Richard Ned Lebow is the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and Centennial Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Besides the books featured in his Rorotoko interviews, Forbidden Fruit and Why Nations Fight, he is also the author of A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge, 2008), winner of the Jervis-Schoeder Award for the best book in international relations and history and the Susan Strange Award for the best book of the year, and The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders (Cambridge, 2003), winner of the Alexander L. George Award for the best book in political psychology.
The opening chapter provides an historical, philosophical and psychological overview of the project and its central ideas. The first few pages are especially important in this regard.One of my principal findings is that we do not need images, let alone stereotypes, of “others” to create ourselves.This idea finds initial expression in the epics of Homer and Virgil but is supported by recent research in child rearing and social psychology. Healthy identity construction for children, groups and nations requires us to draw closer to those from whom we are separating.Psychological research indicates that negative images of others are a special case, most likely to arise when groups compete for the same scarce resources. Although it is apparent that politicians can readily propagate such images for reasons of their own.Identity construction is thus a dialectical process and we need to pay as much attention to the drawing closer together side of the equation as we do to the separation side. This insight has important ethical and political implications, which I draw out in the conclusion.
Richard Ned Lebow The Politics and Ethics of Identity: In Search of Ourselves Cambridge University Press439 pages, 6 x 9 inches ISBN 978 1107027657
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