.” This contraction makes it difficult for identity scholarship to meet its internal validity standard (coherence) and hinders the accumulation of knowledge and progress in understanding what identity is and how or why it matters. This chapter briefly examines how the splitting of identity scholarship has taken shape in IR and argues that we can address the splitting through a deep engagement with ontology of immanence, which is new to constructivist and identity scholarship in the discipline. Keywords Identity scholarship · Constructivism · Contraction · Ontology of immanence

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 Y.-S. Eun, An Ontological Rethinking of Identity in International Studies, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30883-3_1

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In their oft-cited work on the use of the term “identity” in the social sciences and humanities, Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper observe as follows: the term tends to mean either “too much” (i.e., “sameness” among group members over time) or “too little” (i.e., “difference,” a “superficial, accidental, fleeting, or contingent” sense of who one is); because identity is used to describe both “sameness” and “difference,” it is a “hopelessly ambiguous” concept, “incapable of performing serious analytical work” (Brubaker & Cooper, 2000: 6, 11). Much the same can be said about how the concept of identity is used and understood in the discipline of International Relations (IR). In his survey of identity studies in the discipline, Felix Berenskoetter (2017: 7, emphasis added) writes that IR scholars use the term “to view the state as both a coherent and a contingent entity by suggesting that collective identity can both constitute and undermine states.” As I will show in later chapters, there are indeed many scholars who have already noticed this problem. Put otherwise, a thorny problem connected with the contemporary identity scholarship in IR is that the single concept is used to make sense of contradicting realties, designating “both a foundational, essential element of human action and a fragmented, fluctuating Self.” My aim in this short book is to offer preliminary steps in addressing this contraction and thus to contribute to developing a better field for identity research in IR. That requires a mapping exercise to clarify the foundations of the varieties of identity-based research in the discipline and reveal the paradoxical use of the concept identity therein. That is, to achieve my goal, I need to begin by addressing two reflexive questions: How has identity been understood, theorized, and analyzed in IR, specifically by constructivist IR scholars? How can we make further progress if the scholarship remains contradictory and divided when it comes to using the term identity? In addressing those questions, I develop a typology of identity research with a focus on ontology. My typology maps not only the analytical, theoretical, and epistemological orientations of identity research, but also, and more importantly, its ontological underpinnings. This typological map deepens our understanding of identity-based studies in IR, which are currently reviewed mainly from thematic and conceptual or paradigmatic perspectives.

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Based on this broadened mapping exercise, I will show that many of the identity studies in IR cohere around two discrete understandings of being, substantialism and correlationism, and that the analytical, theoretical, and epistemological orientations of identity studies in IR are split along those two lines of ontology. For example, this split corresponds to constructivist scholarship’s division into “conventional” and “critical” camps. Although it is not explicitly stated, substantialism is the ontological basis that underpins conventional constructivism’s common analytical approach, in which identity is treated as a causal or explanatory variable in the study of foreign policy and international politics. In contrast, correlationism underlies the critical variants of constructivism when they hold that identity cannot be considered as a bounded analytical category, let alone as a functional factor. Obviously, it is not a new revelation that IR constructivist research on identity is divided into two camps. Likewise, it comes as no revelation that this binary opposition makes it difficult for identity scholarship to meet its internal validity standard (coherence) and unnecessarily narrows its theoretical lenses. What is new and crucial in this work is my disclosure of the types of ontology behind that divide and my assertion that we can address it without discarding the very concept of identity (Brubaker & Cooper, 2000; Bucher & Jasper, 2017) or subsuming one of the two sides into the other (Dessler, 1999; Hopf, 1998; Ruggie, 1997; Wendt, 1999). Instead, I re-ground identity in an ontology new to constructivism in IR. In what follows, I discuss an ontology of immanence, the signature idea of Deleuze (and Guattari). Building on Deleuze’s thought, I propose a new ontology of identity—or a mechanology of identity—in which identity is thought of as a machine that has virtual/immanent agency in a state of differential becoming. By explicating that idea and engaging it with the ontological meanings of identity put forward by extant identity-based research in IR, I show how it can help to build a bridge between the conventional and critical variants of constructivist research on identity. However, it is important that we are first clear about the foundations of current identity scholarship in IR. To that end, I conduct a mapping exercise to review and typologize the varieties of identity research along analytical, epistemological, and ontological lines.

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Before proceeding further, one caveat is in order. The IR literature on identity is voluminous and multifaceted; an exhaustive review is not only far beyond the scope of this book, but also unnecessary from the perspective of my typological mapping exercise. Furthermore, as mentioned above, my main objective here is to offer an ontologydriven way to address the dissociation in identity scholarship without resorting to either a positivist or a post-positivist synthesis between the two different takes on identity found in the conventional/modern approaches and critical/postmodern approaches. As many have already noted (Dessler, 1999; Hopf & Allan, 2016; Katzenstein et al., 1998; Pouliot, 2007; Ruggie, 1997; Wendt, 1994), the divide between these approaches is one of the main forces that renders constructivist scholarship incoherent and thereby hinders the accumulation of knowledge and progress in understanding constructivist ideas, such as identity. Thus, to achieve coherence and broaden today’s “narrowed” (McCourt, 2016: 475; see also Berenskoetter, 2017) constructivist research on identity, I focus my mapping exercise on identity studies in which each camp’s ontological underpinnings and epistemological and analytical preferences are clearly manifested, even though that focus inevitably sacrifices overall representational accuracy of the complex and wide-ranging body of identity research in IR. As a first step toward the development of a bridge between the two camps, I will briefly discuss the intellectual history of identity scholarship and how it has arrived at the current divide.

A Brief Survey: How Does (the Splitting of) Identity Scholarship Take Shape in IR? To answer that question, it is crucial is to find and understand the critical junctures in IR scholars’ substantial engagement with identity as a clear and constant research subject. I will start in the 1990s during the rise of constructivism in the discipline, combined with the postmodernist turn of the social sciences in general. Comprehensive stocktaking of those developments is widespread and well-rehearsed (Adler, 1997; Allan et al., 2018; Checkel, 1998; Guzzini, 2000; Fierke, 2013; Finnemore & Sikkink, 2001; Hopf, 1998; Kratochwil, 2008; Lapid & Kratochwil, 1996; Urrestarazu, 2015; Vucetic, 2017). Therefore, only a brief summary is warranted here.

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The study of identity has emerged through (and with) theoretical developments in constructivism, a (meta-)theoretical perspective first introduced to IR by Nicholas Onuf (1989). Certainly, it is not true that only self-identified constructivist scholars consider identity as a research agenda. IR studies on national images or perceptions that are similar to the concept of identity pre-date the advent of constructivism (see, e.g., Boulding, 1959; Holsti, 1970; Jervis, 1976), and several rationalist IR scholars are committed to studying identity (see, e.g., Kalyvas, 2008; Laitin, 1998). In addition, there is a rich body of postmodern and poststructuralist literature on identity in which constructivism, specifically its “conventional” variant, is the target of criticism: this point will be discussed in detail in later chapters. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that IR began to make space for identity as an analytical and theoretical category in its own right in the context of the rise of constructivism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This development was linked to the profound structural change in world politics at that time—the end of the Cold War. The apparent inability of realist-rationalist IR thinking to predict that mega-event led many scholars to seek an alternative view and look at the social and ideational, as opposed to material, attributes that constitute social structures and give rise to their transformations. As part of that “constructivist turn” in IR (Checkel, 1998), identity, once considered an esoteric concept, especially during the 1960s and 70s when behavioral sciences and research were the dominant forces in the discipline (Almond & Verba, 1963), began to receive serious attention. That trend was confirmed by the quantitative increase and significant proliferation of publications on identity in IR. According to a review of the Harvard Identity Project led by the Weatherhead Center for International Relations, the number of identity-based works published in IR journals increased dramatically around 1993 and soared again around 1995 (Horowitz, 2002). During that early period of development, identity as an explicit analytical concept was invoked in the literature to understand and account for various international political issues across different areas. For example, the examination of causal relationships between states’ identities and their foreign policy preferences and actions (Berger, 1996; Jepperson et al., 1996; Maull, 1990) was a central interest of constructivist IR scholars; likewise, a growing constructivist literature problematized the common notion of state sovereignty or the Westphalian system, by highlighting the

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socio-historically constructed nature of identity that underlies the state system (Bartelson, 1995; Ruggie, 1993; Waever et al., 1993). Constructivist scholars have also paid substantial attention to various conflicts, such as the Cuban missile crisis and the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, and explained them in terms of identity politics (Campbell 1992; Ringmar, 1996; Weber, 1995; Weldes, 1999). By the same token, peaceful relations between states and the establishment of international or regional political communities were also analyzed through the lens of identity, particularly collective identity formation (Jepperson et al., 1996; Katzenstein, 1996; Mercer, 1995; Wendt, 1992). Put simply, across a variety of issue areas, the identity research of the early-mid 1990s made substantial contributions by providing IR with alternatives to rationalist and materialist assumptions and theories. As diverse as their concerns were, identity-based studies were united in their strong commitment to the view that “identities are the basis of interests” (Wendt, 1992: 398) and “identity is an inescapable dimension of being” (Campbell, 1992: 9). As is well known, however, identity scholarship split over time, parallel to constructivism’s division in IR. By the end of the 1990s, constructivism was largely divided into two camps labeled variously as “conventional” and “critical” (Hopf, 1998: 172), “moderate” and “radical” (Checkel, 1998), or “modern” and “postmodern” (Price & Reus-Smit, 1998; Ruggie, 1998).1 That is, as many observers have noted, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, constructivism and identity research experienced an epistemological or methodological dichotomy between positivism and post-positivism. This bifurcation also underwent what McCourt (2016: 476–477) calls a “social” process of “fractal distinction,” namely the splitting of a group of like-minded scholars into “fractals according to given criteria, like the quantitative–qualitative distinction in social science.” Too often, the result was monologue, or in Lake’s word “factionalism” (2011: 465), that chipped away at the value of constructivist thought in international studies and eventually narrowed constructivism, leaving this problematic divide unaddressed. Although conventional/modern/moderate approaches to the study of identity are

1 To be sure, the theoretical landscape of constructivism in IR is more complex— see, for a fuller account of this point, Fierke (2013) and Srivastava (2020)—but, for the purpose of my discussion here, it is sufficient to tap into these categories and treat them instrumentally to identify main rifts lineation in this complex world of “various constructivisms.”

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generally preferred in today’s IR communities,2 self-proclaimed “dissidents” (Ashley & Walker, 1990) have continued to work on identity, swing in favor of more critical (i.e., postmodern and poststructuralist) approaches and making their own territory. As a result, the contemporary identity scholarship has remained divided and incoherent, and identity studies from both sides keep piling up on opposite ends and: I will explain at greater length and in more detail this point in the next section in which a typology of identity research is developed. The above survey is a much abridged one. Despite its necessary brevity, this review indicates that the splitting and territory-making is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. The existing literature often points to each camp’s epistemological or methodological orientation and expresses concern about “incommensurability,” or it points to different definitions of identity and raises the accompanying concern about “conceptual dichotomies” or “definitional anarchy” (Abdelal et al., 2006: 695; Finnemore & Sikkink, 2001: 391). However, the split itself straddles all the issues of analytics, methodology, epistemology, and ontology. In particular, the problem of splitting and territorialization is closely tied to each camp’s view of the ontological status of identity. As I explain below, the actual terrain of identity research is indispensably formed on the basis of particular premises and assumptions about the existence of identity. Furthermore, as alluded to above, several concerned scholars remain skeptical about overcoming the existing binary opposition; in this 2 TRIP survey data from February 2014 to December 2018 demonstrate this trend. For example, in the 2017 US faculty survey, when IR scholars committed to constructivism were asked which variants best describe their approach to the study of international relations, a majority of the respondents (61%) chose “conventional” variants, whereas 23% chose “critical” variants of constructivism (see https://trip.wm.edu/charts/#/bar graph/38/5061). In Europe, although the preference for critical constructivist approaches is higher (42%) than in American data, conventional approaches are preferred by more constructivists (45%). Similarly, conventional constructivism is also preferred by constructivists in emerging IR communities in Asia: see the 2022 journal special issue of Contemporary Southeast Asia, available at https://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg/publication/ 7814. However, this by no means suggests that how to understand or analyze identity is a settled question in IR. Although the survey data indicates that critical approaches occupy a minor position in the overall structure of today’s constructivist and identity scholarship, they continue to use the term identity, producing a rich body of coherent knowledge committed to their favored ontology and epistemology. Their thinking about identity (why identity matters and/or how identity works in international politics) is radically different from conventional lines of argument. Chapter 2 explores in detail what lies at the core of this conventional-critical binary.

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respect, many have suggested choosing one of the two poles—mostly in favor of the conventional constructivist position (see Dessler, 1999: 136; Hopf, 1998: 197; Ruggie, 1997: 124–25; Wendt, 1999: 1–2; see also Hopf & Allan, 2016; Katzenstein et al., 1998; Ruggie, 1998; Wendt, 1994). However, I argue that IR can address it and thereby create a better field for identity research by re-grounding identity in an ontology of immanence, which is new to the present constructivist scholarship in the discipline. This does not involve any form of synthesis or convergence that flattens out the existing epistemological or analytical differences of the opposing camps, nor does it opt for “forgetting about” the concept of identity “once and for all” (Urrestarazu, 2015: 126, citing Brubaker & Cooper, 2000). What is more, it does not aim to find a methodological or epistemological “middle ground” (Adler, 1997; Adler-Nissen, 2012; Adler-Nissen & Pouliot, 2014; Pouliot, 2007, 2012, 2014)—since it falls short of charting the moves necessary to reconcile more fundamental (i.e. ontological) inconsistency. Instead, the ontological approach I advocate here enables us to embrace and connect the insights of both sides while maintaining the coherence of identity scholarship. In the ensuing chapters, I will discuss and show how the ontology of immanence put forward by this book can help us have a pluralist epistemology and methodology for the study of identity, including both positivist and reflexivist orientations, without causing logical violations in alignment. To clarify this important point, I need to undertake a mapping exercise to develop a typology of identity research that not only describes the analytical, theoretical, and epistemological orientations involved, but also (and more importantly) maps its ontological positions. To this end, the following chapter opens with a review of identity work oriented toward conventional constructivism, exposing its ontological underpinnings and the epistemological and analytical preferences embedded in them. This undertaking will be followed by an investigation of how IR constructivists attentive to postmodern and poststructuralist thought understand identity from ontological, epistemological, and analytical perspectives. Based on this mapping exercise, I present a typology along ontological, epistemological, theoretical, and analytical lines and show that there are two opposite types of identity studies in IR, namely substantialist and correlationist. Having dissected the varieties of existing identity research and shown the current state of identity scholarship in IR, Chapter 3 shows what is at stake in developing a better (i.e., more coherent and expanded) field of identity studies is ontology,

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more specifically an ontological rethinking of identity. In this regard, this chapter suggests re-grounding identity on Deleuze’s ontological idea of immanence and clarifies how I read and use Deleuze’s thought. In the final chapter, I discuss the value added by re-grounding identity in the ontology of immanence, taking examples from the IR literature on identity: European identity, a well-known case in constructivist IR scholarship, and Chinese identity, a case that has recently received growing attention in and beyond the discipline. This chapter also discusses how to connect the metatheoretical insights of the ontology of immanence to actual (e.g., empirical) research on identity by using the example of Korean identity, a subject that I have studied deeply for decades but only through the lenses of substantialism and correlationism.

