Scratch a constructivist scholar and he or she will likely claim that “identity is important.” Scratch a quantitative international relations researcher and he or she will often grumble “well yes, but identity is difficult to measure.” Making Identity Count—the bold volume coedited by Ted Hopf and Bentley B. Allan—aims to start a conversation between these two communities, as its very title suggests: Counting (quantifying) a central constructivist variable (identity). It does this by presenting carefully crafted reports on national identity in eight great powers, which use “a new method that balances the demands of inductive, interpretivist discourse analysis with the desire to produce reliable and replicable results that can form the basis of a quantitative database” (p. 234).
As the quote suggests, the volume’s central claim is that scholars will gain new and important insight on identity—and how to measure it—by crossing epistemological boundaries. While Hopf has been making this argument in a conceptual way for over a decade (“The Limits of Interpreting Evidence,” in Richard Ned Lebow and Mark Irving Lichbach, eds., Theory and Evidence in Comparative Politics and International Relations, 2007), Making Identity Count shows empirical social scientists how to do it, both theoretically and methodologically.
The structure of the volume reflects this hands-on, let’s-do-it approach. Chapter 1, by Hopf, sets the stage, reviewing the qualitative constructivist research on identity and the quantitative IR scholarship that invokes it. Hopf convincingly demonstrates the persistence of academic “silo thinking,” whereby the two sets of scholars, fearful of venturing beyond their respective epistemological comfort zones, rarely acknowledge or make use of each other’s work.
In Chapter 2, coeditor Allan—in the volume’s most important pages—gets down to the nitty-gritty, arguing that discourse analysis is the best way to measure identity. After critiquing other methods (content analysis, surveys) for their inability to capture identity, Allan lays out and operationalizes the discourse technique at the heart of the volume. His discussion of text selection and coding rules is exemplary—and commendably transparent. The latter is an important contribution by interpretivists to current debates over research transparency, or DA-RT (data access and research transparency) as it has come to be known.
The core of the work is eight rigorously executed country studies of national identity, covering nine chapters. (India gets two chapters, one utilizing English sources and the other Hindi texts.) These all adhere to a common template, beginning with a justification of the texts chosen for discourse analysis, at both elite and mass levels. This is followed by a discussion of the various identity categories inductively recovered from the texts. In a third section, the analyst aggregates, creating “topographies of national identity discourse” (p. 38), where he or she presents the dominant discourses of identity and their challengers in a country.
The volume concludes with two synthetic, forward-looking chapters. A first, by Srdjan Vucetic, considers the implications of the findings for how identity is theorized and measured in other disciplines, including anthropology, history, social psychology, and sociology. A final chapter, by the coeditors, takes stock and critically assesses the volume’s methodological bets. More ambitiously, it suggests how a large-n intersubjective national identity database—built on the approach and method developed in the volume— will help address key puzzles in contemporary IR theory.
This is an excellent volume, delivering coherence and value added that are so often missing in edited collections. However, in setting the analytic-methodological bar so high and being so admirably clear in how they go about recovering identity, Hopf and Allan make it easier for a sympathetic but critical reader to uncover and question some of the core principles at play here in terms of both theory and method.
Theoretically, there are two issues. For one, despite claims that the volume conceives national identities “relationally and processually” (p. 209), they are in fact quite structural, static, and fixed. The country studies all conclude by mapping the dominant and challenger discourses of national identity. However, battling discourses—which are themselves structures of meaning—do not provide any mechanism of change or sense of process. At different points, the coeditors invoke empowerment, socialization, and large cataclysmic events as ways in which national identities change (pp. 11, 15, 22–23, 24, 219), and the discussion hints at a role for agents and institutions. If so, this should be made explicit and theorized.
A second theoretical concern is conceptual—the very definition of identity. Coeditor Allan is admirably clear on this point: National identities are “a constellation of categories that define the nation,” and are “constituted by societal discourses” (p. 21). Some sociologists and certainly all interpretivists and anthropologists (Douglas Holmes, “Experimental Identities (after Maastricht),” in Jeffrey T. Checkel and Peter Katzenstein, eds., European Identity, 2009) would object to such a definition as it is grounded solely in language and text, thus excluding any role for social practice. While this might seem a conceptual nit-pick, it matters. The “ethnographic sensibility” heralded on the volume’s opening page (p. 3) as constructivism’s trump card in recovering identity is hard, if not impossible, to capture with a conception of identity that excludes practice.
This theoretical/conceptual exclusion leads to a methodological concern: the absence of ethnography in the volume’s otherwise carefully justified and operationalized methodological tool kit. The coeditors seem genuinely conflicted on this point. In Allan’s theoretical-methodological chapter, he describes the volume’s goal as approximating the “ethnographic ideal” of recovering identity through “overheard conversations,” with discourse analysis coming closest to this ideal (p. 30). However, this conclusion is based less on a principled discussion of how discourse captures conversations and practice—I would argue that it does not—and more by comparing discourse to surveys, where both Hopf and Allan persuasively argue that pretheorization and interaction with the researcher corrupt the recovery of identity (pp. 12, 15, 28–30).
At an earlier point, though, Allan recognizes the key importance of ethnography, serving both as a foundational method for recovering identity and as a validity check on discourse analysis. Yet, the volume fails to employ it—apparently for practical reasons (p. 29). Likewise, in their concluding chapter, Hopf and Allan—when critically reflecting on the work’s methodological limitations—ignore any role for ethnography and basically argue that the solution is a better discourse analysis grounded in more texts (pp. 225–26).
Let me be clear. The coeditors carefully justify their reliance on discourse, and their contributors then operationalize it in a transparent and replicable way. In the end, though, the volume falls short of the ethnographic ideal that is one of its “main intellectual drivers” (p. 202) and to which most interpretive constructivists aspire when thinking about identity.
This said, my criticisms need to be kept in context. Making Identity Count has high ambitions—to theorize and measure identity in a way that will appeal and speak to both interpretivist-qualitative constructivists and positivist-quantitative IR scholars. This requires some serious epistemological boundary crossing, a rare feat that the volume accomplishes superbly. Building upon this work, however, others may wish to push those boundaries further, “recovering” a role for practice and ethnography as well in the inductive recovery of identity in international relations scholarship.
