In 1998, I discovered foreign policy could be advertised like cars or toothpaste. I wasn’t expecting this and it struck me hard intellectually in part because it seemed both wrong and yet effective. In researching a paper on NAFTA in a US Foreign Policy class, I came across a full-page advertisement for the trade agreement in the New York Times. The ad ‘sold’ the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) complete with buzz words and images in a way that made something abstract like free trade tangible to the public but also simplistically black and white. I only happened upon it because in those days if you wanted to research primary source data, you actually read the full paper either in hard copy or on microfiche and this included the print advertisements – a stumbling that is much more unlikely now in the age of online research. I wanted to know more and from there launched a rather unlikely success story that culminated in my now most-cited article, “Constructing NAFTA” published in International Studies Quarterly in 2001.
This intellectual moment awakened a curiosity about state identities and how they appear to be central to how foreign policy is presented to the public. I have since spent my career attempting to understand how identities make economic policies possible (or not), and increasingly, how they are tactically and strategically deployed by policymakers to construct compelling public campaigns for trade and economic policies. In this chapter, I venture into what came from that intellectual moment encountered rather randomly that day in front of a microfiche machine, and how I, and others, think about state identities then and now.
The article “Constructing NAFTA” (Skonieczny 2001) came from a ‘ground up’ research process that began with a curiosity – how and why could a trade policy be advertised? What would it mean to advertise a three-state trade agreement and how could this complicated economic arrangement be turned into sound bites and images that would appeal to an uninformed US public? Since the public knew little about NAFTA, it seemed strange to me that it could be sold as something familiar. But this was because I was relatively new to the world of Constructivism and knew little about how language and identities work together to make something unknown commonplace.
My research into questions about advertising NAFTA during that summer long ago began empirically but ended theoretically. As I tried to understand how the media represented NAFTA, I found a context in the literature on national interest and state identity. At the time, this was a relevantly new and emerging literature primarily coming out of the ‘Minnesota School’ that included Alexander Wendt, Roxanne Doty, Jutta Weldes, Michael Barnett as well as others such as Martha Finnemore, Thomas Risse and, of course, Nicholas Onuf.
Reading these scholars provided me with sets of questions that deepened my theoretical engagement with the project, beginning with “how do states know what they want” (Finnemore 1996)? Finnemore argued that state interests come from socialization in an international society and are not given or innate. This pushed my thinking on where interests do come from – why does a country like the United States believe in and want free trade? While I agreed with Finnemore that this interest in free trade came from socialization in a global environment where free trade is desired among democratic states, I also took it as coming from and contributing to a state’s national identity. Not that this can be removed from the international society but I was interested in the idea that the constructed interests needed to fit with a national story of self. In other words, in defining what a state wants, it must be in line with the story of who a state is.
This changed my thinking on NAFTA from somehow representing an intrinsic interest in free trade to a social construction that represented a fundamental affirmation of American values. This shift lined up with what I was seeing in the advertisements for NAFTA – it would be difficult to represent the trade agreement rules, benefits, costs or worth without a connection to identity because free trade as such has little meaning to the public without an association with relatable values such as opportunity, upward mobility, brighter futures, better jobs and wages – all values associated with the American Dream – that all Americans should have the opportunity to be better off than their parents. The idea of an American Dream is a fundamental value of American identity. Seeing NAFTA as fundamental to a story of American identity provided the context for how NAFTA was visually and textual represented in advertisements. I was now able to see the themes in both an empirical and theoretical context.
In order to examine the advertisements I found during that summer of scanning through microfiche, I drew on Hellmut Lotz’s chapter in Valerie Hudson’s book Culture and Foreign Policy. He had coded the Gore – Perot debate transcripts on NAFTA, and I used his typology to examine the 41 advertisements I had found during the three-month period before NAFTA passed through the Congress. He had broken down aspects of American identity into three fundamental and, at times contrasting, ‘myths’: American Dream, American Exceptionalism and American Populism. I found that this fit with my data and effectively demonstrated how the advertisements constructed NAFTA in line with American identity. Two of the myths, American Dream and American Populism stood at odds – the American Dream represented the belief that opportunities should be expanded for workers, that opportunities through free trade should make people better off than past generations, and that the American economy should be expanding, growing and providing a better lifestyle for the working class. The populism myth represented an anti-trade belief that free trade mostly benefits corporations, the wealthy and re-writes the rules in a way that is unfair for workers and ‘the people’. This theme was found in those who opposed NAFTA and I found it as well in the advertisements against NAFTA.
