Sarcophagus of Identity: Tribalism, Nationalism, and the Transcendence of the Self

Acknowledgements and Preface

This book began its awakening in February 1971 in a walnut paneled courtroom on the 16th floor of the U.S. Courthouse at 312 Spring Street in Los Angeles. I sat alone in the back of the courtroom. Some thirty or so friends and supporters sat closer to the front where my dear friend, and attorney, Charlie Khoury, and the attorney from the Justice Department in Washington, made various arguments to a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. It was a hearing regarding the appeal of a lower court decision in the case of Lt. James Skelly, USN, versus the Honorable Melvin Laird, the United States Secretary of Defense.

Skelly, as he was referred to by the attorneys and the judges, had refused orders to serve in Vietnam where the United States' government was prosecuting a war, and had claimed conscientious objection to war. Skelly had therefore filed a law suit against Laird and some of his comrades in the military hierarchy asking for a writ of habeas corpus, as he claimed that given his conscientious objection to war, he was being illegally held against his will.

As I sat in the back of the courtroom without the companions who knew me in human terms, I began to wonder who Skelly was. Whoever he was, Skelly certainly didn't seem to be me, and I increasingly felt as though I genuinely didn't exist. Instead, Skelly existed as an abstraction that the lawyers and judges discussed as though they were arguing about a fine conceptual issue in theology such as the existence of angels. As all institutions with differential power ultimately attempt to do, they tried to define Skelly, and construct him as either this, that, or variations thereof—conscientious objector to war, or one who wanted to shirk his duty to his country. The circumstances of the hearing had some resonances with those of Joseph K. in Kafka's The Trial—and thus, why did it matter whether Skelly was willing to participate in the organized killing of Vietnamese or not? Like Joseph K, Skelly had been held and thus arrested by the military, and my physical body was the artifact for this tangible deed.

Following the year-long legal case, I was released from the military, but the question of who Skelly was lingered, not least because I gradually came to realize that being defined—given an identity—by others more powerful, was the normal form of our psychological, and ultimately political, imprisonment—arrest was a habitual state for humans, as Kafka understood. Throughout the last several decades of sailing through the seas of our human condition many people from many different places in the world have informed my thinking about identity either directly, upon reflection, or through their books. The books are listed in the bibliography, but even though some of those I want to acknowledge are no longer physically on the planet, I'm still in conversation with them, as well as those who are still present, who, though they might not know it, have provided both insights and a foundation for the writing of The Sarcophagus of Identity.

There are two principal individuals without whom the book would not have been written, Charlie Khoury and Kai Erikson. Charlie because, from our first meeting in his law office in San Diego, I had the distinct feeling that he had become me in a legal sense in the case against the U.S. Secretary of Defense, and it was his genius to draft a restraining order that seemed simple on its surface, that the District Court judge then signed. While the case was being adjudicated, it basically ordered the Navy not to subject me to any duties incompatible with my claim of conscientious objection—what I did or didn't do was up to me!

Kai Erikson suffered my attempts to write about my experiences and the insights I derived from them for longer than I am prepared to admit, but I will say that it was not simply years. He was always kind, and always precise in his criticisms, and occasionally lauded me just enough to keep me at the task when he found I'd written something insightful. Throughout it all, our discussions were informed by the strength of his sociological imagination, and sometimes tempered by a wee bit of shared agua sagrada, that provided the lens through which he and I could see the evolving narrative with clarity and warmth. I feel deeply indebted to him, and to Joanna Erikson for making sure we remembered that there was life beyond sociology!

The other sociologist who fundamentally affected my thinking about identity and how we think we know what we know, was Hugh (Bud) Mehan, whose ethnomethodological approach to our social worlds helped to free me from more doctrinaire approaches to knowledge. Our combined work in what came to be known as the Discourse Group at the University of California, San Diego (more about this further on) enriched my thinking enormously, as I think is evident from what we wrote together and singly in the 1980's.

