Citizenship, violence and identity politics

This paper is aimed at depicting the interface between citizenship, violence and identity politics.Further, it also inquires conceiving collective violence as a social fact which means that it has to be analysed within the context of a specific action environment, i.e. a social milieu that consists of a series of possible actions emerging from a particular group way of life as well as the relational dynamics of these group-making social processes.In the light of this social resistance has often been analysed for its ability to mobilise collective action and to bring about structural changes to social order.1However, the sociological significance of resistance should not be restricted to forms of resistance that are successful in terms of collective mobilisation and social change, because this approach tends to separate social order and power relations from the resistant practices that oppose them, obscuring the close con¬nection between the persistence of power relations and the openings for everyday resistant practices emerging directly from these relationships: 'The openings for resistance derive from the regular exercise of power',2 or, as Foucault notes, 'Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power'.3In a similar vein, Goffman stresses the connection between power relations, its social organisation, and resistant practices he charac¬terises as secondary adjustments: From a sociological point of view, the initial question to be asked of a second¬ary adjustment is not what this practice brings to the practitioner but rather the character of the social relationship that its acquisition and maintenance require.That constitutes a structural as opposed to a consummatory or social psychological point of view.4From this perspective, resistant practices are neither random nor idiosyncratic but an integral part of power relations.Hence, if we are to understand what motivates people to act violently on behalf of groups and how they come to identify with these groups to begin with, if we are to comprehend whether and how the violent acts of a given group of actors might emerge from the regular exercise of social power, we should pay particular attention to the sociocultural resources which generally mobilise actors to exercise physical violence.We should focus on the relational dimension or character of the cultural, cognitive and affective resources actors mobilise in order to sustain violent interaction and on the character of the social relationships that the acquisition, diffusion and practical use of these resources require.Furthermore, if we are to understand the relational character of these resources, we have to concede that as social subjects these actors are able to grasp the nature of their position in society, albeit in a partial and somewhat blurred way.Social facts do exist as a result of social relations; they emerge as an ensemble of possible actions within the context of social group life and not as products of individual minds or macro-cultural systems.However, they are char¬acterised by two modes of empirical existence that are mutually related:5 one has to be located in the mind-body complex of individuals (affects, emotions, or cognitions such as motifs) while the other has to be situated on a collective level (shared representations, social practices, forms of social control, etc.).