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CHAPTER 2

A Typology of Identity Research in IR

Abstract How has identity been understood, theorized, and analyzed in IR? This chapter develops a typology of identity research that not only describes the analytical, theoretical, and epistemological orientations involved, but also (and more importantly) maps its ontological underpinnings. This typological map deepens our understanding of identity-based IR studies, which are currently reviewed mainly from thematic or paradigmatic perspectives. Based on this broadened mapping exercise, this chapter demonstrates that identity studies in IR generally cohere around two discrete understandings of being, substantialism and correlationism, and that their analytical, theoretical, and epistemological orientations are split along those lines. This takes us back to a puzzle introduced at the beginning of this book, namely “How can the single word “identity” be given such radically different ontological meanings and analytical values?” Keywords Typology · Substantialism · Correlationism · Constructivism · Conventional variants · Critical variants · Positivist epistemology · Reflexivist epistemology

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 Y.-S. Eun, An Ontological Rethinking of Identity in International Studies, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30883-3_2

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Substantialist Type: Identity-As-Entity As several excellent reviews have already demonstrated, the contributions of conventional constructivism to the study of identity are dense, and their analytical scope is wide. It ranges from the nexus of national identity, foreign policy, the causes of war, and the conditions of military intervention to the mechanisms of regional integration, the evolution of common security, and the future of international order. Nevertheless, a vertical section cut out of the rich body of conventional constructivist research on identity reveals a single thread that runs throughout: substantialism. Thus, ontologically, identity research conducted under the broad umbrella of positivist (i.e., conventional/moderate/modern) constructivist thinking understands identity to describe a substantial entity or thing composed of fixed or stable properties. A discussion of constructivist studies of regionalism and regional institutions, such as the European Union (EU), will be useful for explicating this point. It is clear that most conventional constructivist studies place explanatory weight on European identity, highlighting the social process of “Europeanization” to explain the key questions of how the EU developed or what led to the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and how NATO has survived in the post–Cold War era (Checkel, 1999, 2001, 2005; Cowles et al., 2001; Diez, 1999, 2004; Hansen & Waever, 2002; Herrmann et al., 2004; Risse, 2010; Schimmelfennig, 2003). The very basic premise upon which this type of research is founded is that there exists an entity that we, the analysts, can observe and identify as the European identity. This premise, although it often remains implicit, is indeed necessary for any approach that treats European identity as an “independent variable” (Abdelal et al., 2006: 695–700). What lies at the core of this premise—that European identity is an observable, static entity and thus can function as a causal factor or variable—is a substantialist ontology. In other words, it is assumed that “European” properties/qualities exist, remain stable, and are clearly distinguishable from other socio-ideational properties. Consider Jeffrey Checkel’s remarks in the oft-cited special issue on identity published in International Organization: he begins his introductory article by asking, “Is Europe different?” His immediate answer is that “for many scholars, analysts, and policy-makers, the answer is obvious: ‘Of course!’” (Checkel, 2005: 801). Europe is obviously “different,” the underlying logic goes, because Europe has its own coherent properties making it distinctive from

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other social entities (see also Checkel, 2001; Zürn & Checkel, 2005). In this line of thinking, European identity is equated with and subsumed into certain properties or qualities representative of Europe. Ontologically, identity is a priori assumed to be a container or, more to the point, a thing that contains these bounded properties. Because identity is believed to be an entity composed of properties that essentially represent and manifest Europe, we, as analysts, can distinguish European identity from other (e.g., Asian or African) identities. This is a core view that underpins all of the eight interventions included in that special issue. In that regard, Alastair Iain Johnston (2005: 1025, 1035), one of the contributors, goes a step further and uses the essentialist term of “European-ness” parallel to or overlapping with the concept of European identity (for a similar treatment, see also Risse, 2010; Wendt, 1994). In short, the logic underlying the concept of European identity in much of conventional constructivist research requires the general acceptance of substantialism, in which socio-ideational constructs, including (European) identity, are seen as entities composed of stable and coherent properties that we can reasonably deem to be an essence, such as European-ness. To be sure, there is no agreement about what this essentialized property of European-ness actually is: some analysts point to liberal democracy, others identify Christianity, and still others zoom in on Anglo-European perceptions of human rights (Bayram, 2017a, 2017b; Checkel, 2001; Hemmer & Katzenstein, 2002; Mälksoo, 2009; McCrea, 2011; Menendez, 2005; Nexon, 2006; Rumelili, 2004, 2016). Those differences are not relevant to my discussion here. Instead, what is crucial is that all these conventional constructivist studies share a substantialist ontological premise that there is such a thing as European-ness (hence European identity)—whatever its contents are—that can be observed, compared with other things, and put in an explanatory framework. That same logic is at play in comparative studies of identity beyond Europe. Christopher Hemmer and Peter J. Katzenstein’s work is a representative case in point. Why is there no NATO in Asia?, they ask. The United States operated “bilaterally with its Asian partners,” whereas it preferred to operate “on a multilateral basis” with its North Atlantic partners. Laying out the limitations of realist and liberal IR theories in answering their question, Hemmer and Katzenstein (2002) pay explanatory attention to different perceptions of collective identity held by US policymakers in the 1950s. Multilateralism in an institutional form,

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Hemmer and Katzenstein emphasize, “requires a strong sense of collective identity in addition to shared interests” (Hemmer & Katzenstein, 2002: 586). More specifically, they write that policymakers in Washington saw their North Atlantic allies as relatively equal partners because of shared religious and democratic values, putting the United States “in a grouping of roughly equal states with whom it identified, [and] multilateral organizing principles followed closely” (2002: 587). The potential Asian allies of the US, in contrast, were “seen as part of an alien and, in important ways, inferior community,” precisely because Christianity and democratic values were largely absent in Asia at that time, and thus US politicians did not identify with their Asian partners. Moreover, not only particular religious or political beliefs, but also “race was invoked as a powerful force separating the United States from Asia” (2002: 588). Whether their explanations are convincing can remain a matter for debate, but when they are examined for the ontology below the representational level, it becomes clear that substantialism is embedded deep within their treatment of identity. Hemmer and Katzenstein establish a close relationship between collective identity and multilateral institutions in which the former exerts causal power over the latter. This relationship can only be seen as causal by accepting the ontological assumption that identity is a reified and stable entity that pre-exists its relata. That is, in Hemmer and Katzenstein’s analysis, American or European identity is conceived to be an entity filled with pre-defined ontological contents (Christianity and democratic values in their case) that political actors can recognize. Again, analysts often dispute which identity containers contain what ontological contents, but that is not what matters for the typological mapping exercise here. Instead, it is crucial to see that in the work of Hemmer and Katzenstein (and conventional constructivists more generally), identity is analyzed based on the ontological assumption that it is an entity that analysts can use or operationalize in causal terms. In other words, the ontological status or meaning of identity is equated with certain reified properties, qualities, or features—liberal or democratic, for example. This substantialist approach is a typical route for the conventional constructivist camp, which seeks identity-based explanations, particularly those derived from “the identity-interests nexus” or “the identity-action nexus” models (Jepperson et al., 1996: 60; see also, Ashizawa, 2008; Banchoff, 1999; Finnemore, 1996; Finnemore & Sikkink, 1998; Thies & Wehner, 2021; Vucetic, 2017; Weldes, 1999). It also seeps deeply into

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identity-based causal theorization. A brief discussion of recent constructivist work will suffice to illustrate this point. In their 2020 special issue published in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, six IR scholars forged conventional constructivism–inspired concepts they termed “misplaced states” and regional “misplacedness” in their attempt to develop a new theoretical framework for regionalism. Aslam et al., (2020: 508–509) note that these concepts can be used to glean significant but hitherto overlooked insights into the dynamics of cooperation and conflict among states in a single region. Conceptualizing states “who perceive that they do not properly fit in the regions they happen to be located in” as “misplaced states,” they argue that states’ “feeling of being misplaced” and corresponding “cognitive aspiration to belong elsewhere” bring about “conflictual behaviour” (Aslam et al., 2020: 506–516). It is this discrepancy between states’ geographic and cognitive regions (“misplacedness”) that takes center stage in their theorization about a state’s behavior when it diverges from regionalism. What is of signal importance to my mapping exercise here is not their arguments as such, but how they have arrived at them with the notions of “misplacedness” and “misplaced states.” They explain that states come to be “misplaced” … “not so much because of material capacities but because they espouse an identity, manifested in different ways, in marked contrast to the states around them” (Aslam et al., 2020: 505). Put simply, an identity “mismatch” is what gives rise to “misplaced states” (Aslam et al., 2020: 510). Their argument requires identity to be understood as a stable entity that functions as a clear, reified point of reference and enables states to determine whether they are in the “right” place. That is, identity is a manifested criterion by which the self–other distinction is made; a “(mis)match” between a state and its region in this marker of identity provides the analytical value of the concepts of “misplacedness” and “misplaced states.” Without that (onto-)logical process, Aslam et al.’s theorization simply does not hold up. For them to conceptualize and theorize “misplaced states” or “misplacedness” as they do (i.e., in terms of the dynamics of an identity “mismatch”), they must have an a priori assumption that identity is a substantial entity that actors can “feel,” “espouse,” and “manifest” within the boundary of a particular place. Identity studies underpinned by those substantialist ontological assumptions are quite naturally commensurate with positivist epistemology (Katzenstein et al., 1998: 649; Wendt, 1994: 385). It thus comes

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as no surprise that several conventional constructivists’ research on identity shows a strong tendency to develop generalizable explanations (Allan et al., 2018; Bayram, 2017a, 2017b). Ted Hopf and Bentley Allan’s edited volume, Making Identity Count: Building a National Identity Database is worthy of note in this regard. As the book title itself indicates, Hopf and Allan (2016: 3) aimed to produce a large-n dataset gathered from nine countries, including the United States and China, that “can be used as the basis for quantitative operationalizations of identity” that can in turn be used to develop “more precise and generalizable” (2016: 28) constructivist explanations and theories. Following from that, Allan, Hopf, and Vucetic theorize a hegemonic transition and the future of an international order from a constructivist vantage point. A key element of their theorization is “the distribution of identity,” as opposed to “the distribution of power,” in the international system (Allan et al., 2018: 12–13), and a crucial empirical enterprise is thus to discern with which identities (American or Chinese, for example) global publics most identify themselves. Again, whether their constructivist accounts of a future international order are more convincing—for example, providing greater explanatory or predictive purchase—than rationalist-realist approaches is a matter for debate, but what is clear is that, as with the identity studies reviewed above, Allan, Hopf, and Vucetic’s undertaking is driven by the substantialist ontological position. They “operationalize” identity as a “factor” and “test” how identities are “distributed” among states (Allan et al., 2018: 11), which is only possible insofar as identity is presumed to be an entity that remains bound by static properties or characteristics and thus remains empirically verifiable and subject to empirical investigation by analysts. Such operationalization and empirical confirmation are the keys to developing a generalizable, and thus scientific, theory that meets the requirements of positivist epistemology. The arguments hitherto presented can be recapitulated in terms of the following points. Although the definitions of identity and the issueareas addressed by actual analyses vary across the field of factor-based, conventional constructivist IR research, they all share substantialist ontological assumptions about identity that serve as a foundation for their analyses and explanations. I call this type of research identity-as-entity because it posits identity’s ontological status as an entity. Whether it is a European identity, Chinese identity, or cosmopolitan social identity (Bayram, 2017a, 2017b), this type of identity-as-entity research relies

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on the view that identity exists in and through an entity composed of coherent properties inherent to it. In identity-as-entity research, identity is understood as a set of externally reified and thus observable properties, qualities, and features of a substance; this is a typical substantialist understanding of being. In this understanding, it is posited that we must have a stable substance for predicates, such as fast, big, blue (or European, Chinese, cosmopolitan), to inhere in. In Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper’s words (2000: 10–11, emphasis added) identity is used to imply a high degree of “sameness ” among group members or “self-sameness ” across time, designating “a foundational, essential element of human action.” At base, this substantialist assumption of being underpins the identity-as-entity research type. As noted earlier, this type runs through the conventional constructivist camp, which privileges the development of generalizable explanations and variable-based theorization. Table 2.1 summarizes these points. Clearly, conventional constructivist scholarship and its research on identity are not monotonic, and many different voices and critics are present not only outside the camp, but also within it. Although it is largely accepted that identity-as-entity influences foreign policy decisionmaking, some note that it is wrong to assume that a single state (or a single region) has a single identity as a unified entity. Instead, they emphasize that identity is a compound of multiple dimensions, and thus a single actor has multiple identities. Based on that assumption, they criticize more moderate constructivist studies for “focus[ing] primarily on one selected dimension of identity” (Urrestarazu, 2015: 134). Let us consider, for example, Ted Hopf’s, 2002 work on Soviet and Russian identity in which he links the social construction of identity to foreign policy actions. The gist of his arguments is this: “there is no one Russia” but multiple Russian identities, which in turn yield different understandings of what Russian national interests are and which actions are “legitimate” Table 2.1 Typological map of conventional constructivist research on identity Type of identity research

Substantialist type: Identity-as-entity

Variants of constructivism Ontological position Epistemological stance Analytical orientation

Conventional/modern/moderate constructivism Substantialism Positivist epistemology Focused on functional factors

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in pursuit of those interests (Hopf, 2002: see also Hopf, 2005: 225– 235). He emphasizes that as each different vision of “the Russian self” is empowered by Russian society’s discourses, “a different Russia is acting” in international politics. Thus, his argument goes, it is critical for those attempting to make sense of the foreign policy actions of Russia (or any state) to delve into the “contestations” among different visions and discourses of national identity (Hopf, 2002: 213, 259–274). A similar line of argument is also found in Kuniko Ashizawa’s take on identity. After articulating what she calls “an essential mechanism” by which “identity functions as a source of a state’s foreign policy,” she remarks that identity “almost always exist in a plural form within a single actor” (Ashizawa, 2008: 573). According to her, identity generates a specific “value,” which in turn “determines a state’s preference for a particular foreign policy option” (Ashizawa, 2008: 571, 579–581). Because identity exists in the “plural,” she continues, there will always be a “value-complexity,” and in policy-making processes, a particular value becomes “the dominant one,” determining “the preference of actors” and their actions (Ashizawa, 2008: 591). This idea of plural or multiple identities for a single state actor and the concomitant contestation between the identities continues to be emphasized by several other recent studies: Hagström and Gustafsson’s analysis of Japanese identity (2015), Hintz’s investigation of Turkish identity (2018), and Eun’s explanation of South Korean identity (2020). All of that work offers renewed insights into the identity–foreign policy action nexus by engaging in a model of multiple identities. Viewed from that perspective, their logic and approach appear to differ from those of scholars who take a more conventional and moderate constructivist research on identity. However, the difference lies in the analytics rather than the ontology. That is, they differ in their analytical and linguistic articulations, not their ontological positions. They all fall into the same category, the identity-as-entity research type. Although they analyze identity using different terms, such as “social [cognitive] structures” (Hopf, 2002), “value-complexity” (Ashizawa, 2008), multiple “layers” (Hagström & Gustafsson, 2015: 5–17), multiple “proposals” (Hintz, 2018: 4, 33–35) or as “a multi-dimensional construct” (Eun, 2020: 40–45), their analyses still make the same substantialist ontological assumption about identity: it is an entity (or a compound of entities) whose properties (or multiple sets of properties) are frozen (i.e., generalized) into certain values or norms. A key assumption here is that although the values and norms, as contents, remain plural and multidimensional,

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their container, namely identity as such, is a stable thing independent of the observer and externally manifested in substantial forms. Thus, we observers determine which is the “main” (Hopf, 2002: 41, 154), “dominant” (Ashizawa, 2008: 579–580; Ashizawa, 2013), “superior” (Eun, 2020: 43), or “sedimented” (Hagström & Gustafsson, 2015: 6–7; see also Hagström, 2015) identity among the multiple identities or identityforms. Although identity is here seen to remain neither unitary nor unchanging, it is still ontologically posited to be something that exists frozen at a given time, and analysts who are assumed to exist independently of the object can thus still use it as a factor in their explanations of the foreign policy actions under investigation.