There are three other individuals who played a significant part in my effort to explore the issues I've written about in this book. Ron and Jane McMahan, and their enchanting young toddler and son, Jason, were with me from the start in the summer of 1970. Ron also sued the Secretary of Defense for his release from service as a Navy officer—always a bit more intelligent than me, Ron retained Charlie Khoury in his legal battle, studied legal flaws in my case, and although he filed his suit some months after I did, he managed to get out of the military months before me. Unfair though this was (said with a wicked smile), my love for Ron, Jane, and Jason has informed my life ever since those early days. They provided me with support, love, and inspiration many times over the years including when we worked together at The G.I. Office in Washington after Ron's and my release from service. It was also Ron's decision to pursue a PhD in Sociology, and his innovative research perspective, that also informed my own decision to do so. Another individual that I want to show my genuine appreciation for is Jakob Horstmann, the literary agent, who became so committed to having this book published that his energy in this regard exceeded my own!

Others, whom I want to acknowledge and thank in some sort of chronological order are friends and colleagues with whom conversations shaped these lifetime concerns on my part. These included Dave Chabot and Sue Shelgren Chabot especially, as well as Dave Anderson, Ron Berk, Dan Boehle, Jeffrey Davidow, Tom Doshan, Howie Goodman, Linda Weinhold, and Jai Ryu from our days at the University of Minnesota. Perhaps most significant with regard to this book, have been the enduring friendships of the anti-warriors in San Diego from the Concerned Officers' Movement (COM), Non-Violent Action (NVA), and the related, Constellation Vote, which was an effort to keep the aircraft carrier USS Constellation from returning to South East Asia to bomb the Vietnamese. These include most importantly the gang, my friends from the early '70's, that have over the past several years explored why we said No to war, including John Huyler, John Kent, Paul Rogers, and Ron McMahan, whom I previously mentioned. Others who informed my thinking during these times included Norm Bleier, Jim Crawford, Lou Font, Jim Lehman, and Jim Pahura from COM, as well as John Gage, Rob Greaves, Anne Jones, Donna Kelly Kent, Will Kirkland, Janis Labao, Susan Lux, Chaz O'Loughlin, Ted Shallcross, and especially as advocates of non-violence, Will Watson, and the draft resistor who spent two years in prison, and inspired the Constellation Vote, David Harris.

In addition, my subsequent work with the FTA show (soldier's graffiti for, Fuck the Army) deepened my sense of the importance of speaking out in the face of powerful political forces. Fred Gardner and Sally Kempton brought this home to me initially, but it was the cast of the show including Michael Alaimo, Peter Boyle, Len Chandler, Dick Gregory, Rita Martinson, Joe McDonald, Robin Menken, Donald Sutherland, and Ben Vereen who made me realize that one could be a 'professional' and still speak truth to power. Most important in this regard was, of course, Jane Fonda, the leading figure in the show, who helped me to see that those who often suffered the most from the imposition of identity categories were women. In addition, by being the key figure in the FTA show, she demonstrated personal and political courage, but also the gratitude of the thousands of soldiers, sailors, and airmen who attended the FTA shows which gave voice to the deep antipathy they felt about a war whose meaning escaped them, and the policymakers who forced them to prosecute it. Others who widened my horizons during this period were Shirley Sutherland, who attended the Appeals Court hearing against the Secretary of Defense, as well as Herb and Shirley Magidson, whose organization, Individuals Against the Crime of Silence, encouraged so many to speak out against the war in Vietnam. Shirley Magidson also introduced me many years later to Johnny Spain, whose life provided a key piece of inspiration for this book.