Applying Lotz’s typology to my data reflects a common practice in constructivist research. We rely on the methods of others and then need to adapt them, expand them, adjust them in-use and in new contexts. Having a framework to start from made my research possible but because there were edges that did not fit, the imperfect methodology pushed the theoretical work forward. The method helped me ‘see’ things in the data that I would otherwise not have seen and to connect my research to a broader perspective on NAFTA that drew on different data. For me, the American Dream and American Populism themes demonstrated that there were competing storylines of what trade represented for American identity – that free trade provided opportunity but also benefited the corporate elite at the expense of the ‘little guy’. The complexity of identity started to come to the fore in ways that I realize more today than I did in that first piece. I see it more in narrative terms now than I did in the 2000s when I focused on discourse.
Perhaps the most interesting finding from my application of Lotz’s method to the advertisements came from applying the American Exceptionalism catagory. By including American Exceptionalism as an integral part of American identity, I was able to identify how the idea of America as an ‘exceptional’ country, a special democracy, a city on the hill, reverberate its own identity often at the expense of others. This pushed my thinking about state identity as relational rather than ontological – in order to understand the self, we need an other. This became the most important finding of ‘Constructing NAFTA’ that even those promoting equal economic ties with Mexico drew on negative stereotypes of Mexican identity in order to gain support. The idea of a weaker partner actually helped sell NAFTA to the public – many of the advertisements both for and against NAFTA relied on this stereotype to reassure Americans that they had nothing to fear from interdependence with Mexico as Mexican workers simply could not compete with American ones.
Roxanne Doty’s (1993) seminal piece in International Studies Quarterly profoundly impacted me as I moved forward on my NAFTA project. In it, she asked how was it possible that the US and the Philippines were positioned hierarchically as subjects such that a colonial intervention into a sovereign country made sense as a US foreign policy? She applied a discursive approach to identity construction and demonstrated how language is productive of foreign policy possibilities and how power is imbued in the way subjects are positioned in a discourse. In her article, she develops and applies a discursive practices approach that brilliantly showcases how methodology and theory are interconnected. She shows how language constructs and positions identities in a hierarchical relationship to one another. She rightly argues that the way subjects or identities are positioned makes certain actions plausible and that how we ‘know’ subjects is from both the past discourses that inform us and in how the subjects are currently positioned vis-à-vis one another. She uses the example of the European and the native – the native is already ‘known’ from past colonial discourses and this ‘knowledge’ is then implicated in a web of possible actions a European subject could take. As she states, “The ‘native’ is positioned in a relation of similarity with a dog. Like a dog, the ‘native’ requires food and fair treatment. If treated properly, he will be faithful to his master … The ‘fair’ treatment to be accorded to ‘natives’ is more akin to the treatment a European would give to a dog than to another European” (Doty 1993, 308).
This resonated with what I was seeing in the case of NAFTA as both proponents and opponents of the trade agreement positioned the US as hierarchically superior to Mexico. Especially surprising for me was that even those who advocated for an equal economic partnership consistently represented Mexico and Mexican workers as less-than, as inferior. For example, one advertisement’s text read:
The representation of Mexico was as inferior, not equal, and not on par with the US or other European and Asian countries. Repeatedly in both the pro- and anti-NAFTA ads, Mexico was represented as an inferior counterpart to the US and therefore, it was argued, a strong and competent American workforce would have no trouble succeeding under NAFTA. In fact, President Clinton echoed the same sentiments at the time in a public statement when he declared that “only someone who was ‘nuts’ would say that America could not win in a head to head competition with Mexico” (Skonieczny 2001, 450). Following Doty’s findings, I argued in the article that identity and in particular, the identity of the other made NAFTA as a US policy choice possible.
When I wrote the Constructing NAFTA article, I suggested that identities and particularly the negative identities of others were necessary to push Congress-resistant foreign policy choices through to the public but I came later to realize how much of a tactic state identity is for policymakers in representing foreign policy as an understandable public story.
