An analytical framework for identity conflict
This study reveals something important about human perception: we are often driven by our identities to interpret the world in a certain way.
Jay van Bavel and Dominic Packer
The limits of my language means the limits of my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
In the series we will be working with identity as one of the main influencing dynamics in modern conflicts. Some of the foundational work in this crucial aspect of modern conflict has already been done, and the last decade or two has seen seminal work that opened the doors of a previously becalmed field of conflict studies and practice. I have, during these last few years, worked extensively with identity conflicts in my consulting work, and the series gives me an opportunity to set some of these operational frameworks out, for the conflict practitioner, politician, city or community leader, or anyone who wishes to improve their understanding and outcomes in this modern minefield.
Jonathan Haidt, Jay van Bavel and Yascha Mounk, to name the main contributors to this work, have given conflict studies and practice the key to a field of conflict so important that I believe we are still to fully understand the extent of what we are working with. With very few exceptions, these pioneers in identity studies are also not conflict scholars or practitioners.
With conflict studies gradually becoming receptive to interdisciplinary collaboration, these psychologists, sociologists and other experts provided us with what I believe to be one of the most important breakthroughs in conflict so far. I cannot imagine my own consulting and field work to exist without it.
My aim with my own research and consulting work in general, and this series in particular, is to be one of the scholar-practitioners who are taking this work further, specifically in conflict studies and practice. The theory and case studies need to be applied, tested, improved, applied. Conflict itself has changed so much (as we will study) that many of our existing conflict tools are simply inadequate, and in some instances harmful, and it is our responsibility to work towards bringing the potential showed in this earlier work to its full potential.
The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, in his beautiful book “The Lies That Bind” sets the task ahead quite clearly, as well as relieving us of the temptation of escaping the influence of identity on our conflicts:
"There’s no dispensing with identities, but we need to understand them better if we can hope to reconfigure them, and free ourselves from mistakes about them that are often a couple of hundred years old. Much of what is dangerous about them has to do with the way identities—religion, nation, race, class, and culture—divide us and set us against one another. They can be the enemies of human solidarity, the sources of war, horsemen of a score of apocalypses from apartheid to genocide. Yet these errors are also central to the way identities unite us today. We need to reform them because, at their best, they make it possible for groups, large and small, to do things together. They are the lies that bind. "
Kwame Anthony Appiah (loc 107)
The origin of one’s identity, in the technical sense that we are using it here, has a relatively recent source. Our identity used to be a rather narrowly understood concept, say for instance Mrs. Joan Abercrombie, of Leeds. Then German-American psychologist Erik Erikson started referring to this separate identity that our race, our gender and so on establishes, in his 1950 book Childhood and Society. American sociologist Alvin W. Gouldner expanded Erikson’s idea of this extended view of our identities:
"Corresponding to different social identities are differing sets of expectations, differing configurations of rights and obligations. In this modern understanding of the concept, our identities are comprised of aspects that we can, and cannot choose, aspects that we hold lightly and aspects that take on the importance of existential truths for us. Some of these identity building blocks change over time, as we mature, become educated, lose faith, get married, have children, and so on. "
“Final grammar” and “operating system”
We will of course analyze the concepts of a “final grammar” and identity as operating system in detail, but as a point of departure, let me get us started with the following.
Grammar” here is used as a tacit rule-system, a conflict reality that decides questions such as who counts as “we”, what may be said in that name, which conflicts register as “real” and so on. It is not emotion, or style, it is the code that creates and sustains a people, a faction, what makes conflict realities make sense to the involved people.
I use “final” in the sense of the observed reality that as ideology thins out, and as people lose trust in institutions, when even the state can no longer tell a single story, identity is what remains, the last shared language in which 21st century conflict is still spoken, classified and fought. As far as the reference to an “operating system” is concerned, an operating system in general terms is the layer that sits beneath every other program, and which gets to decide what gets to run at all. The analogy came to me on one of my long outdoor walks, and while, like all analogies, it is not perfect, it stuck.
Communities, groups, states, unions, churches – all platforms only get to govern conflict if they can run on a shared sense of who “we” are. In this conflict study, identity is the operating system, it is that underlying layer. It allocates belonging, recognizes offense and hurt, it authorizes a speaker, and tells people which fights are theirs, and then how to conduct themselves in that conflict. This, as we shall see, often happens before considerations such as policy, law or ideology even get a hearing.
Inspirations and distinctions
In dealing with the manifestations of conflict in my legal practice for more than twenty years, and only then specializing in the study of conflict, I inadvertently saved the best for last. In pursuing the various streams and rivers of multidisciplinary sciences, disciplines and contributions that all flowed into the greater ocean of conflict itself, I had the pleasure and privilege of learning from the best in their fields. There are a few specific fields of study where I have been unusually inspired by original work in a few of these areas, and I would like to briefly pause here to both acknowledge such inspirations in my own work, and to distinguish that work and the work that we will be pursuing in this series.