During my time at The G.I. Office, which Jane Fonda also helped to found, Donald Duncan, Tom Asher, Marge Tabankin, and ultimately Judy Senderowitz contributed to the evolution in my thinking, but it would not become truly focused until I enrolled in the PhD program in Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. It was then that my varied experiences became married to the sociological imagination and began to provide the focus that ultimately informs what I have written here. The Sociology Department was then dominated by scholars who considered themselves social constructivists, a perspective that fit very neatly with my own intellectual proclivities. In addition to Bud Mehan, it included among others, Bud's mentor, Aaron Cicourel, as well as, Bennett Berger, Jack Douglas, Joseph Gusfield, Kristin Luker, Richard Madsen, Chandra Mukerji, David Phillips, Michael Schudson, and Mary Walshok.

In addition, and very importantly, Chuck Nathanson was also a junior member of the department, and the research I undertook with him on the social construction of the Soviet threat was crucial to the way in which I had come to think about the broader political issues that were informed by notions of identity. In addition to the sociologists, UCSD also had a Communication Department that included the Vygotsky scholar Jim Wertsch, and where I served as a Teaching Assistant for both Herbert Schiller and Michael Cole, all three of whom informed my subsequent work in fundamental ways. This was especially true of Cole, who introduced me to the work of Walker Percy, and Percy's insights that became central to The Sarcophagus of Identity.

As I had served as a Special Assistant to US Senator John Tunney, and worked from his San Diego office in the mid-1970's, I continued to stay involved in local and California politics throughout the 70's and early '80's, and even ran for a seat on the San Diego City Council where I garnered a respectable 22% of the vote in the 1981 municipal primary election. That experience, my experience in Tunney's office (the lead character in Robert Redford's film, The Candidate, was based on Tunney), and conversations with the likes of the future member of the US Congress, Lynn Schenk, as well as Richard Farson, Matthew Welch, and members of the politically active Cassidy clan, led me to sadly conclude that electoral politics required a completely manufactured identity in which one became a saleable commodity. That, and when a leader of the Democratic Party suggested that I move into a district where I could easily be elected, by way of counsel, it elicited a comment from Chuck Nathanson—do you want power or knowledge? That made the choice clear enough!

With knowledge winning out over power, I went back to work and following the submission of a doctoral thesis focused on the transformation of military service in the nuclear age titled The Minuteman is a Missile Not a Soldier, was awarded a PhD in 1984. I had already been offered one of the two positions of Associate Director at the University of California's new system-wide Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, and therefore went to work immediately under the physicist Herbert York. York had worked on the Manhattan Project, been the first Director of the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory, the founding Chancellor of UCSD, the first Chief Scientist of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, and then, first Director of Defense Research and Engineering in the Pentagon. From the late '60's on, he also had become one of the world's leading advocates of nuclear arms control, as his book, Race to Oblivion: A Participant's View of the Arms Race, would make clear.

Herb York had a profound impact on my thinking, and left me with an enduring obsession to rid our world of nuclear weapons. During my time working with Herb, I engaged with individuals from various parts of the world who helped me to deepen that commitment through a growing awareness of the field of Peace Research. These included He Di from China, Peter Schulze from Germany, Tair Tairov from Uzbekistan, Hylke Tromp from The Netherlands, and Hakan Wiberg from Sweden. In addition, at UCSD, I co-taught a course on Missing Themes in US Political Discourse in 1987 with the father of Peace Research, the Norwegian born scholar, Johan Galtung. This complemented the efforts I made with Elise Bouding, Michael Klare, Andy Murray, Dick Ringler, Jennifer Turpin, Nigel Young, and others to institutionalize Peace Studies courses in US colleges and universities. Most significant in this regard was the philanthropist, Joan Kroc, who was especially kind to me, and who endowed two Peace Institutes—one at the University of Notre Dame, and the other at the University of San Diego. It was under the aegis of Peace Studies, and influenced by the above individuals, that I developed my first academic course on this theme, Self, Identity, and Conflict, which over the years it was offered, informed the main arguments presented in this book.

