Identity

The bestselling author of The Origins of Political Order and The End of History offers a provocative examination of modern identity politics and their effect on domestic and international affairs of state.

In 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American and global institutions were in a state of decay, as the state was captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatens to destabilise the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to 'the people', who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole.

The demands of identity direct much of what is going on in world politics today. The universal recognition on which liberal democracy is based has been increasingly challenged by restrictive forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, which have resulted in anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicised Islam, the fractious environment of many college campuses, and the hideous emergence of white nationalism.

Identity is an urgent and necessary book: a sharp warning that unless we forge a universal understanding of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continual conflict.

About the Author

Francis Fukuyama is a Professor at Stanford University's Institute for International Studies. He has previously taught at Johns Hopkins University and at George Mason University. Fukuyama was a researcher at the RAND Corporation and served as the Deputy Director for the State Department's Policy planning staff. He is the author of Political Order and Political Decay, The Origins of Political Order, The Great Disruption, Our Posthuman Future and State Building. He lives with his wife in California.