Pro-trade elites start with an overall strategy for promoting a particular trade agreement to the American public and thus Congress. The strategy involves a public campaign about the benefits of free trade and the economic prosperity it is likely to bring to the American public. However, in all of the trade issues I have examined, both the pro and anti-trade campaigns end up relying on the tactic of stereotypical identities – this is not always the plan and it doesn’t always have the intended effect but identities as tactics appear to be the default mode for saving struggling campaigns or for waging uphill policy battles. As Steele discusses in this volume, tactics appear minimal and in the moment as opposed to more certain and planned out strategies. But, as Steele says,
Deploying stereotypes of national identities is a tactic for making complicated policies simpler. It is a tactic that adds emotion and urgency to policy speeches about trade and I began to see patterns in how US policymakers would deploy negative identity stories about potential trade partners even while promoting partnership deals with them. It is also a methodological tactic – identifying how country stereotypes are used in policymaker campaigns and stories and what impact they have on outcomes is a methodological approach to understanding and analyzing narrative success and failure.
Of course, identifying country stereotypes in texts raises the question of reification – by replicating stereotypes, even if found in empirical data, aren’t we as scholars contributing to reification of identities? By making ‘stereotypes’ objects to examine – narrative objects that when deployed invoke reactions and affect in a public – my work could be critiqued as positivist (gasp!) or as subjective instead of intersubjective. Constructivists have grappled with the reflexivity dilemma with varying degrees of success (see Hamati-Ataya 2013), and my work certainly is not in the self-reflexive camp although perhaps this is worth thinking more about. Instead, I see my own work as attempting to expose and juxtapose how reified stereotypes work in language in a perhaps veiled attempt at politicizing the destructiveness of simplified binaries and the narrative base that policymakers often default to in order to attempt to save their own necks when policy campaigns go awry. Identities are always intersubjective and indeed, while there is often a hard core within any country image that most of the public ‘gets’, any ‘identity tactic’ is open to the possibility of interpretation by the audience and thus the deployment of stereotypes does not always go as the speaker or author intended. If narrative strategies are unidirectional – elites to audiences – tactics can talk back; they miss, they rebound, they ricochet, they strike. In a narrative world, how the story is received is much more important than how it is told.
In this research, I have benefited from the narrative turn in Constructivism (Krebs 2015; Steele 2008; Subotic 2016; Tsygankov 2016; Rumelili 2015; Ringmar 1996; Banerjee 2015). I have shifted to thinking about identities as tactical components of narratives over seeing them as part of a broader discourse. Like Subotic (in this volume), I have increasingly turned toward narrative analysis. Narratives imply a structure – a plot or logical storyline that is constructed by actors during particular moments in time. And, like Subotic discusses, state action is a story – one that is logically coherent in causal, thematic and emotional ways. In this relatively new wave of research in IR theory, scholars have found that states utilize narratives to communicate (Miskimmon, O’Loughlin and Roselle 2013), comprehend (Somers 1994) and constitute state identities and state interests (Banerjee 2015; Ringmar 1996). Some scholars emphasize that narratives require actor agency in crafting them to amplify aspects of a state identity for the purpose of passing policy through public arenas (Krebs 2015; Miskimmon, O’Loughlin and Roselle 2013). A growing literature also addresses the impact of strategic narratives during wartime (Dimitriu and de Graaf 2016; Coticchia and De Simone 2016; Miskimmon, O’Loughlin and Roselle 2014). This line of research emphasizes how narratives are deployed strategically to attempt to achieve a particular policy outcome but I believe more attention could be paid to the tactics the push narrative forward particularly as a ‘strategic narrative’ encounters resistance. Policy narratives are crafted much like the advertisements for NAFTA but in any on-going campaign must be more dynamic and responsive to public reactions, criticisms and counter-narratives. I saw this as an opportunity to think through how identities and, in particular, other-identities function as tactical emotion-drivers in crafted policy narratives.
I am not alone as many other scholars are examining how narratives constitute and are constituted by state identities. In order to make a policy proposal relevant to the public, policymakers often provide stories about national identity – particularly regarding who the state is (self) and why the proposed policy action fits within a certain conception of how the state should act (expected behavior). As Ronald Krebs states, “stories are the vehicle through which human beings define their reality and link thought to action – through which they formulate and articulate identity (who self and other are) and interest (what self and other want)” (Krebs 2015, 5). Subotic (2016) argues that states need an “autobiography”, or as Patterson and Monroe call it, an “ontological narrative” (Patterson and Monroe 1998, 325) that provides stability, particularly in times of crisis. Steele also argues for an autobiographical state identity by claiming that state identity arises “not in the dialectic between self and other but within the internal dialectic that arises from the ontological security-seeking process” (Steele 2008, 32). Banerjee (2015) argues that in the promotion of new policies, actors link or network narratives (or storylines) together to layer meaning onto new policies for public coherence and acceptance.
