Published this week ‘Identity Destabilised’, edited by Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Elisabeth Schober, explores the contradictions, tensions and paradoxes of social identities in a fluctuating neoliberal world. Looking at elitism in Afghanistan, locality, footballs fans and nationalism and nostalgia in an Israeli border towns, this anthropological exercise asks how can an identity be stable if its borders are constantly shifting? This article summarises the aims of the book and emphasises the struggle for an identity in the 21st Century.

Since the fall of 2015, when hundreds of thousands of refugees made their way through what was then becoming known as the “Balkan route”, heading to Germany and beyond, the word “identity” has been used in a nearly inflationary manner by forces of the center- to far-right. Hungarian prime minister Victor Orban saw a threat to Europe’s “Christian identity” in those new arrivals – a sentence that was much hailed by similarly minded actors across the continent, and is just one example that points to something rather important: the return of an extremely virulent form of politics around issues to do with identity. This phenomenon, we believe, ties into a larger process that warrants our attention: the perceived and often real destabilisation of local live-worlds amidst accelerated social change, triggered by an “overheated” form of globalisation.

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For a while in the 1990s, the concept of identity seemed to be everywhere. It has subsequently faded away somewhat as a keyword in the social sciences, which is to be regretted, since we live in a time when good and focused research on social identification is acutely needed. The need for the term identity is possibly even more pressing today than in the last century, if the high-speed transformations we have witnessed in a number of locations across the globe over the last few years are any indication at all. In a fast changing world with rapidly increasing connectivity and mobility, with mounting environmental challenges, rapid economic transformations and the rise of often virulent nationalisms, forms of belonging to places, groups or communities are being challenged in new ways that social scientists arguably still need to have a language for.

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Dario Fo, who died on 13 October 2016, was a major international theatrical figure, and one who also had political commitment. His work was written for and about working-class issues and in 1997 this resulted in his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature because he ‘emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden’. 

As a playwright, Fo’s plays made political points which could not be ignored, and they were translated and performed all over the world. His most frequently performed plays were Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Can’t Pay! Won’t Pay!, both of which were based on real life political events during the 1970s, and are performed regularly today. Fo researched his plays thoroughly, realising that good research is a basic necessity for a political play.  In Can’t Pay! Won’t Pay! (Non si paga, non si paga), prices were spiralling so high that ordinary people could not afford them and decided that they would only pay the original price before the price hikes. Accidental Death of an Anarchist was based on the death in police custody of Giuseppe Pinelli.

Fo was a political activist all his life, following his father who was a committed anti-Fascist.  His politics and commitment to the working class certainly informed his work as a writer, actor and theatre manager. Not originally from an acting family – his father was a carpenter – Fo became an actor as a student and teamed up with Franca Rame, later his wife.  Rame came from a famous theatrical family, and he paid tribute to her talent, knowledge, and the way that she inspired him.

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‘Burning Country’, written by Robin Yassin – Kassab and Leila Al-Shami, explores the horrific and complicated reality of life in present-day Syria with unprecedented detail and sophistication, drawing on new first-hand testimonies from opposition fighters, exiles lost in an archipelago of refugee camps, and courageous human rights activists among many others. These stories are expertly interwoven with a trenchant analysis of the brutalisation of the conflict and the militarisation of the uprising, of the rise of the Islamists and sectarian warfare, and the role of governments in Syria and elsewhere in exacerbating those violent processes.

In this extract taken from the book, Robin Yassin – Kassab and Leila Al-Shami dissect the 2014 seizure of Mosul and impact it had in Iraq and Syria and on international opinion.

In June 2014, ISIS led an offensive which took huge swathes of northern and western Iraq out of government hands. Most significantly, the city of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest, fell to ISIS on 10 June after only four days of battle. General Mahdi al-Gharawi – a proven torturer who had run secret prisons but was nevertheless appointed by Prime Minister Maliki as governor of Nineveh province – fled, and his troops, who greatly outnumbered the ISIS attackers, deserted. This meant that the US-allied Iraqi army, on which the US had spent billions of dollars, was less able to take on ISIS than Syria’s ‘farmers and dentists’. Many Syrians saw a conspiracy in the Iraqi collapse, a play by Malki to win still more weapons from America, and by Iran to increase its regional importance as a counterbalance to Sunni jihadism. It’s more likely that the fall of Mosul was an inevitable result of the Iraqi state’s sectarian dysfunction. Shia soldiers felt themselves to be in foreign territory, and weren’t prepared to die in other people’s disputes. Many Sunni soldiers defected to ISIS.

ISIS’s control of the Iraq–Syria border, and especially of Mosul, was a game changer. The organisation collected the arms left behind by the Iraqi army, much of it high-quality weaponry inherited from the American occupation. Perhaps more importantly, it cleaned out Mosul’s banks. Then it returned to Syria in force, using the new weapons to beat back the starved FSA and the new money to buy loyalties.

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