What Makes Humanity? Identities, Relationships, and a New Cosmopolitanism

This panel discussion relates directly to one of the sub-themes, Equity and Inclusion, under the Democracy Summit’s Advancing Respect for Human Rights thematic area. Identity is a critical issue in dealing with inclusion. The question of who is included, either formally or informally, as a full participant in democracy, including its various institutional and community elements, is frequently determined by who is “us” and who is “them” and how strongly these distinctions of identity are felt.

With the rise of various forms of tribalism and nationalism throughout the world, questions of collective identity and belonging have surged to prominence in recent years. Across numerous disciplines and discourses, a key dilemma has taken shape: how to reconcile the legitimate yearning for rootedness and locality, with the fluidity and porousness of an increasingly global age. On the one hand, prevailing responses to this dilemma, including those shaped by predominant forms of nationalism, liberalism, and globalism, are struggling to resolve the tension. On the other hand, a range of perspectives deriving from alternate sites of collective life and value—for example, indigenous communities, postcolonial and social justice movements, religion, environmental movements, and cosmopolitan networks—cast the dilemma in a different light. This panel discussion is the first in a series over the next several months (see here: https://comitresearch.org/speaker-series/identity-belonging-global-age/) that brings together leading thinkers from a variety of perspectives to examine and reframe the crises of identity that confront us in a rapidly changing global age, and to think deeply about how humanity might resolve them.