Correlationist Type: Identity-As-Flux As explained earlier, constructivist and identity scholarship split into two opposite camps or “fractals” in the late 1990s, and over time the field has narrowed so that positivist (conventional/modern) approaches now occupy the center of identity scholarship, “exclude[ing] more critical and postmodern fractals” (McCourt, 2016: 476). Alexander Wendt’s seminal research on identity, for example, was driven by the idea of a “stable” state identity at the international system level, which has in turn led to what he calls a “weak or essentialist” constructivist approach to international politics (Wendt, 1994: 385). Likewise, Katzenstein et al., (1998: 649) emphasized a modern/conventional variant of constructivism, explaining that “constructivists… put forward sociological perspectives that emphasized shared norms and values but which were in epistemological terms sharply differentiated from postmodernism.” At the same time, IR scholars of postmodern and poststructuralist thought, selfstyled “dissidents” who refused to “be seduced” into positivist theoretical enterprises that seek generalized and “abstract” explanations (Ashley & Walker, 1990: 268), have marked their own territory, taking radically different approaches to the study of identity (see, e.g., Adler, 1997a; Agius, 2013; Biersteker & Weber, 1996; Bucher & Jasper, 2017; Campbell, 1992; Debrix, 2003; Epstein, 2010, 2013; Fierke, 2002, 2003, 2007; Gaufman, 2021; Guzzini, 2000; Laffey, 2000; Onuf, 1989; Weber, 1995; Zehfuss, 2001, 2002). From a mapping exercise perspective, we need to look closely at how those scholars do identity research to unpack their ontological assumptions and accompanying epistemological and analytical orientations.

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As with conventional constructivists, constructivists attentive to postmodern and poststructuralist thought have made significant contributions, giving sufficient and sustained attention to a variety of issues germane to identity but often overlooked in the conventional camp. Likewise, those scholars have produced a complex and rich body of critical literature on identity with analytical and normative concerns diverse enough to defy any easy or simple grouping and mapping. Nevertheless, as with conventional constructivist research, a vertical section cut out of the postmodern and poststructuralist research on identity contains a single thread connecting them, correlationism. Although it is not explicitly stated, correlationism is the ontological basis that underpins the logic and analysis often found in critical variants of constructivism. Correlationism stands in sharp contrast to the substantialism that underlies the identity-as-entity research type reviewed above. It should come as no surprise that postmodern and poststructuralist IR scholars do not consider identity to be a stable entity composed of essentialized properties. The basic premise of their work is that no things or entities are independent of human observers and actions. Instead, they posit that social entities come into being only within and through discursive and linguistic practices in social relations, and thus everything that exists is always in an unstable state subject to ongoing socio-political interactions (Ashley & Walker, 1990; Campbell, 1992; Walker, 1993). In this line of reasoning, the substantialist practice of granting ontological status to reified properties independent of or external to the knower does not logically stand. Contrary to the idea of an externality of being (i.e., Cartesian dualism), an internality of being is presumed. Put simply, knowing is being, and thus what exists is always subject to the observers’ subjective interpretations and representations, which themselves exist in social relations. As stated by Kratochwil (2000: 91), a major issue of concern is exemplified through the following uncertainty: “whether we can recognize [the world] in a pure and direct fashion or whether what we recognize is always already organized and formed by certain categorical and theoretical elements.” In pondering this question, critical constructivists attentive to poststructuralism, especially “the linguistic turn” in philosophy, take issue with positivist epistemology that views language as a mere reflection of realty “out there” (Fierke, 2013: 194; see also Palan, 2000). From an ontological perspective, this postmodern or poststructuralist thought points to “correlationism,” a metaphysical position articulated by Quentin Meillassoux (2010). From a correlationist perspective, to speak

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of an object is always to speak of the subject that regards that object (Bryant, 2014); it is thus impossible to attain knowledge about existence independent of the regarding subject’s thoughts and words. That is, the object is already a relation to the subject that regards it; the thought of an object apart from any relation to the subject is impossible. Put succinctly, “to be is to be a correlate” (Meillassoux, 2010: 28). This ontological idea (i.e., “to be is to be related to the subject”) also indicates that the qualities or properties of an object/entity do not precede its relation to the subject but derive from the latter’s acts of positing and conceptualizing it (Harman, 2018; Morelle, 2012). In this correlationist and subjective ontological thinking, identity (or any social construct) can never be an independent, stable entity because what exists is always “relative… to consciousness, a language, a Dasein, etc.” (Meillassoux, 2010: 409). We can only have access to the anthropological relation—whether experience or language—between identity and the subjects that regard it, rather than to identity in itself. Viewed in this light, it comes as no surprise that postmodern and poststructuralist IR scholars—who often engage with Husserl, Derrida, and Foucault in defining and discussing identity—hold that identity only exists in “ongoing, always incomplete” processes of the discursive representations of the self and the other (Laffey, 2000: 431). For them, an identity’s properties or qualities remain “undecidable” (Doty, 1997: 383) because they exist in constant negotiations and contestations among human subjects who throw different or competing linguistic categories over the self and the other. In other words, identity is here assumed to be filtered through the lattice of language (discourse) that structures how we apprehend the self in relation to the other. Ontologically, then, it is “language” that “makes us who we are” (Onuf, 2003: 27; see also Onuf, 1989).1 This view is evident in David Campbell’s work (1992: 91) on identity and foreign policy. Through a postmodernist lens, he shows that American foreign policy is inseparable from the “representational demarcation” of the self and the other because the US is an “imagined community.” In his words (1992: 9), identity and foreign policy are constructed through the “inscription” of boundaries that serve to “demarcate an ‘inside’ from an ‘outside,’ a ‘self’ from an ‘other,’ or a ‘domestic’ from a ‘foreign.’” 1 In effect, as several genealogical studies show (see, for example, Fierke & Jorgensen, 2001; Kratochwil, 2000, 2008), the advent of constructivism in IR in the late 1980s is indebted to the “linguistic turn” in social theory and philosophy.

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Key here is the question of how we human subjects, including analysts, understand and express ourselves, particularly the “rhetorical” question of how we present “idealized and abstracted” images of ourselves (Campbell, 1992: 127) simply because “the existence of the world is literally inconceivable outside of language” (Campbell, 1992: 6). Thus, in Campbell’s work, identity is understood as “the rhetoric of politics” (Campbell, 1992: 179), which is then conceptualized as “the politics of theorizing identity” (Campbell, 1992: 124) or, more to the point, the “disciplinary” politics of theorizing identity (Campbell, 1998: 207). What critical constructivist research thus ultimately implies is that identity is indeed an “empty” artifact, “lacking” any fixed properties external to analysts’ observation, comparison, or operationalization (Bucher & Jasper, 2017: 406; Epstein, 2010: 336). There is no “natural” connection between “word and thing [identity]” or between “symbol and the symbolized” (Palan, 2000: 579). On the contrary, from a correlationist perspective, identity constantly varies depending on how human subjects hypostatize it in and through their social signs and discourses—which are not predetermined and given, but rather political and dynamic, and resulting from ever-changing socio-political relations (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985). Fluidity and lability thus become fundamental features of identity. Whereas the word “identity” is used to indicate “(self-)sameness” in substantialist approaches, it is used to mean difference or self-difference, describing a “multiple, unstable, contingent, fragmented, negotiated” Self (Brubaker & Cooper, 2000: 11, emphasis added). In this regard, postmodern and poststructuralist researchers have long criticized conventional and modern constructivists for not taking such a “transient and labile” nature of identity seriously in their identity studies (Lebow, 2012: 270). It is in this respect that their analytical focus is largely on “identifications,” which are understood to be discursive practices in social interactions, rather than on identity, understood as an entity composed of fixed or stable qualities and properties (Bucher & Jasper, 2017; Campbell, 1992; Debrix, 2003; Epstein, 2010, 2013; Guzzini, 2005; Lebow, 2012, 2016; Neumann, 1996, 1999; Pratt, 2017; Zehfuss, 2001, 2002). Because identity exists in “on-going, always incomplete” processes of identification, the logic goes, analytical attention ought to be paid to multiple sources and forms of identification and multiple “acts of identification” (Bucher & Jasper, 2017: 396) through which inside–outside or self–other boundaries are drawn and discursive practices of othering are performed.

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Richard Ned Lebow’s engagement is worthy of a lengthy note in this regard. From the 2008 book, A Cultural Theory of International Relations and the 2012 book, The Politics and Ethics of Identity to the 2016 book, National Identities and International Relations, Lebow has continued to levy strong critiques against conventional takes on identity, noting that identity always consists of “multiple, conflicting and labile” perceptions and narratives of the self and the other (Lebow, 2012: 270). Because identity is constituted only through “multiple, conflicting and labile” constructions of self–other distinctions, what is crucial from his analytical standpoint is tracing diverse sources of self-identifications and other-identifications to reveal how those multiple acts are politically contested and manifested (Lebow, 2016). The idea that identity is a (political) manifestation of multiple and labile identification practices naturally bristles at the conventional constructivist analytical approach in which identity is treated as a functional factor that pre-exists and causes a certain state action. Identity, when seen as an on-going and incomplete process of identification, can never “function” (Checkel, 2005) as a factor or variable placed within a linear (temporal-causal) sequence (Abdelal et al., 2009). On the contrary, it has only “unpredictable behavioural implications” (Lebow, 2016: 62). Rather than attributing ontological standing or causal powers to identity as such, Lebow asks us to theorize the processes of identification. In a related context, Lebow also takes issue with the constructivist literature on “ontological security” (Browning & Joenniemi, 2017; Mitzen, 2006; Rumelili, 2015; Steele, 2005, 2008), in which a stable (self)identity, i.e., a clearly delineated sense of self, is the core issue of concern for explanation and theorization because there is no such thing as a stable identity (Lebow, 2008, 2016). Similar lines of thinking are also found in the work of Bernd Bucher and Ursula Jasper (2017: 392), who remark that “despite the attempt of identity research to leave rationalist and materialist IR behind, it oftentimes continues to model identity in individualist and causal terms.” Their take on identity study is largely in line with Lebow’s critical/postmodern position and focuses on the performative dimension of identity. Specifically, Bucher and Jasper (2017: 393) call for a refocusing of identity research from an analysis of identity as a static entity to an analysis of “acts of identification in relations.” Based on a “processual-relational” analytical framework informed by relational sociology (Elias, 1978), they further articulate how multiple acts of identification continually reconstruct imaginations of the self in relation to others and then instantiate

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that point through a case study of Swiss foreign policy decisions on nuclearization in the 1950s and 1960s. The key point they put forth here is the evolving and contested character of identification. Although several identity studies accounting for the Swiss decision to abstain from nuclearization conflate Swiss identity with an essential and “transcendental” value of “Swiss-ness,” which is frequently associated with Switzerland’s “long tradition of neutrality,” there were actually multiple, “conflicting” acts and narratives of “what it meant to be Swiss” during that time, and thus the notion and value of “neutrality” was also “continually renegotiated” in Swiss decision-making with respect to the issue of nuclearization (Bucher & Jasper, 2017: 400, 404–408). As with the earlier review of individual studies in the conventional constructivist camp, the question of whether Lebow’s or Bucher and Jasper’s “processual-relational” alternative is more convincing than their conventional counterpart is not the major concern in my mapping exercise here. Instead, my goal is to reveal what holds together the complex body of research on identity largely produced by postmodern and poststructuralist IR researchers. The review above shows that their position is coherent in maintaining the view that identity is not a stable entity but rather an “empty” concept (Bucher & Jasper, 2017: 406) “lacking” any “fixed” or stable properties (Ashley & Walker, 1990: 262; Epstein, 2010: 336). As discussed, the ontological position underlying their understanding and analysis of identity is closely associated with the correlationist view that there can be “no X without givenness of X, and no theory of X without a positing of X,” such that X “cannot then be separated from this special [subjective] act of positing, of conception” (Meillassoux, 2012: 409). In this respect, postmodernist and poststructuralist IR scholars hold that tracing “multiple, conflicting and labile” identification practices (Lebow, 2012: 270) can offer greater analytical purchase than the operationalization of an identity factor. Although their voices remain outside the mainstream of today’s narrowed constructivism, they have formed their own territory, devoting a great deal of research to that non-substantialist line of thinking on identity. I call this body of work identity-as-flux research, in contrast to identity-as-entity research. Identity-as-flux research is premised on a correlationist ontology rooted in non-foundationalism and non-essentialism; thus, it considers on-goingness, incompleteness, and emptiness as the core traits of identity and highlights the political and performative processes of identification in its studies of identity.