My interest and growing fascination with the importance of identity in conflict started at the most unlikely sources. The work around identity of Jonathan Haidt, Jay van Bavel and Dominic Packer, and Yascha Mounk left me walking around in an intellectual haze for days. The possibilities these crucial building blocks opened for my own work, the sheer sense that it made of what I started to see as intractable mysteries of human conflict, and the potential to really be effective in addressing the changes in modern conflict all count as life-changing moments. I am so grateful to these pioneers.
I also had the privilege of studying and working with the conflict tools created by Professor Peter T. Coleman, a researcher and social psychologist at Columbia University (among several other distinguished organizations). In the series we will occasionally refer to or work with his important work with, as he has called it, Conflict Intelligence (CIQ) and Systemic Wisdom (SW). Coleman has done important work with identity conflict as part of these conflict frameworks, but the following should be understood as meaningful differences between that work and my work in this series:
(a) Coleman’s work does not specify what the operating system of conflict is, or how to apply that in coalitions and cognitive attack, for example, as we will analyze in this series;
(b) His CIQ is an adaptive skill, it tells us how to do the right thing in the right kind of situation. His systemic wisdom is a capacity to read a complex, enduring conflict as a pattern, and to then work with the system rather than against a single cause. In his systems, identity, moral conflict and us-versus-them attractors sit inside that map, they are not the map itself;
(c) Our two projects have several other distinctive differences, one being that Coleman answers “How should a conflict-intelligent person choose a stance when the conflict is simple, intense, or stuck?”. In this series, I answer “Why do so many contemporary conflicts refuse ordinary persuasion, coalition and evidence, and what follows for practice when identity is the grammar they run on?”
Understandably, there is overlap between our respective bodies of work:
(a) I work with the concept of hardening, which is a part of his work on polarization as an attractor;
(b) We both work with adaptive mediation, in this series you will see that in action with diagnosis before intervention, and when not to rewrite the rules;
(c) Neither of us view identity as the only conflict driver. His work on systemic wisdom makes this clear.
Aspects of conflict that we will study here, that Coleman’s work does not deal with, would include:
(a) a political theory of coalitions as permission structures;
(b) cognitive warfare as an attack on syntax, not merely as polarization media;
(c) South Africa as a conflict laboratory of split in-groups and external arenas;
(d) a working distinction between changing policy and changing conflict grammar;
(e) a practitioner sequence for facts: when are they usable, when do they insult a sacred claim, when do they return because reality demands it.
I will argue that some conflict grammars only yield policy change, not conversion. Coleman tells us how to be intelligent across conflict types. This series argues that a large, and growing, class of those conflicts are running on identity as their last grammar, and that practice fails when we treat that class as if it were still an interest problem with bad manners.
My work is built on the foundations that they have established, and I am very grateful to them.
The mechanism explained
We can start with Jeremy Pollack's explanation:
"When someone challenges our viewpoint in conflict, it creates prediction error - a mismatch between our mental model (“I'm right”) and our perception of the outside world (“They're saying I'm wrong”).
The brain's predictive coding system is built to minimize these errors. A large error resulting from a disagreement over a topic could introduce uncertainty about our memories, our beliefs, our social standing, and/or the world in general. This uncertainty threatens our four conflict needs, triggering the amygdala and insula, which signal potential danger. As a result, our brains will desperately seek certainty and predictability-something safe to hold onto-in order to meet these needs. This seeking leads to entrenched positioning and an insistence on being right.
Ultimately, our brains are trying to reduce ambiguity, restore a sense of predictability, and downregulate the body's threat response. Uncertainty is experienced as dangerous. Being certain, having predictability, and feeling right is experienced as safe. Our psychological need for safety is perhaps our most fundamental and irreducible of our basic needs. It's a need we share with virtually every other animal with survival instincts and stems directly from the predictive coding nature of our brains. To feel safe, and for our bodies to remain in an appropriately regulated state for the environment, we need to have some level of certainty or predictability about how events will unfold and how we should respond.
So, this need is an obvious target for uncertainty's threat. Disagreement, especially over values or worldviews, can also be experienced as exclusion or rejection, threatening our affiliation need. In conflict, defending our correctness may help us avoid social rejection, which historically carried survival costs, and reaffirm our membership in a moral or social order. Conflict can also challenge our sense of agency, control, or independence. When we perceive a contradiction, which generates uncertainty, it may feel like we are losing control of the situation.
