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This introductory chapter provides an overview of some of the problems of identity. There would seem to be both public and private issues of identity. In the public sphere, in talk about crime, health, prostitution, and urbanism, the identities of those who make up the social body become a problem in a new way. In broad outline, this must have to do with the growth of cities, along with the institutionalization and increasing bureaucratization of the modern nation-state. The chapter then turns to the private or inner sense of identity that is at the very center of modern thought and imagination from the dawn of the modern world on—starting with the Renaissance, one might say, though one could push the date back to remarkable innovations from the twelfth century but gaining a new momentum and a new accent in the Enlightenment.

This chapter explores the historical roots of the current political crises associated with the headscarf controversy, taking account of its social, political and legal ramifications. Attention will be devoted to the transformation of the Ottoman Empire into the Turkish Republic in the early 20^th century; accompanying legal, cultural and political reforms that changed the society; a critical evaluation of the Turkish modernity project, stigmatizing part of the Turkish society while modernizing the other; and the connection between this modernization project and the current headscarf controversy. Finally the chapter analyzes the legal arguments of the Turkish legal establishment.

This chapter examines the bottom-up justification for the formation of the modern nation-state. It suggests that borderless states are dystopian, noting that in order to be democratic and promote justice, states must depend on a clear definition of territory and membership. The chapter elaborates how the borders and demarcation helped individuals define their identity, providing them with interpretive tools to decipher reality and make sense of their daily actions. It then explains the term human, human features, and identity. The chapter also explicates the need to belong to a cultural community, a nation, or any other particular group. It argues that it is an epistemological need for systems of interpretation that will allow us to understand the world and choose a way of life as well as a creative need for means of interpretation, exchange, and expression. Ultimately, the chapter assesses the negative effect of divided communities on human behavior.

This article argues that modern states and modern societies were formed through the construction of citizenship as a pattern of social attachment, membership and legal norm formation. Citizenship originally developed as a principle that removed feudal legal orders from society, and it underpinned the processes of territorial unification, institution building, centralized integration and democratic participation that characterize modern nation states and national societies. However, the article argues that, both at the functional level and at the normative level, the trajectories contained in national citizenship were not fully realized within national societies, defined by national legal orders. It was only as a system of global legal norms emerged outside national societies, shaping inner-societal patterns of and institutional construction and norm formation, that the basic potentials of national citizenship were fully realized.

This chapter explores how the Bourdieusian field theory can be deployed to make sense of global dynamics. It mentions international relations (IR) scholars that have enlisted Bourdieu in their analyses, applied his work to international issues, and taken certain concepts, such as habitus and practice, from his larger theoretical conceptual apparatus. It also focuses on three transformative processes or macro-historical turning points: the expansion of colonial empires during the phase of 'high imperialism', the two world wars, and the post-war end of formal colonial empires that heralded the rise to dominance of the modern nation state. The chapter maps the points of differentiation between field theory approaches and other approaches. It recognizes other key elements of Bourdieusian field theory, such as fields that consist of objective relations between actors and the subjective and cultural forms of those relations.

This chapter deals with the questions of violence and Hobbes' theory of the state. Violence refers to a variety of different types of action. The chapter draws an important distinction between two main types of violence: physical violence (often referred to as simply 'violence'), and moral violence (often qualified by other terms, such as 'spiritual', 'structural' or 'psychological' violence). Both physical and moral violence are coercive and engender resistance. They are coercive in the sense that they seek to change the behaviour of others. But violence also has a subjective element. For it to qualify as violence, it needs to be perceived as such by others. Typically, violence needs to be recognized as such by those on whom it is exercised. The term 'violence', when used on its own, implies that there is a physical aspect to it. Non-physical uses of the term 'violence' need it to be qualified, typically, for interlocutors to make sense of what type of violence is being discussed. Physical violence is material in that it uses material means to achieve its ends. Moral violence is the result of attempting to achieve ends through blackmail, spying and manipulation. This bureaucratic violence, as a form of moral violence, is the one that is characteristic of the modern nation state and largely explains its successes and failures. State violence today relies mostly on this type of moral violence to create compliance.