However, in my work as well as that of other scholars, I emphasize how states also need to construct biographies of others to secure their own autobiographies and place them into context (Skonieczny 2001; Tsygankov 2016). Andrei Tsygankov (2016) found something similar in his research on US narratives of Russia. He analyzed American media and found a distinct ‘Autocratic Russia’ narrative dominating newspaper stories on US – Russian relations even during President Obama’s attempt to ‘reset’ Russian relations. He found that the ‘Autocratic Russia’ narrative consisted of a combination of three components: an inferior/backwards country image of Russia, a major power security threat, and an oppressive human rights abuser that “obstructs American democratic values and policies in the world” (2016, 3). In his analysis, he articulates how identities impact the emotional content of narratives. As he states, “Narratives function as morality tales that promote commitment to certain ideas of ‘virtue’ and ‘good’ and are advanced on behalf of a moral community.” These ‘morality tales’ often pit a ‘good’ actor against a ‘bad’ actor to convey deep-seated cultural value judgments about just what kind of actor the other is.
I have pushed my own research to examine how policy narratives are impacted by identity characterizations and how what I call “character stories” or “biographies” of others give strategic narratives weight and heft in helping to promote policies in the public arena. These ‘character stories’ draw on country images, which are defined by Martin and Eroglu (1993) as “the total of all descriptive, inferential and informational beliefs one has about a particular country” (193). Once established, country images are particularly sticky; they draw on shortcuts or stereotypes, are easily recalled and easy to activate in the public imagination. Country images draw on black-and-white thinking, particularly when framed as opposites (friend/enemy, hero/victim, redeemer/redeemed), which make the story compelling and easy to understand. The ‘other’ partner countries know that ‘biographies’ are being created about them, and, at times, attempt to influence their images abroad, with various levels of success, by actively marketing their story to specific, target states and to a broader global marketplace (Browning 2015).
Methodologically, identifying country images pairs nicely with polling data regularly conducted by Gallop or PEW about country attitudes – how the public views other countries and vice versa. The data gathered is usually historical and I can pair it with events or other benchmarks that I might be tracking as a researcher. In looking at text data (newspapers, speeches, hearings, etc.), I can then search for the country and see how people are talking about it – how do they characterize the country, what value judgments do they use, how do they compare it to America – does the way they talk about a country imply or identify a type of characterization (i.e. corrupt, rule-breaker, antagonistic, weak). I find that identity characterizations are perhaps easier to find methodologically than other types of stories because they draw on already held stereotypes and are thus simplistic yet powerful.
Moreover, the public arena such as newspapers, public speeches and press appearances are filled with pro/con debate over foreign policy that often brings country images to the fore as different groups activate and deactivate different aspects of a state’s self and other identity to familiarize the audience quickly with the partner country and who that country is. I found this to be the case in my research into President Clinton’s 2000 pro-trade campaign to liberalize economic ties with China. China is almost wholly viewed negatively by the American public, particularly in the year 2000 when Congress still reviewed whether or not to grant Most Favored Nation status to China annually as continued punishment for the Tiananmen Square massacre. Yet, despite its negative image in the US, President Clinton went full-force with a public relations campaign in support of free trade with China in an attempt to convince a reluctant Congress to pass Permanent Normalized Trade Relations (PNTR) with China and pave the way for their entry into the World Trade Organization. I am going to use this case briefly as an example of how identity narratives function as tactics in policy debates.
President Clinton and his pro-trade supporters worked with a consistent and well-crafted strategic narrative that emphasized the benefits of free trade and the need to engage China in order to reform it into a rule-following, maybe-even-future-democratic country. They quickly encountered narrative resistance by critical groups opposed to free trade with China who activated the negative, threatening image of China to their advantage. President Clinton saw opposition to PNTR grow and Congressional support of the free trade bill crumble. At this point, President Clinton adjusted his narrative strategy and deployed an identity tactic. He co-opted his critics’ ‘biography’ narrative of China as a security threat and replicated the overall negative image of China into his story. He shifted the narrative of PNTR to be about threat containment – the only way to contain a threatening and rule-breaking China was to bring it into the fold of the WTO – without this, China would be even more rogue, even more threatening and there would be little the US could do about it.
