ABSTRACT
The past decade has seen a proliferation of scholarly work on collective identity, especially among political scientists and historians (as well as psychologists, anthropologists and archaeologists). As one social scientist has observed: ‘Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, conflict was explained and discussed in terms of conflicting ideologies, that terrain of contestation is now more likely to be characterised by competing and conflicting identities’ (Woodward 1997:18-19).