I should also note that Herb York was also prepared to support innovative initiatives that in the future might make a nuclear holocaust less likely even though it made some of the academics in fields like International Relations a bit nervous. Among the many initiatives I fostered, and York supported, was the expansion of the Discourse Group that we had started at UCSD to one that became an international community of discourse analytic scholars from a wide variety of academic disciplines. It was one of the most intellectually stimulating initiatives that I have ever been involved in and provided a broad preface for me to this current work. From the two week-long conferences that we held in a set of thatched cottages in the village of Ballyvaughan on Galway Bay in the summers of 1987 and 1988, I edited and published thirty-four working papers under the IGCC umbrella that included contributions from over thirty other scholars.

I am grateful that all of them fundamentally informed my subsequent reflections about identity, war, and the fraught nature of our social and political worlds. They included the members of the Discourse Group from San Diego: Aaron Cicourel, Bud Mehan, Chuck Nathanson, Jim Wertsch, and John Wills. In addition, others came from universities in the US and various other countries participated including: David Cambell, Patricia Chilton, Paul Chilton, Carol Cohn, Jeff Connor-Linton, Simon Dalby, Mick Dillon, James Falk, Bill Gamson, Todd Gitlin, Donna Gregory, Hugh Gusterson, Glenn Hook, Pertti Joenniemi, Bradley Klein, Radha Kumar, George Lakoff, Bruce Larkin, Feri Miszlivetz, Ellie Ochs, Kay Richardson, Ruth Rosen, Michael Shapiro, Greg Urban, Rob Walker, and Rudigar Zimmerman.

During this same period, insights regarding the political and cultural significance of the United States' loss of the war in Vietnam, as well as my own role in the anti-war movement, were consistently a part of what I was reflecting on. This was largely because of my participation in the annual Wellfleet Meeting that Robert Jay Lifton and Erik Erikson had first created in 1966, and which I have attended regularly over the past 30 years. In addition to the previously mentioned Kai Erikson, Todd Gitlin, and Ron McMahan, the cast of characters over the years at the Wellfleet Meetings who left a significant mark on my intellectual life were of course Lifton himself, and his wife Betty Jean, as well as the likes of Peter Balakian, Norman Birnbaum, Kira Brunner, Shareen Brysac, Jim Carroll, Cathy Caruth, Rolf Ekeus, Dan Ellsberg, Richard Falk, Michael Flynn, Carol Gilligan, Chris Hedges, Isabel Hilton, Nick Humphrey, Steven Kull, Peter Kuznick, Hillel Levine, David Lotto, Norman Mailer, Eric Markusen, Patricia and Edwin Matthews, Saul Mendlovitz, Karl Meyer, Cindy Ness, Dan Okrent, David Rush, Bill Schabas, Jonathan Schell, Larry Shainberg, Marty Sherwin, Chuck Strozier, Roberto Toscano, Sherry Turkle, and Howard Zinn.

In addition to joining the Wellfleet Meetings in the mid-80's, an ongoing conversation developed with Myra MacPherson after meeting at a conference on The Cultural Legacy of Vietnam at Rutgers University in the spring of 1986, and her book, Long Time Passing: Vietnam & The Haunted Generation. Myra's insights, complemented those of another now long-time friend, David Cortright, the author of Soldiers in Revolt, and both fundamentally informed the broader conversation about the Vietnam War, and the significance of the protest against it, that I was having with myself and others.

I also began working with Mary Kaldor in the late '80's, as her political and intellectual engagement with war, military institutions, and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe insured that the political aspects of the Cold War, and the Beyond the Blocs movement became a central part of my thinking about how identity had been utilized politically. I'm deeply grateful to Mary for what I consider to be a most excellent post-doctoral education that I received through my relationship and work with her. We jointly organized a series of 10-day summer seminars in Europe that involved major political and intellectual figures from both sides of the Cold War divide in 1987, 1988, and finally in 1989 when the project culminated with the East–West Summer Seminar on Global Security and Arms Control at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations in the then Soviet Union.