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Following along the contrasting lines of ontological thinking, the two types of identity research also take very different epistemological routes. Unlike the positivist epistemology closely connected to identity-as-entity research, identity-as-flux research resonates with a reflexivist or interpretivist epistemology in which generalized and essentialized truth claims are rejected and subjected to discursive or linguistic deconstruction. Likewise, the two types of identity research also differ widely in their analytical orientations. For example, one encounters a stark difference between them when analyzing the political dimension of identity, such as the issue of identity politics. Whereas identity-as-entity research draws political implications from the “identity-action nexus” model, in which an identity factor is assumed to precede and (in)form state preferences and foreign policy actions, identity-as-flux research pays heed to the politics of identity, particularly the power politics of identity because political contestations are inseparable from identity, always on-going and incomplete constructions of narratives of the self in relation to others. From that perspective, constant political interventions occur through which one of the many contending narratives is privileged and universalized while others are suppressed and marginalized (Mattern, 2001; Campbell, 1992; Waever, 1998; Walker, 1993; Zehfuss, 2002). Table 2.2 summarizes the key typological features of identity research in IR as discussed thus far. Table 2.2 Typology of identity research in IR Type of identity research Substantialist type: Identity-as-entity Ontological position Epistemological stance Analytical orientation Variants of constructivism associated with each type

Substantialism Positivist epistemology Focused on functional factors

Correlationist type: Identity-as-flux

Correlationism Reflexivist epistemology Focused on political acts and discursive practices Conventional/modern/moderate Critical/postmodern/radical constructivism constructivism

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CHAPTER 3

Re-Grounding Identity in Ontology of Immanence

Abstract IR constructivist research on identity is divided into two camps. Although both sides use the term identity, each camp assigns a very different ontological status or content to it: identity is, or exists in, either a substantial entity external to the observer that exercises causal influence over the actions under study or an incomplete or empty flux that has to be filled by human subjects’ discourse or linguistic practice if it is to have any political influence. How can the single concept “identity” be given such radically different ontological meanings and values? While noting the existing suggestions fall short of addressing this question, this chapter propose Deleuze’s ontology of immanence as an alternative. This chapter explicates my reading of ontology of immanence and discusses how regrounding identity in the ontology of immanence forward by this book can help to build a bridge between the conventional and critical variants of constructivist research on identity. Keywords Deleuze · Ontology of immanence · Morphogenetic model of being · Virtual agency

The discussions in Chapter 2 have shown that what underlies the problem of the splitting of identity scholarship in IR is ontology, particular assumptions and propositions about the existence of identity. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 Y.-S. Eun, An Ontological Rethinking of Identity in International Studies, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30883-3_3

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Although the existing literature tend to focus on exploring the difference between “conventional” and “critical” constructivist camps, pointing to each camp’s epistemological and/or methodological orientations (Abdelal et al., 2006, 2009; Berenskoetter, 2017; Checkel, 1998; Finnemore & Sikkink, 2001; Hopf, 1998; McCourt, 2016; Pouliot, 2007; Ruggie, 1998), this approach obfuscates the ontological issue at stake. As Table 2.2 shows, the actual terrain of identity research is formed on the basis of certain ontological positions about identity, namely substantialism and correlationism; and particular analytical, theoretical, and epistemological orientations are split along those lines. What this implies is we need an ontological (rather than epistemological or methodological) rethinking if our aim is to fully address the dissociation in today’s identity scholarship in IR. One caveat is required to be made before proceeding further. The typology in Table 2.2 is not a wholly accurate representation of the complex and wide-ranging body of identity research in IR. What is more, there are subtle but important differences not only between the variants of constructivist research on identity, but also within each variant. However, as with any typological attempt, total representational accuracy is not the aim here. Although it is far from an exhaustive survey of the varieties of identity studies in the discipline, my typology is accurate enough to be useful for making sense of the main terrain and currents in today’s divided scholarship and debate about identity. In a related vein, the fact that some identity studies do not seem to fit into either column of Table 2.2 should not obscure the larger fact that the discipline’s identity scholarship remains incoherent caused mainly by the sharp divide between the two columns. As I said at the outset of this book, if the goal is to achieve a stronger (i.e., more coherent and expanded) field of identity studies, we need to focus on the two sides and clearly map where they stand in terms of ontology, epistemology, and analytical orientations before we attempt to build or cross a bridge between them. As my typological mapping exercise has shown, the current identity scholarship fails to meet the internal validity standard of coherence. Although both sides use the term identity, each camp assigns a very different ontological status or content to it: identity is, or exists in, either a substantial entity external to the observer that exercises causal influence over the actions under study or an incomplete or empty flux that has to be filled by human subjects’ discourse or linguistic practice if it is to have any political influence.

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How can the single word “identity” be given such radically different ontological meanings and values? Several concerned scholars have already noticed this problem and offered their own solutions. In simplified terms, three directions for reconciliation are currently available. The first way out is choice: to address the issue of conceptual incongruence by choosing one of the two options—mostly in favor of the conventional constructivist position (Dessler, 1999: 136; Ruggie, 1997: 124–25; Hopf, 1998: 197; Wendt, 1999: 1–2; see also Hopf & Allan, 2016; Katzenstein et al., 1998; Ruggie, 1998; Wendt, 1994). The second way out suggests that we stop using the concept of identity altogether. Because the concept is used by IR scholars to make sense of “opposite/contradicting phenomena” (Berenskoetter, 2017: 7), designating both “a foundational, essential element of human action and a fragmented, fluctuating Self,” it has little analytical value. To borrow Brubaker and Cooper’s words, (2000: 1, 10), the term means either “too much” (i.e., “sameness” among group members over time) or “too little” (i.e., “difference,” a “superficial, accidental, fleeting, or contingent” sense of who one is). Because identity is used to describe both sameness and difference, it is a “hopelessly ambiguous” concept, “incapable of performing serious analytical work” (Brubaker & Cooper, 2000: 6, 11). Although instructive, both those options leave the problem unresolved: identity studies from both sides keep piling up without discarding the very concept of identity or allowing either of the two stances to succeed at the expense of the other. A third way out is proposed by the recent “practice turn” in IR theory that rejects the simple positivist/postpositivist or ideational–material dichotomy and instead searches for a middle ground. This attempt has generated new and important insights about the social construction of identities, norms, and preferences, showing that they emerge from and are forged by social practices that are understood as day-to-day practical and commonsensical activities. Practice theorists claim that examining those habitual, everyday routines and digging into their structural roots will improve understanding about how international interactions actually work (Adler & Pouliot, 2011a, 2011b; Adler-Nissen, 2012; Lechner & Frost, 2018; McCourt, 2012; Neumann, 2002, 2012; Pouliot, 2008, 2010). One of the key contributions of this practice turn is the ability to see and account for social constructs and actions through “both change-impeding [observable] structures and change-stimulating agency and reflection” (Holthaus, 2021: 1), which

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requires both positivist and reflexivist epistemologies and methodologies (Adler, 1997; Adler-Nissen, 2012; Adler-Nissen & Pouliot, 2014; Andersen & Neumann, 2012; Bueger, 2015; Bueger & Gadinger, 2014; Cornut & de Zamaróczy, 2021; Pouliot, 2007, 2012, 2014). As significant and relevant as the practice turn is for addressing the issue at stake in divided constructivism, much difficulty still remains precisely because the bridge it has built is epistemological or methodological, not ontological. Practice theory–based work emphasizes methodologies—as plurals, of course—and calls for an epistemological move from grand theorizing, whether positivist or reflexivist, to the development of midrange theory and “sobjectivism” (Pouliot, 2007) to reconcile the positivist–reflexivist divide. However, mixed methodologies and epistemological middle grounds do not address ontological rifts. We simply cannot expect the ontological divide to go away because methodological and epistemological divides have been narrowed or reconciled. To borrow David Marsh and Paul Furlong’s analogy (2002: 21), ontology is like “a skin, not a sweater” that can be put on when we are addressing philosophical issues and taken off when we are choosing a methodology or doing empirical research. In effect, as Robert Cox (1996: 144, emphasis added) has remarked, “all social research begin[s] with certain ontological assumptions,” whether implicit or explicit (see also Hay, 2002; Klotz & Lynch, 2007; Kurki, 2020; Wight, 2006); thus, without addressing the binary at the ontological level, the same problem—that identity studies from both sides keep piling up on opposite ends—continues to remain unresolved, despite the definitions of middle ground spaces at the levels of epistemology and methodology. In what follows, I present an alternative way to bridge the seemingly irreparable gulf between substantialist and correlationist research on identity. I propose an ontology of immanence in this regard and discuss the value that it adds in opening up the conversation between the two types of identity research while connecting the insights of the epistemological, theoretical, and analytical approaches favored by their respective proponents.

An Ontology of Immanence The philosophical vocabularies of “immanence” date back at least as far as Immanuel Kant, specifically his conception of “the highest good” (Silber, 1959), but the position that I advocate here follows up on Deleuze (and

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Guattari)’s thought, particularly Deleuze’s ontological ideas of “univocity” and “the virtual.” In his immanent and univocal thinking, identity can never be a static entity. However, this does not imply that the ontology I advocate comes to terms with the correlationist ontology in which identity remains an undecidable flux or empty artifact. I argue that Deleuze’s ontology of immanence enables identity to be approached both as analytical factors—that interest conventional constructivists—and as on-going discursive practices closely involved in the politics of identity and representation—that interest critical constructivists. As noted, my idea of an ontology of immanence arises from Deleuze (and Guattari)’s unorthodox ontological thought. To understand it, we first need to make sense of several related metaphysical concepts, primarily “differentiation,” “the virtual,” “territory,” “code,” and “assemblage,” as they are forged and articulated in The Logic of Sense (Deleuze, 2004), Difference and Repetition (Deleuze, 1994), and A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Therefore, I need to outline how I read and understand those terms, which is a critical exercise simply because everyone reads Deleuze differently, and maintaining fidelity to a thinker is precisely what his philosophy opposes. I am not attempting to develop a holistic picture of Deleuze’s philosophy or his complete opus, but only to tease out the specific aspects of his ideas that are most relevant for understanding the ontology of immanence I am putting forth here. In doing so, I also deploy key concepts developed by Brian Massumi (2002), Karen Barad (2007), and Manuel DeLanda (2002)—all of which are inspired by or reminiscent of Deleuze’s philosophy—to clarify how I read and use Deleuze’s thought.1 As a large body of contemporary literature in philosophy, including the aforementioned Deleuzian studies, has already noted, a typical line of ontological thinking running throughout traditional and (to a certain

1 Obviously, my reading of or thinking on Deleuze (and Guattari)’s ideas here is a particular assemblage actualized through linguistic, discursive, and corporeal encounters with numerous human (and other-than-human) agents at various levels and in varying degrees. I cannot name them all, but I would particularly like to acknowledge that my inter-actions with the Korean philosopher Jung-Woo Lee and his works on Deleuze’s thought—such as Lee, JW (2003) Sagunuichulhak (“A philosophy of event”). Seoul: Geurinbi; Lee, JW (2008) Chinahanauigowon: sosujareuluihan yulryhak (“A thousandone plateaus”: Ethics for minorities). Seoul: Dolbaegae; and Lee, JW (2011) Jeontong, Geunda, Talgeungae (“Thoughts on the traditional, the modern, the postmodern”). Seoul: Geurinbi—take center stage of my inter-actions.

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extent) modern Western philosophy revolves largely around the notion of stratification. More specifically, its core assumptions about what exists and the conditions of being are based on the premise of a central or “highest” being that transcends all other beings and things. Ontological meaning and status are formed according to the degree of closeness or similarity to the transcendent being and differ widely. This is a world that works with representational articulation, which can take various forms, be they concentric (e.g., God, human, ape, mammal, and so on) or linear (e.g., tribalism, primitive communism, feudalism, capitalism, and so on). This is what Deleuze and Guattari call an “arboretum” or a “tree model” of ontological thinking (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 211, 355–388). Such a stratified model of being does not speak to how beings become the beings they are. In opposition to the arboreal model of what is, Deleuze (and Guattari) present a morphogenetic model of being that does not assume any central or highest being in terms of ontology. For them, all beings, what we commonly call entities, remain ontologically equal in the sense that they all harbor capacities to produce an output, despite there being apparent inequalities in power or influence; in a related vein, they call an entity a “machine” to get around the problem of the ontological hierarchy embedded in using categories of the subject–object binary. In their terminology, therefore, my iPhone is a machine, and so is this manuscript. The question is how machines come into being as they are. Here, the main thrust of Deleuze’s ontology lies in acts of “entification” or “existification” (Deleuze, 1994; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). In simplified terms, a machine comes to be the machine/being that it is by entering into intra- and extra-fields of relations to other machines. A key assumption here is that all machines, be they material or ideational, human or nonhuman, have virtual agency—understood not as conscious initiatives but as hidden capacities, potentialities, and affordances—to engage in acts of entanglement with a variety of different beings and produce outputs in the form of actualized features, qualities, properties, and activities. This virtual agency is associated with “singularities” in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1994: 278) and “attractors” in DeLanda’s Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy (2002: 15), both of which can be taken to mean the most intimate reality of a being that works as “the point of departure” in defining and structuring its being. A machine’s virtual agency might or might not produce certain features, qualities, or actions depending on how it relates to and entangles with other machines and under what fields of relations their interactions take place. Because the

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number of ways in which machines entangle or, to use Barad’s apt term, “intra-act” (Barad, 2007), with other machines across a variety of fields of relations is virtually infinite, we analysts can never fully fathom, let alone predetermine, how this virtual agency will be actualized—that is, what it will produce/become at the level of manifestation. Therefore, from the perspective of an ontology of immanence, all machines are always considered to be in a state of “differential becoming,” a morphogenetic process of unfolding from the virtual to the actual (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 85–99; see also DeLanda, 2002: 10–15). What we often call a “real-world” problem, then, is part of the process by which the virtual becomes actual, not a reified manifestation of transcendent patterns or essences. In the words of Barad (2007: 361), it is the effect of “the intra-active engagements of our participation within and as part of the world’s differential becoming.” Although we often ground the ontological status and contents of entities in the manifested properties or features we observe, that is not how Deleuze’s ontology of immanence works. The opposite is the case. Ontological status is granted to a machine, not because it is an entity/substance composed of inert (bundles of) properties, but because it has virtual agency to connect to other machines and thus produce specific properties, qualities, or actions. A logical corollary of this line of ontological thinking is the principle of the univocity of being (Deleuze, 1994: 41–79; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 254–255). Because the condition of being is not attributed to essential properties or a transcendent (central or highest) being, but rather to the virtual agency held by individual machines in a state of “differential becoming,” ontological forms and contents can differ whenever their agency is actualized through intra-actions with other machines in various fields of relations. Theoretically, this implies that all beings are equal in the sense that they all possess virtual agency open to constant transformation, change, collapse, and re-emergence into qualitatively different beings. In this respect, the notion of individuation refers not to the conventional/modern sense in which one entity is distinguished from another, but rather to a machine’s intra-active differentiation, its own differential becoming (Deleuze, 1994: 48; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 48–50). The principle of the univocity of being appears to be a commitment to postmodern or even relativist ontological thinking (Turner, 2011) because it appears to lead to endless differentiations of the same machine, resulting in “undecidable” properties, qualities, or actions

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(Doty, 1993, 1997). However, Deleuze’s ontology of immanence should be approached with care because it makes strong connections to both the virtual and the actual. In this regard, Deleuze (1994; see also Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) offers the important concepts of “assemblage,” “territory,” and “code.” An assemblage2 is a morphogenetic constellation or pattern in which an existing state of affairs is actualized. Its basic implication is that assemblages are subject to empirical (temporal-spatial) analysis. To unpack this point further, let us consider Deleuze’s concepts of “territory” and “code.” All beings in human societies interact with one another in various physical or socio-linguistic fields. This often leads to the agglomeration of seemingly similar (natural or social) entities and thereby gives rise to certain strata. This stratification, Deleuze states, reflects representational rather than ontological differences (Deleuze, 1994: 11–13), and the stable or static lines and strata that enfold a set of entities and their interactions constitute territories and codes. In other words, territory and code describe certain physical and social boundaries of fields in which machines engage in the act of entification. From this perspective, an assemblage can be understood as an actualized, current state of machines’ differential becoming within the boundaries of territories and codes (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 352–360). To illustrate, consider the simple example of baseball. Baseball presents itself to us in an (a series of) assemblage(s). Its territory is an aggregate of all the physical machines that constitute what we call and know as baseball: balls, bats, helmets, gloves, players, umpires, managers, spectators, stadiums, etc. These physical things constitute one representational line and stratum that embodies baseball. Of course, these physical machines alone do not give rise to baseball. We need a code (collective and coherent meanings and meaning-making), namely rules and norms about how to play and how to determine a winner, and those are linguistic and sematic and thus social by nature. Thus, baseball is a morphogenetic machine of different assemblages (e.g., games) actualized by and through the dynamics of its physical territories and socio-linguistic codes within temporal and spatial 2 As will be discussed below, I treat this word differently from how it is used in Latour’s actor-network theory, where it is basically used to emphasize change over stability (Latour, 2005). In his actor-network theory, the term, “assemblage” is closely linked not to Deleuze, but to Whitehead’s process philosophy that states that every actual entity is (in some sense) process. Here, assemblage is a conceptual indication of an “extreme relativism” in which entities themselves “perish” instance-by-instance (for a fuller explanation of this point, see Harman, 2008).

