ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the intersection between the concepts of identity and war. Linking the literatures on identity and the outbreak of wars, then, must mean reflecting on how war is implicated in establishing friend and enemy relationships. According to Ringmar, explanations which postulate a number of interests and point to a specific outcome — like the initiation of a specific war — are somewhat constrained and even alarming. The Gulf War is interpreted as ‘a means of stimulating a unified body politic’. A crucial role in war involves the action of killing. More generally, the acts of violence literally inscribe the will of one collective onto the body politic of another human collective. Scholarship on identity reveals a number of insights useful for the study of the outbreak of wars. For various reasons, however, most extant scholarship has largely been preoccupied with other forms of social interaction than those which have led to war or have come close to war.