It was through Mary that I met Nick Humphrey and Feri Miszlivetz in Budapest in the summer of 1986, and the conversations with each of them has enriched my thinking for the past 30 years. Nick, because he helped me to see the larger historical evolution of humans and the psychological problems that developed as humans became conscious of Self and our consequent mortality. Feri, because he has constantly informed my understanding of Europe, its history and possible futures by including me in innumerable conferences, academic programs, and conversations without which I would feel impoverished. Feri's spouse, Jody Jensen, also contributed to a more nuanced sense of the tumultuous history of Central and Eastern Europe.

Although I left UCSD shortly after Herb York retired in 1989, and spent a year plus as Associate Director of the Center on War, Peace, and the News Media at New York University, I had intuited by then that to understand the human condition as fully as possible, it would be necessary to leave the United States. Because of people like Mary Kaldor, Feri Miszlivetz, Jody Jensen, Patricia Lewis, Tair Tairov, and Nick Humphrey, Europe seemed much more interesting politically and intellectually at the end of the Cold War. Thus, as I had already recently regularized my Irish citizenship based on the heritage of my grandparent's birth in Ireland, I began to make plans for moving to the place I had found very felicitous on the west coast, Ballyvaughan. Before making the move toward the end of 1991 however, I worked at NYU with Rob Manoff who had founded the center. That was a particularly stimulating time, as Manoff had understood and written about how reality became embedded in the stories written by journalists. That conceptions of identity are often central to the reality portrayed in such stories made me grateful for Rob's insights, and therefore conversations with him were always lively and informative.

Settling into life in Ireland was rather easy not least because of the inherent friendliness of the people, especially those like Ruth and Brendan Walsh who were friends of my late brother Frank. As Irish history was informed so fundamentally by its relationship with the United Kingdom, and it's continued political dominance in Northern Ireland, questions about identity, and who one was, were never far from everyday conversations. I became Associate Director of the Irish Peace Institute at the University of Limerick shortly after settling in Ballyvaughan, and I even taught for a brief stint at the University of Limerick. John Healy was the first to befriend me there, and soon thereafter I would also get to know his wife Yvonne—they were concerned professionally and personally with the Peace Process in Ireland, as was a wry member of the Peace Institute staff, Brid Kennedy, and they all had reflections about the identity of nationalists, Unionists, Protestants, and Catholics, etcetera.

Later when I taught at the Magee campus of the University of Ulster in Derry between 2007 and 2012, the concern was even more visceral, and I learned a great deal about the fraught character of identity from my colleagues, students, and friends both at Magee and in Derry City. Paul Arthur, Clionagh Boyle, Maoliosa Boyle, Stephen Ryan, and Alan Sharp helped me to see how identity could be a false friend, at the same time that some in the North clung to it like a life vest in a stormy sea. Students and speakers at the Divided Societies conferences I organized while at Magee, as well as the online Global Conversation course, also brought this home in a global context, so my thanks to Rachel Coyle, Christine Cutting, Harris Dunlap, Eilis Haden, John Harkin, Katy Hayward, Luis Alvarado Martinez, Beata Matuszka, Juliet Garlow, Elissa McNicholas, Gina Taylor, Ashley Yagilieniskie, Bryce Lewis, Jonathan Lincoln, Kaitlin Tippin, Emily Works, Hannah Colbert, Jonathan Ulrich, Ryan Tanner, Lauren Cappa, Cheryl Mariani, Kaitlin Steiner, Laryssa Witty, Andrew Minch, Kaitlin Vanderhoff, Jennifer Lopez, Rebecca Ewing, Karsyn Sprague, Renjie Butalid, Emma Taylor, Will Burton, Ciarán O'Connor, Michael Graham, Pan Hung Yu, Alex Ascherson, Ibrahim Elshamy, Zack Breslin, Michelle Coyle, Eva Kovacs, Sissela Matzner, Manos Valasis, Margaret Logue, Willa Murphy, and Leonie Murray. Teya Sepinuck was excellent in demonstrating the raw, naked power of identity in the performances she organized in the Theater of Witness, which she created, as was Idan Meir and Fadl Mustapha with Idan's play, Bassam.

