from the bookshelf - Francis Fukuyama’s “Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment” introduces its reader to a comparative society, a world in which regardless of numerous contemporary opportunities there is a significant gap between inner self, outer reality, and their interpretation. A world in which eagerness for acknowledgement and recognition feed the divisions, distribution, and redistribution. Beyond economic motives and grievances, theorisation and ideology, ideas of morality and honour culture become obvious perplexities of social cooperation and nation building.

Racial and ethnic belonging, gender, orientation, disabilities, and other considerations serve to illustrate indignant identities. Expressive individualism and simultaneous collectivism become the bases of political activism in the struggle for democratisation of dignity in which social media networks became a useful mobilisation instrument. Nonetheless, more extensive integration of identities encounters obstacles of all pervasive politicisation, radicalisation, populism, ethnonationalism, Islamic experience, primitive nationalism, and return to authoritarian tradition. Fukuyama’s “Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment” includes discussion of migrating and immigrating identities, multiculturalism, pluralisation, problems of assimilation, segmented integration and pillarisation, religion and nationalism, Euroscepticism, and debated American identity.

Popular science. 9/10

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