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dimensions. When a baseball game begins, its assemblage is actualized; when the game ends, the assemblage, too, is gone (i.e., de-actualized), but baseball itself remains. Every time, different assemblages are morphogenetically actualized in specific, concrete instances of time and space. Thus, the assemblages of baseball have a vector and are therefore subject to empirical investigation. Furthermore, although assemblages are constantly formed and transformed, their constituting elements and dynamics can swing toward stratification, resulting in a closed territoriality and thereby stable vector bundles. This allows us (observers) to find general patterns, make predictions, and adjudicate competing statements about assemblages in a state of change. Again, to understand this point, the example of baseball serves nicely. Baseball has a closed territoriality because it is actualized through a fixed code and an only partially open territory, and it rarely swings towards destratification. In effect, to actualize baseball is synonymous with a reproduction of what already fits (i.e., to act upon its territories and codes). This enables us to have a settled definition of the existence of baseball: what it is, and what it is not. Certainly, every time a baseball game takes place, we have different outcomes—who wins and loses, and with what scores, for instance. That could appear to be an “endless” variation or “incomplete” flux; however, the differences are still actualized within specific temporal and spatial dimensions. Furthermore, the different outcomes do not change the existence of baseball. Its assemblages—however different they might appear to be—are still forged within the stable or static territories and codes of baseball. As such, baseball, although dynamic and exciting, is subject to not only empirical investigations, but also theoretical predictions—who will likely win or lose, for example. Therefore, it is clear that Deleuze’s ontology of immanence differs from both substantialist and correlationist thinking. Rather than confining the condition of being to an essence (fixed or stable properties) or centering what exists on subjectivity (unstable and contested signs or discourses in socio-political relations), it offers a morphogenetic thinking in which both stasis and transience are not only recognized, but also imbricated as the condition of being. Beings come into the beings that they are as they undergo the process of becoming from the virtual to the actual, which results in the multiplicity of assemblages embedded in specific spatial and temporal dimensions. This idea of “differential becoming” enables us to see a single (set of) being(s) moving in the

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directions of both “sameness” and “difference” (Brubaker & Cooper, 2000), which is what epitomizes the ontology of immanence I am putting forward here.

Morphogenetic Type: Identity-As-Machine If we re-ground the concept of identity in the ontology of immanence, we can make epistemological, theoretical, and analytical gains that are broader than those of the two opposite types of identity research discussed earlier. Indeed, such a re-grounding holds out the possibility of including and connecting their respective analytical and theoretical insights, and thus developing a better field for identity research in IR. In the ontology of immanence, identity, like all other beings, is a machine that harbors virtual agency—capacities, affordances, potentialities—to enter into fields of relations with other machines and produce outputs in the form of actualized qualities, properties, and activities. The entanglements or intraactions among various physical and socio-linguistic machines (such as race, gender, language, religion, biological traits of people, physical land, ecologic environments) produce certain forms (such as polities, be it a state or regional community or signs and signifiers, be it a narrative or a discourse), along with the specific qualities (such as values and norms, be they democratic, socialist, progressive, conservative, nationalistic, or cosmopolitan) and actions (such as drawing self–other or inside–outside boundaries) that an identity-machine can take. That is, ontologically, identity is a machine that does not yet have determinate positions or commitments but is in a process of unfolding. Thus, from a perspective of the ontology of immanence, identity should not be defined at the level of manifestations, but rather at the level of the virtual–actual dynamics it undergoes. European identity, for example, is to be understood as one qualitative feature of an identity-machine that itself results from the becoming it has already undergone. Certainly, every time acts of entanglement occur among different machines, they produce different identities; more specifically, they produce different forms, properties, qualities, and activities for and by an identity-machine. Furthermore, events of entanglement among even the same physical and socio-linguistic machines might produce difference, rather than sameness, depending on how open or closed their fields of relations are. This indicates that for any identity, the ontological contents are never predefined but always in a state of

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becoming with different morphogenetic effects. This applies the principle of the univocity of being to the very machine we call “identity.” The implication here is clear: multiple potentialities exist simultaneously in a single identity-machine, and they can in turn lead to multiple embodiments in terms of qualities, features, or activities. As such, there will likely be political contestations and interventions in the process of each identity-machine’s differential becoming. This is one central concern that lies at the heart of identity-as-flux research, specifically the postmodernist work on identity politics. What is more, in the ontology of immanence, an identity-machine is always in a morphogenetic process of unfolding from the virtual to the actual, and that process involves sociolinguistic, as well as physical and material, fields. One of the necessary conditions for the very existence of identity-machines is thus rooted in discursive acts, particularly discursive practices of identification, a major issue of concern in the poststructuralist approach to the study of identity. Re-grounding identity in the ontology of immanence will, therefore, have strong resonance for postmodern and poststructuralist scholars of identity because it embraces the discourse analysis of multiple sources of identification and encourages discursive deconstruction (or normative problematization) of the essentialized features of identity. That is, however, only part of what the ontological re-grounding I advocate here can offer. In correlationist thinking, ontological standing or agential affordance is not given to identity, which is regarded as basically an empty concept that can only be acted upon by human subjects’ social signs and political signifiers. By comparison, in the ontology of immanence, identity-as-machine gains its ontological status on the grounds of its virtual agency to produce an output in the forms of properties, qualities, and activities. As already discussed in detail, although such agency is never pre-defined, it nonetheless presents itself in terms of specific assemblages. In other words, the capacities and potentialities harbored in the depths or, to use Massumi’s words (2002: 10, 15–16), the “ontogenetic dimension” of an identity-machine are actualized and thereby take on concrete forms and properties with specific space–time configurations called assemblages. As such, the assemblages of an identity-machine are subject to empirical investigation and explanation. Viewed in that way, identity is no less a real being than baseball. We can therefore observe it, compare it with other real beings, and use it in an explanatory framework. However, the important caveat here is that it is real and subject to empirical explanation, but not because it has an essence, a “we-ness”

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that has substantial and transcendental value deemed to represent who we are. To repeat, the ontology of immanence does not offer any essentialist approach to defining who or what exists (is real). Instead, what we can observe and explain are the existing states of affairs, the identity assemblages actualized in specific temporal and spatial dimensions. For instance, the American identity assembled in the UK and the American identity assembled in China are not the same thing; nor are the American identity assembled in the 1950s and the American identity assembled in the 2020s the same. Different American identities—more accurately put, different American identity assemblages —have morphogenetically been manifested in different times and spaces. As different as the assemblages have been, those differences are not a basis from which to deprive American identity of its ontological standing and agency, precisely because the differences remain representational rather than ontological. Because they remain representational within specific, concrete instances of temporal and spatial dimensions, they are subject to empirical investigation. Additionally, when identity assemblages are formed with and through closed (physical, material) territories and sedentarist (socio-linguistic) codes, sameness rather than difference will prevail across assemblages and become what has often been deemed the essence of identity (i.e., “we-ness”), such as “Britishness” (Modood & Salt, 2011; Morra, 2013), “Chinese-ness” (Chang, 2015; Lee, 2017, 2021), or “European-ness” (Johnston, 2005; Risse, 2010). Given its stable and static nature, it is subject to not only empirical explanation, but also theoretical generalization, both of which are of particular interest to conventional constructivist researchers. In short, re-grounding identity in the ontology of immanence can open up a much-needed conversation between substantialist and correlationist approaches to the study of identity and offer fertile ground for IR analysts to embrace both types of identity research. The thorny problem of splitting and narrowing in identity scholarship seems to leave only an either/or position—i.e., discarding the very concept of identity or choosing between the two stances in favor of one (e.g., conventional) variant. As noted earlier, although there have been important attempts to find and build a middle ground, the resulting “practice turn” in constructivist work is epistemological and does not address the foundational ontological problem. By comparison, the ontology of immanence I have articulated, specifically the ideas of differential becoming, the virtual, the actual, and assemblage, can serve as an ontological both/and position that bridge the conventional and critical variants of constructivist

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research on identity and connect the insights offered by the epistemological, theoretical, and analytical approaches favored by their respective proponents. As I have shown, the value added by re-grounding identity in the ontology of immanence lies in embracing both (seemingly disparate) types of identity research into a coherent field without causing logical violations in alignment.

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CHAPTER 4

Illustrations and Implications

Abstract By ontologically rethinking identity as a machine in a state of becoming with different morphogenetic effects, we can improve and broaden the current divided field of identity scholarship. The immanent ontological thinking I advocate here allows IR researchers to have a pluralist epistemology for the study of identity that includes both positivist and reflexivist orientations without getting bogged down in methodological or epistemological conflicts and fragmentation. To further illustrate the value of my metatheoretical suggestion, this chapter takes examples from the IR literature on identity: European identity, a well-known case in constructivist IR scholarship, and Chinese identity, a case that has recently received growing attention in and beyond the discipline. I explain how scholars with substantialist and correlationist ontological perspectives approach them, respectively and how my proposed re-grounding opens a conversation between the two opposing types of identity research. This chapter also briefly discusses how to connect the metatheoretical insights of the ontology of immanence to actual (e.g., empirical) research on identity by using the example of Korean identity, a subject that I have studied deeply but only through the lenses of substantialism and correlationism. Keywords Empirical research · Methodology · European identity · Chinese identity · Korean identity

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 Y.-S. Eun, An Ontological Rethinking of Identity in International Studies, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30883-3_4

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My goal in this short book has been to offer preliminary steps in developing a better (i.e., more coherent and expanded) field for identity research in IR. To that end, I have undertaken a typological mapping exercise to dissect the varieties of existing identity research and show the current state of identity scholarship in the discipline, and that exercise has produced a typology of identity research along ontological, epistemological, theoretical, and analytical lines. As shown by that typological map, identity studies largely cohere around two discrete understandings of being, substantialism and correlationism, and the analytical, theoretical, and epistemological orientations of identity studies in IR split along those ontological lines. To bridge that split, I have suggested re-grounding identity on Deleuze’s ontological idea of immanence and explained how that suggestion will improve the study of identity in the discipline. In this final chapter, in lieu of summarizing the key arguments made thus far, I will conclude with a brief illustration to demonstrate how my proposed re-grounding opens a conversation between the two opposing types of identity research and offer some thoughts on how to do empirical research on identity, with the ontology of immanence advocated here. For the purpose of this illustration, I will take examples from the IR literature on identity: European identity, a well-known case in constructivist IR scholarship, and Chinese identity, a case that has recently received growing attention in and beyond the discipline. I will explain what they are and how scholars with substantialist, correlationist, and immanent ontological perspectives might approach them. I will also briefly discuss how to connect the metatheoretical insights of the ontology of immanence to actual (e.g., empirical) research on identity by using the example of Korean identity, a subject that I have studied deeply as an IR researcher for decades but only through the lenses of substantialism and correlationism. Let’s begin by reflecting on what European identity is. The answer differs radically, depending on one’s underlying position about what exists (is real). In substantialist and individualist ontology, European identity is a real thing composed of a set of stable properties and qualities, often dubbed European-ness, within which different European nations exist together. I am not suggesting that substantialist ontology regards European identity as a ahistorically fixed entity. From the perspective of substantialist ontology, European identity is also a socio-historically constructed reality: it is a well-run argument that European identity is a

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product of the long history of European socialization and the consolidation of “Christianity” as a “political-religious community” committed to liberal-democratic values (McCrea, 2011: 7; Menendez, 2005: 186; Nexon, 2006: 256; Risse, 2010: 1–16). But no matter how sociohistorical or socio-political the process of its construction is understood to be, European identity itself is ontologically conceived as a stable entity— that changes over time. In other words, it changes, but it is not subject to such constant variation and negotiation that observers cannot discern what it is at any given moment. Furthermore, although substantialist approaches recognize that European identity can change, what seems to be changing in their ontology is not European identity as such but its attributes. European identity exists in itself, and what varies over time is its observable attributes and predicates, the particularities of European-ness. Ontologically, therefore, European identity is a stable object whose reified attributes can change—but only into other reified attributes. Furthermore, in substantialist ontological thinking, the attributes of European identity at any given time are understood to remain cohesive enough to define the boundary of who Europeans are and what Europe represents and thus to inform what Europeans want at home and abroad. This ontological stance leads to a particular analytical orientation: certain attributes of European identity are fixed (i.e., generalized or essentialized) and operate as causal factors that exist independently of analysts applying identity-action nexus models. When seen through the lens of correlationist and subjective ontology, on the other hand, European identity is far from a substance that works as a causal factor influencing European states’ decisions to take certain actions. Those analysts who argue that it is are understood to be committed to generalizing or essentializing certain sources of identity construction as “methodological shortcuts” (for representative examples here, see Dessler, 1999; Wendt, 1999); and that act itself should be criticized because it is the very performance that produces the political construction of reality that needs to be denaturalized (Campbell, 1992; Walker, 1993). In correlationist and subjective ontology, European identity is a contested act of representing Europe. That is, it is an incomplete set of social signs or “imaginaries” (Weldes, 1999) that social actors perform to represent “European-ness” through speech (acts) and language (games) in ongoing social and political interactions. Given its fluid and socio-political nature, it is always contested and negotiated by all the human subjects involved in the “politics of representation” and

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thus “the politics of reality” (Zehfuss, 2002). In ontological terms, European identity exists as a contingency in flux, and it only becomes “real” during linguistic performances and representations by political human subjects, “speaking actors” (Epstein, 2008: 14), including the analysts who define European identity by freezing certain sources or aspects of European self-identifications. Much the same can be said about how we understand and analyze Chinese identity in IR—and the social sciences more broadly. On the one hand, it is often defined in terms of “Chinese-ness.” Of course, there is no consensus about the composition of that essence. Although the terms “China” and “Chinese-ness” have been commonly used to indicate the universal vocation of Zhongguo (“the center of civilization”) or Zhonghua (“central efflorescence”) (Cao, 2004; Liu, 2001; Lü, 2008; Mullaney et al., 2011) throughout Chinese history, the question of what Zhongguo and Zhonghua comprise remains unsettled. Some point to a certain geographic area, typically defined as “the central plain—the Yellow River basin”—during the Eastern Zhou dynasty period (770–221 B.C.) (Lewis, 2006, 2007), and others identify Chinese-ness with shared descent and blood, highlighting the “Han,” a major ethnic group in China, as a common ancestry (Elliott, 2012; Leibold, 2006). Still others consider Confucianism to be what unifies Chinese culture and people throughout its millennia-long history (Elman et al., 2002; Ge, 2014; Kuhn, 2009). In the discipline of IR, this cultural approach stands out, particularly in the ongoing debate about “Chinese IR” or a “Chinese School” of IR and in the attempts to build IR theory using the “Chinese characteristics” of the Chinese IR community (Qin, 2011, 2016, 2018a, 2018b; Yan, 2011, 2013; Zhao, 2005, 2009). Crucial to my point here is that despite the differences about the contents of Chinese-ness, many studies have an essentialist understanding of Chinese identity. Whether it is a certain space, a certain ethnicity, or a certain culture, Chinese identity tends to be conceived as an entity filled with predefined and transcendental (i.e. essential) contents or Jungtongron (“orthodoxy”) (Chang, 2015: 1). As noted, this tendency is especially apparent in the search for a “Chinese version” of international studies or international order. Following the line of essentialist thinking, for example, Chinese identity is subsumed under Confucianism and its ideas of Tianxia (“all under heaven”), Wang Dao (“Kingly way”) or Zhongyong (“co-evolutionary” principles of harmony), which are in turn invoked to develop causal arguments that China will rise “peacefully,”