Mary Hawkes, who founded the Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan, helped me to understand the manner in which one's rootedness in place, helped one to assume a concrete identity. Tony Glavin, the Dublin based best-selling American Irish author also helped me to feel what we might call Irishness, and willingly gave me his own reflections on aspects of this work when it was in manuscript form. And, not least in engaging me in rich conversations about identity or the lack thereof, was David Coombes, who not only taught about European integration at the University of Limerick, but also practiced Tibetan Buddhism.

In 1992, although I kept my connection with Ireland firmly in place, I began teaching for two ten-week terms in eastern Austria at the European University Centre for Peace Studies (EPU), as well as in Szombathely, just across the border in Hungary with Feri Miszlivetz, Jody Jensen, and others. Not only did one feel some antagonism between Hungarian and Austrian identity, but given the multi-national character of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, different identities were spread like wild flowers across the landscape—there were Croats, Czechs, Germans, Serbs, Slovaks, Slovenes, and the remnants of Turks, everywhere, and much of it subsumed under the political identity of Austrian. During this period, Kai Erikson also joined us at EPU, to explore the character of the war in the former Yugoslavia, and in the experience of accompanying him to Pacrac, I could see how identity easily helped to access hatred. Some of the colleagues at EPU who were most helpful to me in understanding the complicated nature of identity in this and other parts of Europe were Josef Binter, Ladislas Bizimana, Anders Bjorn Hansen, Lena Hansen, Svante Karlsson, Ravinder Kaur, Annemette Matthiessen, Jennifer Peet, Dennis Sandole, and Ole Waever, among others.

Five years later, when I moved to Denmark, I was astonished to see how deeply national identity was held among the Danes—given their previous homogeneity, it was no surprise that immigration of non-Danes would become a huge political issue in the early years of the 21st century. Those who provided me with often wry insight into Danish identity were some of those who had been at EPU, including Anders Bjorn Hansen, Ravinder Kaur, Annemette Matthiessen, but also Kristof Kristianson and Garba Diallo from the International Peoples' College in Elsinore, as well as Birgitte Sorenson, and Thomas Skelly, the son that was born to Annemette Matthiessen and me while I was living in Copenhagen.

With the experience of developing educational initiatives in Europe as background, including conferences, seminars, and courses in Austria, Denmark, Hungary, Ireland, the UK, and Russia, it made sense that we should also attempt to build on the EPU program in Austria by attempting to create linked Peace Studies programs in Ireland and Spain. Although the Irish program languished for complicated political reasons associated with the Peace Process, the program in Spain was so successful that it developed into a full-fledged MA program in Peace and Development Studies, and was the only one of the three programs to survive institutionally. This was largely through the efforts of Vicent Martinez Guzman, who understood the need to provide the program with a strong institutional base, and therefore integration into the academic structure at the Universitat Jaume I in Castellon de la Plana. Martinez was fortunate to have strong colleagues within the Department of Philosophy and Sociology at Jaume I, who enriched the program, but also my own teaching in the program around identity and conflict. During those early years of the program in the late 1990's, the key people in addition to Martinez, included Salvador Cabedo, Domingo Garcia, and Sonia Reverter, through whom I was also fortunate to converse with the Judith Butler scholar, Patricia Soley.

In 2000, Andrew Murray, the founder and director of the Baker Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies at Juniata College in Pennsylvania invited me to return to the U.S. after my ten-year sojourn in Europe for the fall semester as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Peace Studies. For the following five years, I returned every autumn to teach in the Peace Studies program at Juniata where I gave particular focus to identity issues in my teaching. It was in the period following the September 2001 attacks that American identity seemed to be not only reinforced, but often quite virulent through the projection of the negative other of Arabs and Muslims, and thus, the wars in the Middle East.