On the contrary, being right helps us feel that we have regained control or influence, rather than being at the mercy of someone else's perspective. Stating, defending, or proving our position restores a feeling of agency: “I can influence this outcome.” The need for control is also linked to the drive for what psychologists call cognitive closure: a motivational initiative to arrive at a firm answer and avoid ambiguity. The need for control becomes stronger under stress, time pressure, or perceived threat, as it reduces mental load and helps us conserve cognitive resources.
(Pollack 92)
Hold these ideas lightly, they will increasingly make sense, and become of practical use, as we wend our way through the series. We will work with these definitions and ideas, and construct a few that you can work with.
We can end of the first installment with the important distinction between identity conflict and identity politics.
Not identity politics
It is an important difference, with a small section of overlap between the two ideas. Identity, as we will be working with in the series, is the grammar through which people decide who we are, who they are, what may be conceded, what would count as loyalty or betrayal. It is a coordination language. It is much older than social media arguments on X, than US campus politics, and much older than the phrase “identity politics”.
Parties, churches, unions, clans, communities, professions, street committees and nations run on it. It can be ethnic, racial, religious, partisan, linguistic, regional, organizational or professional, to name a few categories. It hardens under threat. It decides whether a fact is usable. It decides whether a coalition deal can survive or not. Identity politics, on the other hand, is a social media style of claim-making in public argument.
It treats a selected social category as a primary moral unit, ranks speech by speaker position, and treats disagreement as harm or domination. It is loud, contemporary, and platform-shaped. It is but one way that identity becomes political, and it is not the operating system itself.
We can also look at the limited sense in which the two terms overlap in practice:
(a) both use belonging as a shortcut for truth;
(b) both punish exit and reward loyalty;
(c) both can turn a policy dispute into a purity test;
(d) both can make “who is speaking” more important than “who is telling the truth”.
A racial mobilization, a nationalist gathering, a party faction, or a hashtag campaign can all run the same grammar: if you accept that you are no longer one of us.
The overlap is the some parts of the mechanism, not the ideology. Applied to everyday, real conflicts, we can see the reality that identity-as-grammar is a general conflict fact. Afrikaner and Zulu politics, ANC succession battles, union disputes, Israeli-Palestinian sacred values, Chinese face-saving mechanisms, or a captured board all use it.
On the other hand, identity politics, on the other hand, is a particularly Western-derived repertoire of claims about recognition, historical injury, representational justice and so on, now globalised online. Identity politics usually starts from a category, and demands that the system rearrange around it.
Conflict identity, on the other hand, often arrives at the residue of threat, humiliation, patronage or defeat. People did not need a theory of recognition to refuse a government of national unity deal that their base would have read as surrender. They needed a story of who “we” would be if they signed. Identity politics is a programme: which identities deserve priority, which speech is illegitimate, who must yield.
Our use of identity in the series is a diagnosis: what language is this fight actually in, and what can still be moved without conversion. If we confuse the two we will start officiating the morality play, instead of reading the permission structure. Maybe the easiest difference between identity conflict and identity politics is its visibility. Identity politics is loud, theatrical.
Much of identity conflict is quiet – the union official that cannot agree to the good offer, the city official who cannot be seen to negotiate with “that” person, the community that will not accept an objective statistic from a particular think tank. The last important distinction relates to the use of facts. Identity politics often treats facts as owned by specific camps. Identity as grammar explains why that happens, and explains why some facts still remain as constraints in the conflict process.
One of the important aspects of my work here is to show, through our study of identity politics, that the increasingly popular view that identity politics have abolished the truth is an unnecessarily cynical one. I am also not saying that identity is merely an academic fashion. The series walks between those two extremes.
A helpful set of definitions to distinguish between the two concepts, over and above this discussion, could pin the following two paragraphs here at the start of our work:
Identity is the last grammar of contemporary conflict: the set of rules that tells a group what may be believed, allowed, traded and still leaves them as themselves.
Identity politics is one current public strategy that weaponises that grammar by making a social category the main currency of legitimacy.
I find that, in practice and consulting work, the distinction is often an important one. One effective way of testing a distinction between the two categories is to remove the slogans of the current culture war, and to then notice if the conflict is still standing. If the coalition is still in trouble, the persuasion still not working, the in-group still split, we are looking at identity as OS.
Conversely, if the fight evaporates once the platform script changes, we were dealing with identity politics. The overlap and distinction is important. The popular discourse stole the word, the idea of identity as political weapon. With this series I aim to restore the difference more clearly than what it has become, even in a few technical discussions. It is an important practical and strategical consideration, not simply as the denunciation of a pathology, but to restore the language that so many of our conflicts are already speaking.
Next installment we will, amongst other ideas, start examining how identity works, how it steers conflicts, and the practical implications of this for working with identity conflicts.