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and that China can provide “moral” hegemonic leadership and build a “harmonious” world (see, e.g., Yan, 2011; Zhang, 2015; Zhao, 2005, 2014). However, radically different understandings of Chinese identity also exist—particularly in the fields of critical anthropology, literature, and diaspora studies. To put their understanding bluntly, Chinese identity or Chinese-ness is a mere reflection of the “political expression” of speaking actors, particularly political elites and intellectuals who confine what China is to certain (positive or negative) features or qualities to advance their political purposes (Ang, 2013). For example, following Foucault’s “genealogy as critique,” critical anthropology and diaspora studies show that since the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220), the term Zhonghua (“central efflorescence”) has continued to be used by Chinese political elites in the context of constructing a Sino-centric worldview, and the term Zhonghua has thus always been used in conjunction with its opposite, Yidi (“barbarian” or “barbarity”). Laden with such a hierarchical and dichotomized meaning, “Chinese-ness” has politically acted as a Chinese identity “marker” that entails repression and discrimination against the Yidi, whose identities have varied depending on the Chinese elites’ political needs for their rule and authority in different historical conditions (Ang, 2013: 70; Dardess, 1983; Duncan, 2002). Likewise, Confucianism, which many have believed to be an essential source of Chinese identity, is seen as nothing but a political act. In this context, not only Chinese political actors but also their European counterparts are subject to scathing criticism because they choose certain aspects of Confucianism and equate them with Chinese identity for political purposes. Lionel Jensen’s work (1998: 5, 17–25), for example, shows that historically Europeans have confined Confucianism to a simple political ideology that they have closely linked to Chinese “despotism” or “autocracy,” stating that this is “the result of a prolonged, deliberate process of manufacture in which European intellectuals [and “Jesuit missionaries”] took a leading role,” especially during the late nineteenth century, to justify their moral superiority and colonization (see also Aoki, 2013; Dardess, 1983). In short, Jensen states, Confucianism as Chinese identity is “a Western invention.” Ontologically, then, Chinese identity does not exist as an entity that can also be used in an independent causal analysis of identity–action nexus models, but rather as a “fictitious” artifact made by political and/or religious elites who “manufacture,” mainly in the negative sense, essentialized linguistic categories of what China is. In this vein

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of critical and postmodern thinking, Chinese identity should be subject to discursive destruction for “cosmopolitan” emancipation (Ang, 2013: 70; see also Duncan, 2002; Elman et al., 2002). As clearly shown by those examples, when we approach the two sides on their own terms, we end up in an either/or situation: ontologically speaking, European or Chinese (or any) identity is either a real, independent entity or an unstable artifact embedded in the language–power nexus. That dichotomy is a serious logical violation in the ontological alignment of identity studies. By contrast, the ontology of immanence enables us to take a both/and position, not because we simply and conveniently assume that identity is both a stable substance and an everchanging sign, but because immanent ontological thinking defines all beings, including social constructs such as European or Chinese identity, as machines in a state of becoming with different morphogenetic effects. Because an identity-machine undergoes the process of becoming from the virtual to the actual, it can generate both substantialist and correlationist effects at the level of manifestation. Thus, if our aim is to fully understand identity, it is not only appropriate but also necessary, from the perspective of immanent ontology, to unpack its morphogenetic effects using both positivist and reflexivist epistemological stances while deploying a causal analysis of the “identity–action” nexus and the discourse analysis of identification and normative takes on the political construction of identity. More specifically, European identity is certainly subject to historical and discursive approaches to and the normative problematization of how it is constructed and, more importantly, how it is represented because an identity-machine’s virtual agency is never predetermined but is always in a morphogenetic process of unfolding. Given that this differential becoming undergoes entanglements with a variety of socio-linguistic fields, as well as physical and material fields, political contestations among human subjects who have competing signs and signifiers for (the European) self and (the non-European) other are inevitable. As such, the politics of representation, as one of the morphogenetic effects , is naturally a key concern of identity research in immanent ontological thinking. To speak using Deleuze’s notion of assemblage, the question here is not what the existing state of affairs of the identity-machine is, but how it is assembled and why it is assembled as it is. Those questions require historical and discursive approaches to the study of how the territories and codes used in the production of European identity assemblages are made, as well as normative critiques of how closed or fixed they are.

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However, to have a more complete understanding of European identity, the ontology of immanence I advocate also requires us to delve into the substantialist aspects of European identity because its assemblages could end up producing sameness rather than difference, giving them a causal influence over the actions of subjects in those assemblages, which is another morphogenetic effect . In other words, when European identity assemblages continue to remain bounded within limited territories and static codes, they are perceived as a reified reality and performed as the habitus of everyday life. Any dispute over what European-ness means is then to be settled on the grounds of those reifications and routinizations at the level of manifestations, which in turn produces conditions and constraints on how Europeans ought to (inter)act. This is where the identity–action nexus model in which identity functions as a causal factor can be applied and also where ontological security theory comes into play. Existential anxiety, a key mechanism of ontological security, arises only when a clearly defined sense of the self exists: if a person is faced with events that disrupt their settled conception of who they are, they experience “existential anxieties” and thus take actions to restore their “inner consistency” and reassert “a sense of order,” namely a “stable” identity, as a way of coping with those anxieties (Browning, 2018: 336; Mitzen, 2006: 346–348). The point to emphasize here is that in the ontology of immanence, it is not only possible but necessary to explain and theorize causal relationships between identity-assemblages and actions. Taken as a whole, then, the potential utility of re-grounding identity in the ontology immanence becomes clear. By ontologically rethinking identity as a machine in a state of becoming with different morphogenetic effects, we can improve and broaden the current divided and narrowed field of identity scholarship. The immanent ontological thinking I advocate here allows IR researchers to have a pluralist epistemology for the study of identity that includes both positivist and reflexivist orientations without getting bogged down in methodological or epistemological conflicts and fragmentation. That is the key contribution of re-grounding identity in the ontology of immanence, and it is also the key to developing a better field for identity research in IR. These points are summarized in Table 4.1. Of course, several questions remain open and require further conversation. One of them would be, how to go about doing empirical research based on the ontology of immanence put forward by this book. The value of my metatheoretical suggestion might be one thing, but praxis

Substantialism Positivist epistemology Focused on functional factors Conventional/modern/moderate constructivism

Analytical orientation

Variants of constructivism associated with each type

Correlationism Reflexivist epistemology Focused on political acts and discursive practices Critical/postmodern/radical constructivism

Substantialist type: Identity-as-entity Correlationist type: Identity-as-flux

Types of identity research

Re-grounding identity in an ontology of immanence

Ontological position Epistemological stance

Table 4.1

Not limited to one type but inclusive of both, without causing logical inconsistency

Focused on assemblages

Immanence Pluralist epistemology

Morphogenetic type: Identity-as-machine

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is quite another. Such a call for methodological sophistication in identity research committed to immanent ontology is warranted as well as expected because methodology is a major undercurrent in the discussion about a new theory or research program in contemporary IR. Although my concerns are primarily with an ontological rethinking of identity in international studies, let me briefly offer an answer to the how-to question: how should immanent ontological thinking be applied in an actual (e.g., empirical) analysis? For this purpose, I will use South Korean identity as an example and offer concrete methodological guidelines and steps commensurate with ontology of immanence. The first and most important step that needs to be taken in an empirical analysis premised on the ontology of immanence is to see South Korean identity as an assemblage. As discussed in detail above, an assemblage is a machine’s existing state of affairs as it is morphogenetically actualized within specific temporal and spatial dimensions. In this sense, an assemblage is subject to empirical (temporal-spatial) investigation, so analysts can use well-established methods such as surveys, content analyses, and experiments to investigate what South Korean identity is at a specific time and place. Abdelal and his colleagues have offered a detailed account of these methods in their paper, “Identity as a Variable” (2006: 701–705) and the book they edited, Measuring Identity: A Guide for Social Scientists (2009). In addition, we can follow the analytical and methodological moves Ted Hopf used in his work (2002) on Soviet and Russian identity.1 He used a close reading of varied text materials, from official government documents to daily newspapers, popular novels, school textbooks, and film reviews, to perform a social discursive analysis and discern how identities were expressed in that society at specific times (1995 and 1999 in his case). To examine Korean identity, many analysts, myself included, have already used those methods and found that a collective belief in a common historical and ethnic ancestry of Gojoseon in the Bronze Age and the political ideas and institutions of modern liberal democracy are two central attributes in defining what Korea is or who Koreans are (Choe, 2006; Eun, 2020; Kang & Lee, 2011; Kim, 2014; Kim & Kim, 2020; Moon, 2012; Shin, 2006; Yoo, 2016). Here an important caveat in how 1 The same methods are also used in Hopf and Allan’s edited volume (2006), Making Identity Count: Building a National Identity Database and in Allan, Vucetic, and Hopf’s paper (2018), “The Distribution of Identity and the Future of International Order.”.

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we assess those findings is needed. The ontology of immanence reminds us that what has been found in those analyses is a Korean identityassemblage actualized in specific spatial and temporal dimensions (i.e., within the geographic space of the southern part of the Korean peninsula during the time periods when those investigations were conducted), not the identity-machine itself. Ontologically, it is the latter that produces the former: as a machine, the identity harbors virtual agency—capacities, affordances, potentialities—to generate outputs (i.e., morphogenetic effects) in the form of actualized features, qualities, properties, and activities while “intra-acting” (Barad, 2007) with other machines across a variety of fields of relations. Depending on how those “intra-actions” take place under which fields of relations, the virtual agency might or might not produce certain features.2 Put otherwise, the Korean identitymachine is always in a state of differential becoming that produces different morphogenetic effects in different conditions. Thus, the Korean identity-assemblages that we analysts empirically observe at the level of representation can always transform, collapse, or re-emerge as radically different Korean identity-assemblages. As such, we next need to examine the rigidity and stability of the particular Korean identity-assemblages manifested in our empirical investigations. This is the second step of an empirical analysis premised on the ontology of immanence. To this end, we need to examine and compare Korean identity-assemblages at different times or in different places/relations. If our findings at this second step point to significant and perennial variations in the Korean identity-assemblages across time, a primary concern for empirical analysis in the third step will be which elements occupy the central position in those assemblages and how they are networked therein because perennial variations indicate that the Korean identity-machine has “open-territoriality”—its actualized assemblage is on the move, (re)connecting with different machines, including those yet to be observed or yet to be formed. In such a state of movement, what matters from an empirical perspective is the degree of centrality, understood largely in terms of main paths and clusters, of each of the observed elements that constitutes the Korean identity-assemblage. The more central an element is in open-territoriality, the more persistent 2 For instance, the liberal democratic values observed in empirical investigations of Korean identity have not existed in all time periods or in all relations with the other, including other democracies: bri.

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it is likely to be and thus the more likely it is to serve as a hub in different network (assemblage) dynamics. In this investigation, we can adapt the well-established tools and methods of social network analyses (including computer software such as Pajeck, UNICET, NodeXL, or NetMiner) to identify central elements (or “nodes”) by examining the number of neighboring nodes, iterative circles of neighbors, and the number of paths going through nodes.3 By contrast, if the cross-temporal and comparative examinations of the second step show no significant variations or differences among actualized assemblages, the Korean identity-machine is likely to have “closed territoriality.” In that case, we move to the fourth step, which is a twofold undertaking. According to several empirical studies that have examined Korean identity with different temporal foci, the collective beliefs in ethnic homogeneity and common ancestry remain rigid across different times and relations (Jeon, 2019; Moon, 2012; Olsen, 2008; Shin, 2006, 2015; Yoo, 2016). Because such collective beliefs manifest themselves to us as the quality of Korean identity across time, we can find general patterns in their morphogenetic effects from an analytical standpoint, which in turn enables us to analytically consider Korean identity as a (causal) variable and use or test it through various theoretical frameworks, including identity–action nexus models. In this case, we can undertake small-N research, such as in-depth and comparative case studies, to obtain causation-tracing evidence, or large-N research, such as a broad cross-case regressions, to check theoretical generality (i.e., the identity-variable’s generalizable causal power). One cautionary note is appropriate here: the empirical finding that Korean identity appears to remain fixed along a certain ethnicity does not mean that Korean identity as a being/machine is a fixed entity. Although we analysts can observe its general patterns or persistent qualities—to the extent that it has closed territoriality—those patterns and qualities exist in and through the accumulation of local manifestations, namely actualized assemblages, of the Korean identity-machine. To reiterate, assemblages cannot be equated with beings themselves. From the perspective of the

3 An overwhelming number of articles and books introduce or use social network analyses and techniques in the social sciences, particularly in social psychology, management studies, and media and communication studies. For recent and interdisciplinary works, see Bainbridge (2020); Bidart et al. (2020); Fu et al. (2017); Harms and Connolly (2019); Sammut and Bauer (2021).

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ontology of immanence, identity should not be defined at the level of manifestation, but rather at the level of the virtual–actual dynamics it undergoes. As a machine, Korean identity has virtual agency in a state of differential becoming. One of the key questions thus becomes, why or how has the identity-machine been actualized in a stable manner, such that observers are able to define its generalizable (“sameness”) features? In other words, the concerns of an empirical analysis that is finely attuned to the ontology of immanence extend beyond positivist causal research to socio-historical investigations that unpack and trace the processes and practices by which certain features of identity are essentialized. Therefore, not only a causal analysis, but also the question of how collective beliefs in ethnic homogeneity have become deeply and consistently embedded in Korean identity-assemblages should be of central interest to identity researchers attentive to immanent ontological thinking. Answering those questions requires socio-historical approaches. Several relevant studies have indeed shown that those collective beliefs emerged largely through acts of othering during the Japanese annexation of Korea from 1910 to 1945 (Shin et al., 1999: 470; Olsen, 2008). More specifically, a national identity based on statehood completely lost its basis among the Korean people when they lost their sovereignty to Imperial Japan in 1910. To confront Japanese imperialism and mitigate foreign (Japanese) influence and aggression, Koreans at that time felt a strong need to assert the distinctiveness and effectiveness of their nation. Without the political entity of a state, Koreans relied on “ethnic homogeneity” and a common ancestry to maintain their national identity in a way that drew a sharp distinction between themselves and the Japanese aggressor (Shin & Chang, 2004: 118–124). Against that backdrop, Koreans stopped using the word gukmin, which means “citizen of the state,” and instead used minjok, which means “a common ethnic group” (Choe, 2006: 95). The Korean nation was in that way “racialized” through a belief in “a common prehistoric origin, responding to … Japanese imperialism” (Shin et al., 1999: 469). In addition, Japan’s specific colonial policies, such as forced assimilation, encouraged the growth of ethnically centered nationalist sentiment in Korea. The Japanese adopted aggressive policies to assimilate Koreans into Imperial Japan and used the argument of Japanese racial and cultural superiority to justify their annexation of Korea. In response, Korean began to privilege the distinctiveness, purity, and superiority of Korean ethnicity. Koreans, particularly teachers and journalists, “zealously advocated for Korean