The Clinton administration’s narrative shift was noted by the New York Times: “The emphasis on national security issues reflected a growing feeling within the administration that the economic arguments in favor of elevating trade ties with China, while strong, have proven insufficient for wavering lawmakers” (Kahn 2000, A3). In other words, a narrative of the importance of engagement, of trade with others, lacked the weight of the emotional narratives that activated negative stereotypes of China as a security threat and an affront to American values. As the Congressional House vote drew near, President Clinton continued to emphasize that the trade vote was a national security vote. He stated, the China Trade Bill was “a good deal economically. But I have to tell you, I think it’s more important for our national security. It’s the most important national security vote that Congress will cast this year” (Vita 2000, italics added). As President Clinton’s trade narrative became one of national security, he relied on the assumption that China was a ‘threat’, an other, that must be contained in order for this narrative to make sense. He activated a negative stereotype and country image even while pushing for an equal, economic partnership and entanglement with China. This, to me, represents a juxtaposition – just like the NAFTA campaign, Clinton argued for closer, equal economic partnership with a corrupt, rule-breaking, negatively perceived other. If one considers the liberalism mantra that trade equals peace and/or at least interconnectedness and less likelihood of war, representing the partner country in the same negative light that Americans have come to know through media, etc. seems counter-productive to the possibilities of partnership. And yet somehow it appears to be pervasive in US trade politics.
Clinton’s pro-trade narrative shift was successful in passing PNTR through Congress. After a five-month public campaign and media push, the US House of Representatives passed PNTR legislation with China by a margin of only 40 votes (237 – 197) with 73 Democrats on May 24th. The Senate followed the House and passed PNTR 85 – 15 in September, and PNTR was signed into law.
Despite the Clinton administration’s initial strategy of emphasizing the positive aspects of trade and globalization, I found that Clinton needed a ‘biography of the other’ in order for his narrative to make sense to the public. Without incorporating this ‘other’ biography, the pro-PNTR narrative was not complete and was left vulnerable to successful critique by an effective anti-trade counter-narrative that portrayed China as a threatening, human-rights-violating, corrupt state that the US should not be dependent on or entangled with. The use of identities in this example (and in other examples of trade politics) shows that policymakers use partner images, even negative ones, in promoting policies for the American public. Identities are tactics and important aspects of policy stories and strategic narratives.
If identities are used as tactics by policymakers, how is the study of identities and, in particular, identity narratives a critical research methodology? I believe that constructivist research has always had its roots in a critical methodology of ‘exposing’, of bringing to light the ‘taken-for-granteds’ of language that gives pause and hopefully recognition for how language is deployed and functions in societies. By recognizing the power of ‘emotive’ narratives that often reify, malign and obfuscate complexities, my hope is that we, as researchers, are speaking truth to power in some small way and revealing how othering-dynamics, while perhaps effective in short-term contexts, erode a long-term foreign policy strategy by denigrating partner countries and relegating policy debate to us/them shortcuts.
In this way, my work is in line with Steele’s “politics of exteriority” (see Steele in this volume). The impact of the speech, the text, the image in the public space becomes the methodological focus rather than the motives behind why or when they were deployed. This contrasts with many other foreign policy analysis scholars who examine the interior politics and it is not to say that ‘motives’ are not important but that ‘words matter’ whether or not the speaker herself believes them or intended them to have the particular outcome that they did. Steele refers to three “positional” methods of analyzing aesthetics or text for that matter: exposition, interposition and juxtaposition. Exposition is the act of exposing that I have described – the bringing into focus the particular ways that language and emotional referents can induce support or rejection of largely un-emotional policy choices. This is largely my methodological position but I also believe that my work forces a juxtaposition that I hope critically politicizes the narrative choices of policymakers. By ‘exposing’ how policy narratives often devolve into us/them stereotypes even by those who are pushing for increased partnership or interconnectedness, I hope to activate a critical lens toward why this happens, how this works and ultimately how to push back against debased political narratives that reify and recirculate negative stereotypes of other countries.
