During the centuries after the fall of the Han dynasty, dozens of states rose and fell in geographic China, which was not only politically divided but also home to multiple separately named population groups, some of which were speakers of languages unrelated to Chinese. Yet, a single written language was used throughout the region, broadly common institutions were everywhere in place, and there was a widely shared collective historical memory. This memory included an assumed single line of legitimate sovereigns stretching back to the Sage Kings of legendary antiquity. Differently named population groups could adopt that written language, institutions, and historical memory, and their rulers could potentially even join that line of legitimate sovereigns. It was therefore relatively easy for the Sui and Tang dynasties, having militarily unified the geographic space of the old Han empire, to successfully depict themselves as heirs to a unitary China rooted in ancient memory.

Ethnic groups living in the Mandara Mountains are assumed to be segmentary in structure, which is why scholarly literature portrays them as egalitarian societies. The configuration of the architectural landscape reveals a different reality. This article shows how the architectural landscapes of the Mandara Highlands are ideologically constructed to represent and legitimize hierarchies between clans and individuals. Physical entities appear as particular elements of social space, and as places socially constructed and tinged with ideologies. These fieldwork-based observations provide the foundation for interrogating the meaning of egalitarianism in African society.

This article shows a novel facet in the complex relation between multiculturalism, the state and the market. Contrary to conventional theories in political science, sociology and anthropology, it shows that it is not just the success, but also the failure of the state and the market to commoditise nature and turn it into property that can actually help to foster ethnic identity. While state-driven market incentives to expand the agricultural frontier in Colombia during the 1960s and 1970s failed, they did help to foster differentiated indigenous identities and organisations, which converged around the revival of long-forgotten nineteenth century indigenous laws and other political opportunities to reclaim lands that had been taken away from them. Moreover, this article also shows that during a period of institutional openness in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the political emergence of indigenous identities became an important component of Colombia’s state-building processes by helping this country to maintain its territorial integrity through a model of delegated indigenous governance.

This article discusses eleven Southeast Asian students’ transnational mobility in order to obtain higher education at an Islamic university in Jakarta. A life story approach has been used and semi-structured and interviewee-oriented interviews have been carried out in the field, as well as on the internet. The focus is not only on the students’ individual experiences, such as educational background, strategies in mobility, prevailing life conditions, educational objectives, and future plans, but also on why they chose international Islamic studies in Jakarta and how they evaluate the education offered there. Gender constitutes an overall empirical and analytical aspect of this article, taking into account the prevailing gender order, or norm, in the students’ homelands and families, as well as gender regimes, or relations, in the educational and social environment in Jakarta. These students have mixed backgrounds regarding nationality, class, parents’ education, gendered and religious norms, and previous contacts outside of their homelands. All, however, accumulate social capital in the transnational social fields or networks – physical and digital – that they take part in during their time in Jakarta and after they finalised their studies. All the students plan for further studies or a working career, and a majority of the students intend to return – or have already returned – to their home country, while a few prefer a third country. They can be defined as so-called temporarily uprooted locals, with an even spread on a scale from localism to cosmopolitanism in their individual identity formation.

This study examines the historical development of hostility between the Shona-speaking inhabitants of Buhera district in south-central Zimbabwe and Ndebele speakers who settled in the area after being forcibly removed from various parts of Matabeleland and Midlands provinces between the 1920s and 1950s. It shows how competition for productive farmlands, which became visible beginning in the 1940s, produced and sustained the Ndebele–Shona hostility in Buhera. While other scholars view this hostility primarily from an ethnic perspective, this article argues that ethnicity was just one of many factors that shaped relations between these people.

During the course of pre- and in-service teacher education programmes, reflection can happen in a number of ways, for example: reflective journals, personal stories and pair/group co-operative discussions, professional development portfolios, and blogs and electronic portfolios. The aim of this paper is to examine various technologies such as online chat, discussion forums and blogs, in terms of their suitability and affordances as reflective media. It begins by examining positional survey data gathered from student teachers (STs) who have used these social media over a period of time. Following this it focuses on one of the desired outcomes of Reflective Practice (RP), the construction of teacher identity as part of the process of becoming a professional. The construction of identity through the mediational tool of language used across these modes is examined through a corpus linguistics lens. Collections of language produced around RP activities are analysed as a corpus in quantitative and qualitative ways. These complementary sources of data in a mixed-methods approach provide some insights into the technologies and their potential in a Language Teacher Education (LTE) context. To this end, our findings suggest that blogs, in particular, foster narration, RP and the expression of identities, while chat and forums promote emotional and affective engagement, all of which can be useful to STs at the initial and continuing stages of their career.

This article examines the role of the intergenerational memory of the Second World War (WWII) in identity formation and political mobilization. An existing explanation in the ethnic-conflict literature is that strategic political leaders play a crucial role in constructing and mobilizing ethnic identities. However, based on 114 open-ended interviews with individuals born in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia, conducted in Serbia during 2008–2011, nearly a third of the respondents make spontaneous references to WWII in their statements, usually drawing parallels between the cycle of violence in the 1990s and that in the 1940s. The question this article asks, then, is why some respondents make references to WWII spontaneously while others do not. It is argued that intergenerational narratives of past cycles of violence also constitute a process of identity formation, in addition to, or apart from, other processes of identity formation. The respondents mention WWII violence in the context of the 1990s events because they “recognize” elements, such as symbols, discourse or patterns of violence, similar to those in the intergenerational narratives and interpret them as warning signs. Hence, individuals who had previously been exposed to intergenerational narratives may be subsequently more susceptible to political mobilization efforts.

This paper elucidates a theory of identity formation and applies it to the study of international negotiation. The theory acknowledges that actors/agents can adopt a multiplicity of identities, and it treats changes in the salience of identities as endogenous to the contextually dependent processes of interpersonal and intergroup interactions. Typically, strong identities are viewed as encouraging conflict and exacerbating interstate disputes. Our theory, however, suggests a palliative role for identity: third-party mediation can more effectively resolve conflicts when it enhances shared, if initially less salient, aspects of the disputants’ identities. We discuss several causal pathways through which the process of enhancing identity salience can increase the likelihood of successful conflict resolution, providing a complementary mechanism for the effectiveness of mediation to those extant in the literature. The paper concludes with a practical method for applying the theory's insights to the choice of mediator and the mediator's technique.