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ethnic nationalism” (Allen, 1990; Kim, 2014; Shin et al., 1999; Yoo, 2016). To rationalize their beliefs, they built narratives about a common ancestry and ethnicity and a long and glorious Korean history; during that period, the notion of danil minjok or han minjok, which literally means “a nation of one clan” came to occupy a central position in the Korean discourse on national identity (Allen, 1990: 792; Hwang, 2020; Kang, 2020; Lee, 2020; Shin & Chang, 2004: 121). In that context, it comes as no surprise that the leitmotif of an ethnically based national identity is a critical component of Seoul’s policy discourses about the reunification of Korea. Despite North Korea’s military adventurism, all South Korean governments, regardless of their political ideologies, have pursued “peaceful reunification” based on a rigid sense of shared ethnic identity, the view that all Koreans are “members of an extended family” (Lee, 2010a, 2010b, 2012; Roh, 2006a, 2006b). In short, since the colonial occupation of the early twentieth century, the idea of the Japanese “other” as a foil to Korean ethnicity has built bonds of national solidarity and social coherence among Koreans. Given those findings, not only socio-historical approaches, but also reflexive and normative issues are at stake in doing identity research premised on immanent ontological thinking. Because Korean identityassemblages continue to remain narrowly bounded within a certain static code, i.e., collective belief in ethnic homogeneity, the issue of inclusion–exclusion (inside-outside) perforce arises and the marginalization of outsiders becomes inevitable. How Koreans define themselves is essentialized as one stratified quality or characteristic, which means that a clearly demarcated boundary of who Koreans are or what Koreans represent must be drawn in line with that essentialized characteristic, and that boundary affects how Koreans ought to act and feel, especially toward those outside it. For instance, several empirical investigations that used survey data or social media data have demonstrated that when disputes or competitions occur between Korea and Japan over various issues, be they territory, history textbooks, or even national football games, Koreans tend to have a strong sense of solidarity and report feeling anger or a sense of victimhood against Japan (Choi, 2018; Choi et al., 2014; Kim, 2020; Son, 2017). That collective emotion serves as a powerful marker that reminds Koreans of who they are and who they are not. The voices of outsiders—who do not feel the same or similar emotions—are suppressed

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or marginalized in Korean discourses about Japan and judged to be inappropriate or stigmatized as maegukno, “traitors” or chinilpa, “pro-Japan faction” (Choi et al., 2014; Jeon, 2019; Lee, 2019). To an analyst committed to the ontology of immanence, the ways in which self–other identifications are practiced and, more importantly, reproduced and essentialized are of particular interest. Although Korean identity appears to be stable and rigid, that is true only of its manifestations, its actualized identity-assemblages. In the ontology of immanence, Korean identity is ontologically understood as a machine that always remains in a state of differential becoming. A question that then deserves an empirical exploration is why or how its assemblages remain stratified and rigid at the level of manifestation. In answering that question, “reflexive” discourse analyses through which researchers can discern explicit or implicit “discriminative mechanisms” within mainstream social discourses (Alejandro, 2021: 150) are useful. For example, we can empirically examine Korean public sentiments toward Japan as they are expressed in school textbooks, novels, TV shows, movies, and social media, and we can critically assess whether and to what extent the idea that the Korean nation is both distinct from Japan and ethnically superior to it prevails or is sustained across those social (con)texts. In addition to a reflexive social discourse analysis, we could take an autobiographical or autoethnographic approach (Inayatullah, 2011; Inayatullah & Dauphinee, 2016; Löwenheim, 2010) to ensure that our empirical analysis not only shows the social contexts surrounding self– other identification acts, but also reveals our own implication in the making of those social environments. In the ontology of immanence, we analysts are not assumed to exist independently of the object under investigation. We are indeed part of the assemblage of the object/being. As explained in detail above, differential becoming undergoes entanglements with a variety of socio-linguistic, physical, and material fields of which we analysts are a constitutive part. If identity is seen as a container holding essential (or more precisely essentialized) properties, qualities, or features, we are implicated in the (re)production of that essentialized identity through our quotidian encounters. In this sense, autobiographical approaches, particularly an autobiography that focuses on the analysts’ bodies and emotions, can be very useful for understanding whether and how we are implicated in that (re)production. Our own bodies and emotions are the very first place in which encounters with (the features of) identity are performed, reified, and experienced. To tell

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our personal feelings and experiences—for example, to narrate how our body and emotions have reacted to the encounters with certain features of identity, be they positive or negative—is the first necessary step in recognizing our own agency in (re)producing the object under study (i.e., essentialized features of identity in this case). The questions involved in this type of autobiographical encounter include, How has my personal and professional subjectivity been constructed, deconstructed, or reconstructed within and through the notion of who Koreans are that prevails in Korea of which I am a citizen?; Am I motivated to go beyond such a prevailing idea and how much do I put my motivation into action in my everyday routines, especially my teaching and research?; and What has made me feel discouraged and frustrated as I try to denaturalize mainstream discourses on identity in the social groups, including academic discipline(s), of which I am a member? In short, writing and telling about the experiences that I have had and the emotions I have felt can clarify the kinds of agency I exercise (or do not exercise) in (de)essentializing identity. The empirical accounts and knowledge developed by such an autobiographical approach and reflexive discourse analysis can help us assess and map the ways in which identity-assemblages remain essentialized and how those stratified manifestations straddle the socio-individual nexus. The step-by-step guide to empirical analysis and accompanying methods just discussed for the example of Korean identity are depicted schematically in the Fig. 4.1. The implications of my discussion thus far are rather straightforward: re-grounding identity in the ontology of immanence, which is new to constructivist scholarship in IR, enables us to have a pluralist epistemology and methodology for the study of identity that includes both positivist and reflexivist orientations without yielding a logically inconsistent alignment. This inclusion does not involve any form of convergence that flattens the existing epistemological or analytical differences between the two camps of constructivism, nor does it opt to attach a particular significance to one type of identity research over the other. Instead, it opens up a much-needed conversation between the two and connects the insights of the theoretical, analytical, and methodological approaches favored by their respective proponents. Re-grounding identity studies in the ontology of immanence will thus help to develop a better field for identity research in IR.

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Fig. 4.1 How to do empirical analysis of identity committed to the ontology of immanence

We need more than a middle ground at the methodological and epistemological levels to address the dissociation in today’s identity scholarship. As important as they are, the methodological and epistemological middle grounds cannot reconcile the more fundamental (i.e., ontological) difference found in current identity scholarship. The ontology of immanence, on the other hand, can serve as a useful pole around which both types of identity research can productively cohere without getting bogged down in methodological or epistemological conflicts or resorting to a positivist or post-positivist convergence. If we ontologically conceptualize identity as a machine whose virtual agency exists in a state of differential becoming, it is logically sound to understand that such an identity-machine can move in the directions of both “sameness” and “difference” (Brubaker & Cooper, 2000), producing both substantialist and correlationist effects at the level of manifestation. A corollary of this ontological (re)thinking is a research field for the study of identity that embraces a wide range of theories and approaches, both conventional (modern) and critical (postmodern) ones, without giving an a priori preference to either type. The methodological guidelines elaborated above require both positivist and reflexivist epistemological and methodological stances and tools to trace

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and assess the great variety of morphogenetic effects that an identitymachine can produce as it undergoes the process of becoming from virtual to actual.

Implications for the Problem of West-Centrism in IR Beyond the question of how to develop a better field for identity research in IR, which is of central interest to this book, the ontology of immanence put forth here has also an important implication for the on-going debate over acute issues associated with West-centrism in IR. Although I cannot do justice to the breadth of the debate here, let us consider, for purposes of illustration, a snapshot of points of contention in the terrain of the relevant debate. West-centrism is an enduring problem in the discipline. Many studies, including postcolonial and decolonial studies, have long criticized the discipline for its (re)production of West-centric ways of knowing and being. For example, since the 1990s (at least), the value of “mainstream” and paradigmatic IR theories commonly grouped together under the headings of realism, liberalism, and (conventional) constructivism have been subjected to criticisms—with West-centrism being one of the key lines of attack against all of them. Likewise, common stories of the origins of the discipline and its subject matter that begin with the Peace of Westphalia and a “First Great Debate” between realism and idealism have also been under sustained scrutiny because of their West-centric historiographical accounts. To be sure, critics have different takes on the problem of West-centrism embedded deep within mainstream IR. Nevertheless, a common thread running through each differing take on the central problem is a profound critique of the universalization of a particular Western—more specifically, the Euro-North American—experience or thinking in the study of international relations (see, although much abridged, for example, Acharya, 2014; Acharya & Buzan, 2007; Bilgin, 2014; de Carvalho et al., 2011; Hobson, 2012; Krishna, 2001; Ling, 2014; Seth, 2013; Shilliam, 2011, 2015; Tickner, 2003; Tickner & Blaney, 2012; Vitalis, 2015). West-centric IR inevitably entails the problem of the marginalization and silencing of other (non-Western) actors’ varied understandings of how the world works and their agency in and contributions to global politics. To grapple with this problem, critical IR scholars have called for

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a “broadening” of the discursive horizon of the discipline. One of the early responses to the plea was to draw renewed attention to non-Western societies and theorize international politics in ways that are finely tuned to those local thinking schema and experiences. Advocates of “homegrown” IR theory building from non-Western perspectives often point out that those regions that remain marginalized in West-centric IR (namely, Africa, Middle East, Latin America, and Asia) have cultures, worldviews, and historical experiences distinctive from those derived from the modern West. This enterprise of non-Western IR theory building has especially been endorsed by IR scholars interested in the international politics of Asia (Acharya, 2000, 2004; Acharya & Buzan, 2007, 2010; Haggard & Kang, 2020; Kang, 2003), who share the view that theories, concepts, and norms derived from European experiences and ideas “do a poor job” as they travel to Asia (Kang, 2003: 57–58). Of course, the rise of Asia in general, and China in particular, in twenty-first century world politics has added momentum to non-Western IR theory building; ongoing scholarly attempts to build a Chinese IR school or an IR theory “with Chinese characteristics” are a case in point (Qin, 2018a, 2018b; Yan, 2011; Zhao, 2005). However, this “homegrown” IR theory-building enterprise and its underlying assumption soon faced criticism—with nativism or ethnocentrism being the target of much of the criticism. Critics state that nonWestern IR theorization wherein unique historical experiences or local cultural traits are highlighted can lead to a cultural or national “inwardness” that works to reproduce the very “ethnocentricities” (Hurrell, 2016: 149) that are being challenged. Relatedly, non-Western IR theorization—if it is solely grounded in searching for ethno-national or cultural-historical characteristics different from Western ones—can easily turn into an “anti”-Western act, which can fall prey to political interests of a particular state in the non-Western region. For example, in his discussion of Chinese indigenous visions of world order and IR theory, William Callahan doubts the applicability of the traditional Chinese concept of Tianxia (“all-under-heaven”). He claims that Tianxia serves to be a philosophical foundation upon which “China’s hierarchical governance is updated for the twenty-first century” (Callahan, 2008: 749, see, for a fuller exposition of this point, Callahan, 2013). Meanwhile, despite our persistent problematization of the Western parochialism of the discipline and relevant calls for a pluralistic IR (Dunne et al., 2013; Jackson, 2011), a few “paradigmatic” (i.e., mainstream and

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Western-derived) IR theories still remain at the center of much of IR scholarship (Eun, 2019, 2022; Whyte, 2019).4 Furthermore, there is little difference between epistemological trends in Western (e.g., American) and non-Western (e.g., Asian) IR communities in terms of their strong commitment to positivist epistemology.5 The above brief snippet of the debate indicates (at least) two points: first, the time when critical IR scholars had to fight to assert a case for going beyond West-centrism by more actively embracing the voices and experiences of the non-Western world in the discipline has certainly long passed; second, non-Western IR theorization has not (yet) succeeded in reaching its core objective to address the problem of West-centric modes of knowledge production: rather, it is not devoid of criticism because there are potentially ethnocentric or nationalistic undercurrents in the non-Western (e.g., Chinese) IR theory-building enterprises. If we revisit the current state of affairs diving deep below the level of manifestation through Deleuze’s ontological ideas discussed in earlier chapters, we can approach the issues at stake differently and make further progress. From the perspective of the ontology of immanence, the current West-centric IR is an assemblage actualized by and through the dynamics (“intra-actions”) of particular physical territories and socio-linguistic codes within temporal and spatial dimensions. Although West-centric ways of knowing appear to remain dominant and stable across different IR communities, it is, after all, an assemblage—which can turn into qualitatively different assemblages depending on the kinds and movement of territory and code involved in the production of IR knowledge. When we see the current West-centric IR as an assemblage, not an essential and distinctive knowledge-making field or practice deemed to represent 4 More specifically, Christopher Whyte’s work in which he employs a topic-modelling algorithm analysis to examine theoretical and thematic patterns in a large number of IR texts (11,000 articles published in 18 IR journals over the past 25 years) demonstrates that “factionalism based on paradigmatic training and debate… clearly influences the theoretical construction of much research in the field,” and “paradigmatic foundations are closely linked to a large number of research topics” in IR scholarship (Whyte, 2019: 443–446). 5 See the most recent Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) survey data, available at https://trip.wm.edu/data/dashboard/faculty-survey. For other studies offering the same or similar findings, especially with respect to Asian IR communities, see the 2022 journal special issue of Contemporary Southeast Asia in which contemporary IR research and teaching trends in six Southeast Asian countries—Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines, and Cambodia—are investigated through cross-national surveys, available at https://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg/publication/7814.

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the “Western” world, we can more clearly perceive that the problem of Wester-centrism cannot be addressed through any essentialist form of knowledge (production). Rather, attention needs to be drawn to questions of why West-centric IR as an assemblage is actualized and stabilized as it is and how we can encourage such a rigid assemblage to keep moving in the direction of change and openness. Unfortunately, however, much of the “homegrown” or “non-Western” IR theorization work tends to understand and approach West-centric IR in essentialist terms, zooming in on ethno-cultural differences between “Western” and “non-Western” worlds and taking global or universal applicability as an “unquestioned benchmark for defining worth within IR” (Anderl & Witt, 2020: 45). This only leads to the reproduction of essentialized understandings of how the world works. The fact that despite the differences in their manifested features, the same codes, namely West-non-West dualism and the positivist understanding of “good” knowledge, are at play in the actualization of both assemblages of West-centric IR and its counter proposal attests to this. As critics have already noted, West-centrism operates with “a peculiar articulation between dualism (such as Europe-non-Europe, primitivecivilized, and traditional-modern) and a linear, one dimensional evolutionarism from some state of nature to modern European society” (Quijano, 2007: 169). That is, mainstream IR theories, and the discipline of IR more generally, take a particular Western thinking or experience—namely, Cartesian-Newtonian dualism and a European experience of modernity—as basis for developing the narratives of (the progress of) international relations and formulating IR theories, with claim to universal applicability and validity. Likewise, non-Western IR theory-building enterprises and the recent call for “Global IR” (Acharya, 2014, 2016) also resort to the West-non-West duality and binary as a point of entry for the practice of addressing the problem of West-centrism. Their approach is premised on two assumptions: first that there are geo-cultural differences between “Western” and “non-Western” worlds, thus leading to the second assumption that greater inclusion of “different” (that is, non-Western) perspectives in the Western-centric discipline of IR will render the discipline more “pluralistic” and “global” (Acharya, 2014: 650; Acharya, 2016: 5; see also Acharya & Buzan, 2017; Lake, 2016; Tickner, 2013). This binary categorization deployed by both sides conflates the world with manifested values and practices believed to represent Western and