As Juniata was a college initially founded by the Church of the Brethren, one of the historic "peace churches, it was also during those years that since that the President of Brethren Colleges Abroad (BCA), Karen Jenkins, asked me to help them initiate Peace Studies programs abroad for US students. I therefore initially established five programs in Belgium, Hungary, Ireland, and Wales, and also created annual international student conferences that brought US and European students together to discuss some of the underlying issues that resulted in violent conflicts, including those fostered by identity issues, for example, in Northern Ireland. Since it was also clear at that time that the large international education organizations, such as NAFSA –Association of International Educators, did not see the positive synergy that might be developed between those concerned with International Education, Peace Studies, and Peace Research, BCA therefore also provided a platform from which several of us could develop programs designed to enhance that synergy.

Many of us were aware that unless we made a strong educational effort during the first decade of this century, xenophobia and identity-based conflicts would spread ever more rapidly throughout the countries of the world and the minds of its citizens. Early on, my work in this area received significant support from key actors at BCA including Mell Bolen, Ted Long, Tom Kepple, and Ron McAlister, as well as BCA staff members Daniel Bryan, Elizabeth Huskin, Rob Kruger, Julie Larison, Alex Neff, and Kris Riggs. In addition, Ron Moffatt, who became the President of NAFSA in 2007, and I decided that we needed to create a vehicle to engage international educators in seminars that would help them to understand how to create programs focused on the development of a global citizenry rather than to continue to simply valorize national identities. Moffatt and I therefore created the first such seminar in the summer of 2007, but most unfortunately, he passed away in 2008.

Ron however had inspired a fair number of his colleagues in the international education community with his vision, one of whom was Everett Egginton, Moffatt's successor as NAFSA President. Everett and I decided that future seminars should be named The Ron Moffatt Seminars, and by the 2014 NAFSA annual conference when NAFSA agreed to begin formally offering the Moffatt Seminars, over 200 international educators had participated in the seminars. In addition, thanks especially to the involvement of Jeff Helsing, Associate Vice President of the United States Institute of Peace, USIP had become central to the Moffatt Seminars and NAFSA's broader efforts to educate for peace. In addition to Everett Egginton, among the international educators who helped us with the development of the Moffatt Seminar and its focus on global citizenship were Wynn Egginton, Raul Favela, Mary Anne Grant, Marlene Johnson, Carl Jubran, Rachele Lawton, Heather MacCleoud, Betty Soppelsa, Michael Woolf, and importantly, Susan Thompson.

In the early 1990's after I left IGCC, I had been able to start working more fully on the central ideological role of identity in war and militarism, as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in Peace and Security Studies, thanks largely to Jane Sharpe. Subsequently, I also received support from Generalitat Valenciana in Spain, for which I am very grateful. However, it was not until 2012 that I was able to fundamentally focus on the research and writing that would ultimately result in the initial draft of this monograph. This was facilitated by a TAMOP Fellowship at Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Hungary for a project on New Conceptual Foundations for Identity. That initial work coincided with an invitation from Jim Lakso, the Provost, and Tom Kepple, the President at Juniata College to become the interim Director of the Baker Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies for the 2012/13 and 2013/14 academic years. I took up their invitation and I am very grateful to both of them for it, and the manner in which they, as well as Andy and Terry Murray, Anne Baker, Dave Drews, Laurie Reeder, Bonnie Lakso, and Pat Kepple, supported me during what ultimately became three very intense years.

