Power inheres in the markets for hydrocarbons: natural gas and oil. The extraction, transit, sale, and price of hydrocarbons all create geopolitical moments in which agents may exercise control over one another or create new modes of interaction.

Firms extract hydrocarbons from beneath us. Some of these firms are minuscule beasts, privately owned with a handful of technicians and a drilling rig or two. Others are leviathans that employ hundreds of thousands and have varied owners that often include states. The vast majority of these large firms do business across national borders. When they produce outside their home nations, firms rely on institutional environments and often complex contractual arrangements designed to manage their calculable risks of cost and price.

For the past two decades, the attention given to the concept of “identity” – both in the social sciences and in the world at large – has continued to rise. Multiple disciplines and subfields are producing an expanding literature on the definition, meaning, and development of ethnic, national, linguistic, religious, gender, class, and other identities and their roles in political, social, and economic outcomes. The ubiquity of identity-based scholarship suggests an emerging realization that identities, as Rogers Smith (2002: 302) has observed, are “among the most normatively significant and behaviorally consequential aspects of politics,” yet the literature has remained diffuse. That is, despite this flurry of activity, the social sciences have not yet witnessed a commensurate rise in definitional consensus on the concept of identity.

The intense interest in scholarship on identity, as well as the many kinds of studies this fascination has spawned, has unfortunately helped undermine the conceptual clarity of identity as a variable. The wide variety of conceptualizations and definitions of identity has led some to conclude that identity is so elusive, slippery, and amorphous that it will never prove to be a useful variable for the social sciences. Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper (2000) have even argued, in the most important critique of identity scholarship to date, that it is time to let go of the concept of identity altogether and to move beyond a scholarly language that they suggest is hopelessly vague and has obscured more than it has revealed.

This volume outlines a variety of definitions and methodologies for studying social identities in a diverse set of contexts within American politics, comparative politics, and international relations. As such, we hope it will serve as a primer on the analysis and methodology of identity scholarship for a wide range of interested researchers. Political scientists have long enjoyed access to many excellent guides to mainstream theories and methods, yet those wanting to do research on social identities have had to synthesize enormous literatures on their own, with no practical guide to the alternatives they might employ in their scholarship. This volume aims to be such a road map, both analytically and methodologically. The chapters include a broad array of definitions as well as methodological options available for scholarly research on identity, including methods currently in use and some promising newer ones.

The chapters of this volume demonstrate concretely how to conduct identity research using several different methodological options. Each chapter shows how the ideas that underlie identity are applied in the context of individual research and what sorts of insights such projects can yield. In this way, the combined chapters create a whole greater than the sum of its parts; by aggregating the various specific methodological approaches, the text provides a coherent basis for the general examination of identity in the study of political science.