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non-Western societies, respectively. A tendency in the non-Western IR debate to dichotomize complex thought systems into contrasting camps of “individual” thinking and “relational” thinking, and then to assign ownership of the former to Western (e.g., modern European) culture and the latter to non-Western (e.g., traditional Chinese) culture, is a case in point (Kang, 2012; Li, 2021; Qin, 2016, 2018a, 2018b; Zhang, 2015). By bifurcating the world and pairing one side of the duality with particular geographic locations and particular ethno-cultural traditions, both assemblages (re)produce essentialized and universalized understandings of how the world works—on either Western terms in “mainstream” IR or non-Western terms in the “non-Western” IR theorization scholarship. Such essentialized identities and fixed binaries are constitutive of “a coloniality of power” (Mignolo, 2000, 2007; Quijano, 2007; Quijano & Ennis, 2000) that marginalizes different voices located on one side of the duality (whether that side is designated as “Western” or “non-Western”). The point to re-emphasize is that the current West-centrism of IR is an assemblage morphogenetically actualized in specific instances of time and space, not an essential existence composed of values or habitus inherent to the “Western” world. When seen through the lens of ontology of immanence, there is no such thing as “Western” (or “non-Western”) essence; as such, any approach to addressing the problem of West-centric IR does not logically stand as long as it is grounded in essentialist logics, namely the West-non-West binary thinking premised upon an ontological assumption that there exist “non-Western” ethno-cultural substances essentially different from “Western” ones. More importantly, because West-centric IR is an assemblage—however rigid it may appear to be—it is ontologically open to transformation, change, collapse, and re-emergence into qualitatively different assemblages. Depending on acts of entanglement among various physical and socio-linguistic machines, a variety of assemblages can be actualized, taking on different features and activities of knowledge production. To be certain, a high degree of “sameness” among actualized knowledge assemblages can exist under conditions in which events of entanglement among the same or similar machines continue to take place and thereby static territories or fixed codes emerge. As seen above, this is the case with respect to both assemblages of Westcentric IR and its counter proposal: although they have different features and characteristics at the level of manifestation, both operate with and through the essentialized codes of West-non-West binary thinking and positivist science. Many different and critical views of how the world

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works continue to crop up in the growing non-Western and Global IR literature, but the differences between the knowledge claims and those of West-centric (mainstream) IR remain representational and quantitative: they all are bound by the same sedentarist codes of knowledge (production). No matter how many knowledge assemblages—whether they have “Western” or “non-Western” characteristics—are formed, they do not constitute qualitative, or what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) also calls “true,” differences and diversity as long as the territory and code on which they are actualized remain essentialized and fixed. What matters for venturing beyond West-centrism in IR toward greater qualitative diversity in international studies, is, then, straightforward: rather than devoting our attention to the development of knowledge assemblages based on continued designation of essentialized differences between Western and non-Western worlds—which carries the risk of repeating and reinforcing the old exclusive and hierarchical structure of knowledge production—we need to take steps to rectify the stratified and essentialized codes and generate open territoriality in the actualization of IR knowledge assemblages. That is, there is a need for a field of knowledge in which assemblages in and for international studies are constantly formed, transformed, and collapsed, later to re-emerge in qualitatively different assemblages. Metaphorically speaking, the field of knowledge of IR ought to be on the move, intersecting with and encountering yet-to-be-discovered or yet-to-be-formed territories and codes of knowledge production, be it from the perspectives of Western or non-Western worlds. In the words of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), we need to pursue an IR as “becoming-rhizomatic.” This requires not only expanding the parameters of our disciplinary agents and practices, but also, and more importantly, (re)inventing what legitimate agents and practices are in international studies. This broadening of meanings, as well as forms and sources, of agency in knowledge production can lead to staging multi-active and quotidian encounters with people, voices, and ideas outside disciplinary space, agent, and language (i.e., the existing territory and code of IR) through which qualitatively different visions of how the world works, and how our knowledge is produced, presented, and networked can be actualized or deactualized. “Greater diversity,” the common intention of advocates and critics alike in the debate over non-Western and Global IR, should be sought and determined in terms of whether IR is in motion, not whether IR embraces “non-Western” voices. This is a key implication of the ontology

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of immanence I advocate for addressing the problem of West-centrism in IR.

Implications for Theoretical Contributions and Progress Let us now go back to my main concern and suggestion. It is true that developing a new field of identity studies based on the ontology of immanence put forward in this book will be challenging. Also, its knowledge claims lack generality and predictive capacity: in effect, only a limited and provisional generalization about identity, let alone a “covering law”like generalization (in Carl Hempel’s term), is possible, and even that is possible only when an empirical analysis arrives at the third step to find that identity-assemblages have manifested in cross-temporal and spatial investigations as rigid and stable. When viewed from the mainstream (positivist) understanding of science in IR, those limitations might call the scientific rigor of the proposed identity research into question. Nonetheless, I am not sure that we have learned as much about identity and our world by prioritizing generality or generalizability as the mainstream positivist view implies. Every day, we experience improbable, rare, and novel phenomena. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows in his groundbreaking book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, unexpected events can change an entire system (in the case of world politics, recall the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War or the September 11 attacks in 2001 and the subsequent shifts in the international security environment), but they are rarely foreseen or accounted for by general theories because such theories tend to “overestimate the value of rational explanations of past data, and underestimate the prevalence of unexplainable randomness in those data.” Proponents of general theories replace the unstructured randomness found in real life with the structured randomness found in games, which Nassim Taleb (2007, 148– 9) calls the “Ludic Fallacy.” Likewise, in Uncertainty and Its Discontents: Worldviews in World Politics, Peter J. Katzenstein and his collaborators (2022) show that uncertainty is “an indelible part of many spheres of life including public health, the environment, finance, security and politics”

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even though those uncertainties are “concealed by” a conventional, mechanistic Newtonian scientific worldview to which mainstream IR theories continue to adhere.6 I believe that the criteria for judging contributions and progress in IR knowledge and knowledge production should be whether a theory or a research program enables a truer mapping of our open social world, rather than “how much of the world the theory can help us explain” (King et al., 1994, 101, their emphasis). The world is not organized according to linear causality. Our world political reality is, in fact, a jumble. In this jumbled world, I trust that the progress of IR knowledge will be propelled by our willingness to be surprised and attempt to fully understand unexpected, rare instances, so-called “anomalies,” because they produce healthy doubt about the value of stratified, paradigmatic thinking about world politics, where “anomalies keep proliferating, faster than answers” (Keohane, 2008: 3). In this respect, the study of identity also requires doubt and flexibility. As demonstrated, identity exists and works in both substantialist and correlationist ways, although the current identity research scholarship in IR tends to zoom in on only one of them. As a being, an identity-machine can be actualized in various forms, qualities, or properties, undergoing the process of both stasis and change and leading to different kinds of territoriality. To gain a firmer grasp of the complexities that arise from that dynamic, we analysts should be able to not only cross the barriers thrown up by the different theoretical and epistemological orientations of identity studies, but also make connections across those lines and barriers. To do such boundary-crossing and boundarydissolving, we need an ontology that does not resort to one particular way of thinking but swings both outward and inward, giving voices on all sides a stake in co-constituting a broad and coherent field of identity studies. I believe that a deep engagement with the ontology of immanence will offer benefits us in this regard. By constantly reminding us of the virtual agency possessed by identitymachines in their morphogenetic process of unfolding, immanent ontological thinking makes it easier for us to be willing to be surprised and 6 Relatedly, see Katzenstein and Seybert’s (2018) work in which they propose and articulate the idea of “protean power” (as opposed to “control power” that dominates much thinking in IR) as a way to rethink how power operates in international relations and better analyse unanticipated events and changes in world politics.

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learn something rare or new through a boundary-crossing and boundarydissolving mode of inquiry. Viewed in that light, although a field of identity studies committed to the ontology of immanence might not have the generality or predictive capacity demanded by positivist science, it can have what Tomas Kuhn (1977, 321–2) called “fertility” or Ernan McMullin (1976, 404–17) termed, “potential fertility”—a conceptual schema’s ability to respond “creatively” to future or unexpected events— which is a different but equally important criterion of acceptability for scientific enterprise. Although “today’s mainstream standards” for contributions to IR knowledge draw on “the positivist model of science”7 (Parsons, 2007: 164; Kurki & Wight, 2013: 15–16), I believe that a field of identity studies (and the discipline of IR more broadly) need to pay more heed to “nomad science” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 358–367), whose enterprises are largely driven by the problems that we face in our life-worlds and not determined by our disciplinary or structural programs that are already organized and stratified into paradigmatic theories or methodologies. The rules of the nomad science game are to overcome problems with whatever is at hand,8 meaning that such scientific enterprises are expected to freely or “eccentrically” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 362) draw from a variety of theories and fields whose approaches are not necessarily consistent with one another at the level of representation. This is not to say that formalized ways of knowing—or “royal science” in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms (1987: 362)—must be repudiated. Nomad science does not demand that we sacrifice explicit theorizing or rigorous empirical investigation. As the step-by-step methodological guidelines for the empirical analysis of identity shown earlier demonstrate, the ontology of immanence instills its practitioners with a spirit of rigorous and careful argumentation when we make knowledge claims. It helps us to maintain 7 Meanwhile, post-positivism rejects the application of “scientific” methods to social phenomena (i.e., anti-naturalism) or challenges the notion and project of “science” altogether (i.e., anti-scientism) “on the basis of a general acceptance of the positivist model of science,” despite the fact that the philosophy of science embraces a wide variety of legitimate understandings of science (Archer, 1998; Hollis, 2002; Patomäki & Wight, 2000). Viewed in this sense, an important question that needs to be considered is “what exactly this non-positivist social ‘science’ is all about” (Guzzini & Leander, 2006: 80). 8 A case in point provided by A Thousand Plateaus is the work and movement of the journeyman in Gothic architecture. Deleuze and Guattari’s illustration (1987: 368) shows that the journeyman’s mobility is not affected by structural programs.

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a cautious epistemological position in which neither of the two prominent types of identity research is privileged a priori. My point is that IR would be better off if it were in pendulum-like motion, swinging between nomad and royal science, intersecting their different ways of knowing and giving both stakes in co-constituting its research fields or programs. This is especially true in the study of identity: to achieve coherence and broaden today’s divided and narrowed scholarship and debate about identity, we need to build and traverse an ontological bridge between the positivist and reflexivist epistemological and theoretical orientations without causing logical contradictions in that process. A field of identity studies committed to the ontology of immanence deserves serious attention in that regard. Although this suggestion does not fit easily into either of the two types of identity research currently common in IR, its contributions have nothing to do with whether it has a single unified epistemology, theory, or methodology. Its real virtue instead is its capability to help us avoid becoming preoccupied with a single type of identity research and especially from seeing their different ways of knowing and forms of engaging with the world as oppositional or discrete. Instead, it leads us to be on the move, encountering and mapping the “becomings” of identity-machines while making logically sound connections between the insights of both sides of identity research. Tolerance is therefore necessary in evaluating such a complex and unorthodox approach that might appear to be inelegant or incomplete by IR’s mainstream standards for judging theoretical contributions and progress. My discussion and suggestions in this short book are, of course, a conversation starter, not a conclusion. My discussion here is by no means exhaustive, nor do I pretend that it develops a holistic picture of the complex and contentious terrain of identity research in IR. As always, I only claim that my discussion and suggestions are worthy of criticism and further development. To borrow Otto Neurath’s analogy (1983: 92), “we are like sailors who have to rebuild our ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle [and reconstruct] it in drydock.” I will be satisfied if my sailing boat stimulates other researchers in a modest fashion and provides a useful encounter from which to increase the seaworthiness of our ship.

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Zhao, T. (2005). The Tianxia system: An introduction to the philosophy of a world institution. Nanjing: Jiangsu Jiaoyu Chubanshe. Zhao, B. (2014). To build a harmonious world: Ideal of traditional Chinese thinking. Springer. Zhao, T. (2009). A political world philosophy in terms of All-under-Heaven (tian-xia). Diogenes, 56, 5–18.

Index

A assemblage, 39, 42, 43, 45, 46, 56–65, 69–73 autobiographical approach, 64, 65

B becoming-rhizomatic, 72 binary categorization, 70

C Campbell, David, 6, 21–24, 27, 53 Chinese identity, 9, 18, 51, 52, 54–56 Chinese IR, 54, 68 Chinese-ness, 46, 54, 55 closed territoriality, 43, 61 code, 39, 42, 43, 46, 56, 57, 63, 69–72 coherence, 3, 4, 8, 36, 63, 76 conceptual dichotomies, 7 Confucianism, 54, 55 constructivism, 3–6, 8, 14, 17, 19, 21, 22, 26, 27, 38, 58, 65, 67 constructivist turn, 5

contraction, 2 conventional/modern approaches, 4 convergence, 8, 65, 66 correlationism, 3, 9, 22, 27, 36, 52, 58 critical/postmodern approaches, 4

D Deleuze, G., 3, 9, 38–43, 52, 56, 69, 72, 75 differential becoming, 3, 41–43, 45, 46, 56, 60, 62, 64, 66 discursive and linguistic practices, 22

E either/or situation, 56 empirical investigation, 18, 43, 45, 46, 60, 63, 75 “empty” concept, 26 ethnic homogeneity, 61–63 European identity, 9, 14–16, 18, 44, 52–54, 56, 57 European-ness, 15, 46, 52, 53, 57

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 Y.-S. Eun, An Ontological Rethinking of Identity in International Studies, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30883-3

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INDEX

F fertility, 75 fractal distinction, 6

G generalizability, 73 Global IR, 70, 72 greater diversity, 72

I identification, 24–26, 45, 54, 56, 64 identity-action nexus, 16, 27, 53 identity-as-entity, 18, 19, 22, 26, 27, 58 identity-as-flux, 26, 27, 45 identity-as-machine, 45 identity-interests nexus, 16 identity scholarship, 2–4, 6–8, 21, 35, 36, 46, 51, 52, 57, 66 individuation, 41 intra-act, 41

K Korean identity, 9, 20, 52, 59, 61, 62, 64, 65

L Lebow, Richard Ned, 24–26

M machine, 40–42, 44, 45, 51, 56, 57, 59–62, 64, 66, 67, 71, 74, 76 Meillassoux, Quentin, 22 methodological guidelines, 59, 66, 75 methodological shortcuts, 53 methodologies and epistemological middle grounds, 38 methodology, 7, 38, 59, 76

misplaced states, 17 model of multiple identities, 20 morphogenetic effect, 51, 56, 57, 60, 61, 67 morphogenetic thinking, 43

N nomad science, 75 non-Western IR theorization, 68, 69

O ontological both/and position, 46 ontological re-grounding, 45 ontological security, 25, 57 ontology of immanence, 3, 8, 9, 38, 39, 41–47, 52, 56–60, 62, 64–67, 69, 71, 73–76

P pluralist epistemology, 51, 57, 58, 65 pluralist epistemology and methodology, 8, 65 political contestations, 27, 45, 56 politics of representation, 53, 56 positivist epistemology, 17–19, 22, 27, 58, 69 postmodern and poststructuralist thought, 8, 21, 22 practice turn, 37, 38, 46

R radically different ontological meanings, 37 reflexivist epistemology, 27 rigidity, 60 Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, 2, 19

INDEX

S “sameness” and “difference”, 1, 2, 44, 66 singularities, 40 social network analyses, 61 stratification, 40, 42, 43 substantialism, 3, 9, 15, 16, 19, 22, 27, 36, 52, 58 Swiss-ness, 26 T territory, 7, 21, 26, 39, 42, 43, 63, 69, 72 theoretical generality, 61 the politics of theorizing identity, 24 three directions for reconciliation, 37 typological map, 2, 19, 52

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typology of identity research, 2, 7, 8, 27, 52

U unfolding, 41, 44, 45, 56, 74 univocity of being, 41, 45

V virtual agency, 40, 41, 44, 45, 56, 60, 62, 66, 74

W we-ness, 45, 46 West-centrism, 67, 69–73 Western invention, 55