During my time at Juniata, my work on this manuscript also benefited from interactions with members of the International Studies faculty and the staff of the Center for International Education. Particular thanks go to my Research Assistant, Rhey Haggerty, whose work in 2012 and 2013 was, I often think, absolutely crucial to completion of the manuscript. Christian Eichenmueller who also served as my Research Assistant in the following academic year, made our seminar at Juniata part of a broader conversation on identity, and fundamentally enriched my thinking as well as my social life. Sadie Luetmer's work helped in the above regard, as well, and she also managed to keep the diverse parts of my professional life together. And although, she would undoubtedly understate her work, Liz Widman, helped to manage me and the institute in a manner that allowed me to more fully focus on the manuscript and issues of identity, including, for example, when Kelly Gates of UCSD came to Juniata to talk about facial recognition technology and identification. Airokhsh Faiz Qaisary, worked tirelessly in copying numerous documents, including the 200 plus pages of the Appendices from the legal case, Skelly v. Laird.

After I left Juniata in early May of 2015, I was fortunate to receive an additional grant that was tied to the transformation of the Institute for Social and European Studies (ISES) that my friends in Hungary, Feri Miszlivetz and Jody Jensen had built up starting in the early '90's. It allowed me to explore beyond identity and was realised in the framework of the TÁMOP 4.2.1.D-15/1/KONV-2015-0006, as well as the innovation research base and knowledge centre in Koszeg which was developed in the framework of the educational and research network at the University of Pannonia, subsidised by the European Union and Hungary and co-financed by the European Social Fund. ISES ultimately became iASK, the Institute for Advanced Studies Koszeg, and now supports a wide range of cutting edge research and teaching.

Before I close these acknowledgements, there are two other groups of individuals that I want to thank for various kinds of help and support. The first includes the some of the faculty and students, some of whom served as ad hoc teaching assistants, in my classes, and especially those who participated in the Seminars on Critical Thinking in the Information Age that we began offering in 2012 in Kőszeg.

The key individuals in making the seminars stimulating were Christian Eichenmueller, Sadie Luetmer, and Petra Paulic, while those whose contribution added to our thinking about identity and related issues included Izabella Agardi, Nathan Anderson-Stahl, Max van Bahlen, Adrienne Ballreich, Charles Barlow, Jack Barlow, Giselda Beaudin, Amrita Bhohi, Milan Brezovsky, Óscar Villagrán Buraglia, Adam Cline, Sasa Crijlak, David Coombes, Alyssa Dalos, Claire DeLaval, Mike Ebeling, Ruairi Friel, Felipe Gonzales Santos, Rhey Haggerty, Stuart Holland, Carl Jubran, Svante Karlsson, Juozas Kasputis, Alexsandra Klucska, Ana Marques, Stefan May, Ron McMahan, Prisca Merz, Dimitar Nikolovski, Kyle Novak, Linnea Ohlsson, Ramona Padurean, Justas Patsaukas, Christina Paulos, Charlotte Reuter, Deb Roney, James Roney, Reka Salamon, Yael Shieber, Michael Weintraub, and John Zarobell.

In other education related endeavors, as well as this book, the faculty, students, and friends who contributed to facilitating the work, as well as my understanding, included, very importantly, Jana Beňová, as well as Kathleen Boisen, Robin Franck, Jenna Goodhand, Lynn Hajdukovich, Ana Maria Hernando, Chris Kjonaas, Patricia Lewis, Judy Liu, June Lowenberg, Samantha Martin, Teri McLuhan, Lisa McRee, Jill Moon, Ashley Phillips, Margaret Riel, Linda Smith, and Zsuzsanna Szelenyi. As one will note, many of the individuals I have made note of in these acknowledgements are women, not least because they, along with some of the men, spoke for the most part in a different voice, to use the title of Carol Gilligan's important and insightful book. For me, this meant that they tended not to engage in the instrumental, and often decontextualized, rationality that Gilligan critiques, but instead often spoke with attentiveness to the broader contextual circumstances within which we were embedded. I'm sorry if I missed anyone who should have been acknowledged, but my deep thanks to each of you!

Chapter I

Introduction

This is a book about imprisonment, the difficulties of escape, and some reflections on sustained emancipation in the social worlds we inhabit. It is not about the