to Ian S. Lustick, re:
Agent-based modelling of collective identity: testing constructivist theory.
Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation vol. 3, no. 1,
http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS/3/1/1.html
----
You are familiar enough with the literature to realise that the two approaches
you describe (in the study of identity) are politicised. The constructivist
approach was and is supported by defenders of the liberal-democratic nation
state, who are seeking to dissociate it from race theories. The very people,
who appear to the casual reader to be the anti-nationalist side, questionning
all those nationalist myths, are the most resolute opponents of the break-up
of nation states. They are the ones who are convinced of the value of the
existing liberal-democratic states, which they seek to defend against moral
criticism, and against possible revolutionary changes.
You are misleading the readers of the Journal of Artificial Societies and
Social Simulation - who will not be familiar with this background - by leaving
this out.
You know that there is a question of the global structure of identity, which
most theory of ethnicity or identity ignores. Neither primordialist nor
constructivist theories of identity can explain why almost all IRA
sympathisers also sympathize with the ETA, and vice versa. However that is a
question of global politics. Your decision to ignore it is a political
decision in itself. Your political background is obvious: your work in western
conflict-theory circles links you indirectly to the western defence / security
/foreign policy establishment.
In fact you are a member of the Council for Foreign Relations, for several
generations the leading lobby for an aggressively expansionist US foreign
policy. Your work has been published by that lobby. You published in Foreign
Policy, a leading journal of western 'democratic expansionism'.
Your work has been funded directly by the United States Institute for Peace,
an agency of the United States governmnet. It funds pro-American journalists
and politicians, to produce pro-American propaganda, for instance in the
Balkans. Your work was directed at comparative anti-terrorist strategies in
Northern Ireland, French Algeria, and Palestine.
I know what you believe in: a world of peaceful democratic free-market nation
states, on the American model. I am sure you believe, that would be an
improvement on the butchery in, for instance, Ruanda. You find it acceptable
for the west to kill 'terrorists' and 'dictators', to reach that ideal. You
also think, that you have a sacred duty to manipulate research for political
purposes, or at the very least to mislead people about its political message.
--
Paul Treanor
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/genocide.html
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