Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

268 • IDENTITY POLITICSfound mainly in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States, althoughsmall groups can also be found in Australia, Canada, Ireland,Great Britain, and South Africa.IDENTITY POLITICS. A form of domestic politics within one nationstatein which individuals relate to each other as members of competinggroups based upon ascriptive characteristics such as nationalorigin, language, race, religion, or sexual orientation. Often the basisof a group claim of entitlement to power, or of disenfranchisement ofthe power of a competing group, is some claim of that group havingsuffered an unredressed historical or current grievance. The natureof the competition is often perceived by members of the competinggroups as zero-sum, that is, a gain of relative power by one groupnecessarily entails a loss of some power by all other groups. The riseof identity politics within the United States in the past four decadesaccounts for recent attempts to define hate crimes through legallyspecified classes of victims and offenders distinguished both by thevictim’s and accused’s relative memberships in legally specifiedgroups and by alleged bias-related motives of the accused.Within the United States, identity politics has been manifest inthe rise of right-wing patriot and militia-type groups as well as therevival of white supremacist groups in the 1980s and 1990s. Identitypolitics has led to similar groups and movements in other liberal democracies,such as anti-Turkish nativism in Germany by skinheadsand neo-Nazis, anti-Arab nativism in France by groups such as theNational Front, and the anti-Muslim actions of the Yugoslaviangovernment under former president Slobodan Milosevic. Taken to itsextreme, identity politics may become ethnonationalist terrorismadvocating separatism, leading a group to claim a territory within anexisting nation-state and to attempt to win either autonomy or completeindependence. Another possible manifestation is irredentism,whereby an existing nation-state lays claim to the territory of anotherneighboring state based on historical claims of former possession bythat nation. A third consequence would be attempts by the majorityethnic group within a given nation to engage in genocide or ethniccleansing against minority groups in their midst.IDEOLOGY. A system of ideas and beliefs about the nature of humanity,the nature of the world, government, and politics that helps toguide the holder of the ideology in making political choices and in the