IDENTITY, EMPATHY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Journal Articles
Overview
Overview
abstract
The insertion of identity politics into international relations undermines the capacity
for cosmopolitan empathy, a capacity that might be useful in ameliorating some of the world’s
social problems. Empathy is the capacity to put oneself into another’s shoes and recognize a
stranger’s humanity. The useful post-modern stress on the mutability of identity has hardened in
identity politics into the creation of exclusive social categories of Oppressed and Oppressor. The
social creation of such categories through such devices as the politics of amnesia paves the way
for isolationist indifference. Yet data drawn both from the sociology of genocide and from the
author’s own research shows that humanitarian empathy across lines of identity is possible.
