ABSTRACT
There are few concepts that have as many historical derivations and contemporary defi nitions as identity. The purpose of this chapter is to familiarize international history and international relations (IHIR) audiences with these defi nitions and their origins. It does so by approaching identity in three ways. First, identity is understood as a concept that signifi es both sameness and difference. Second, identity operates as an organizing category by which difference and similarity (usually in cultural and political terms) group people into social collectives. Third, identity functions as a legitimating principle that both motivates and justifi es individual and group demands for a range of self-determination and recognition: political, economic, class, gender, ethnicity or religious-based, etc. Or, as Rogers Brubaker suggests, identities are ‘at once categories of social and political practice and categories of social and political analysis’ (Brubaker, 2004 : 31).