But what of our own identities as writers hidden in our texts? What of focusing on state/national identity at such expense to the complexities of the people within states? At masking our diversities, our differing interpretations of who is America for example? Can we, should we as scholars interested in identities and how they function as tactics in policymaking include our own identities, our own voices as part of the exposure, to be more honest, more truthful, more effective?
In my own position as a scholar, teacher and writer, I admit my own identities are absent from my texts. Yet, I am aware that my own interest in identities albeit state identities, comes from my own personal experiences with self-aware slipping between a self-identity in one context that feels vastly removed from my identity in other contexts – the languages, the dress, the common references, the assumptions that shift as I might move from an academic environment to a lesbian night at a local bar. I feel aware how all of us move within contexts holding multiple identities some that feel much more out of joint than others.
In revisiting Roxanne Doty’s more recent work, she calls on us as writers to be brave, to put our own voice in our writing so as not to sanitize academic writing beyond recognition of its humanness (Doty 2010). She, along with other IR scholars, has raised the contradiction of our own attention to identities in foreign policy but erasure of our own personal identities as if they are not a part of the story at all. She writes,
This gives me pause – how relevant are my personal stories, my voice, my experiences of oppression, of the weight of false assumptions to my ability to expose and, perhaps rupture, the everyday deployment of self/other logic that oversimplifies foreign relations and draws often on fears of the other for promotion of policies? And while I don’t yet know the answer to whether or not my voice matters in my research, I do know that exposing, with the hope of disempowering the way fear works in othering narratives, matters both in politics and in my personal life where I have experienced bigoted fear-driven narratives during the successful Prop 8 campaign that actually stopped our marriage from taking place even in my home blue state of California. And in 2016, we witnessed to the extreme what happens when fear-driven othering-narratives target immigrants, the disabled, Muslims, transgender persons, and women, pushing legitimate economic fears toward illegitimate fears of the other, and unleashing a candidate and now President who relies on such narratives for victory. Perhaps more than at any time in recent memory, exposing the tactical use of othering narratives to drive political stories forward is critical to a democratic politics – whether it comes with a personal voice or not.
Many years ago I followed my curiosity as a graduate student into a project on NAFTA that had a profound impact on my academic career. Publishing in International Studies Quarterly as a Masters student at San Francisco State University opened the door for me to pursue my Ph.D. at the school of my choice, the University of Minnesota, and to benefit from a community of constructivist scholars and a tradition of path-breaking intellectual work. Revisiting the intellectual journey of Constructing NAFTA in this chapter was a bit of a personal indulgence and one that I would not have taken if not for the encouragement of the editors of this volume. However, it allowed me to rethink how I have approached my research on identities and trade politics and to marvel at how our intellectual paths are never as straightforward as they might appear on our CVs.
The academic journey that began with my research on NAFTA is now more important than ever as I watch the new Trump administration take shape. As fear becomes an integral part of our nation’s politics, the exposing of fear-driven identity narratives is more critical than ever. My latest project examines how populism narratives clashed with President Obama’s pro-TransPacific Partnership (TPP) narratives to ultimately derail his plans for passing TPP during his presidency. The anti-TPP narratives of the Trump and Sanders campaign shared a theme of economic fears even while drawing on differing strains of populism. Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders drew on fears that the trade deal would not represent the workers and was instead a handout to powerful corporations and private interests. Republican candidate Donald Trump drew on fears that the trading regime was rigged against the United States and that the TPP was a “bad deal badly done”. However, President Obama also drew on a fear-based narrative to argue for TPP. He argued that TPP was critical to balancing a rising and threatening China and to shore up US allies in an Asia region that would otherwise be dominated by Chinese interests that were inherently anti-American. The pro-TPP campaign, like so many trade campaigns before it, relied on a negative identity narrative that exacerbated anti-China sentiment to cull favor with the American public.
In a time of uncertainty in international politics, I am certain that the opportunities to examine othering-narratives and their tactical use by policymakers will increase rather than decrease in the coming years. Our country is polarized, and increasingly this polarization manifests in fears that can be easily tapped for political gain. I am heartened by the critical engagements of the scholars found in this volume that task themselves with exploring new methodological inquiries that expose power, language and identities in new ways with the hope of countering what seems like an overwhelming rise of fear-based nationalism. For my own work, I will continue my acts of ‘exposing’ and ‘juxtaposition’, and consider how my own voice can contribute to our critical engagement with identities in international politics.
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