Identity and violence: the illusion of destiny

The world may be more riven by murderous violence than ever before, yet Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen argues in this sweeping philosophical work that the brutalities are driven as much by confusion as by inescapable hatred.

It was at the age of eleven that Amartya Sen first encountered murder. The Hindu-Muslim riots, which suddenly erupted in the 1940s in India, were led by instigators on both sides. Most of the victims - both Hindus and Muslims - in those riots were poor labourers of the same class. But nothing other than religious identity was allowed to count in the murderous world of singular classification.

Sen argues in his new book that conflict and violence are sustained today, no less than in the past, by the illusion of a unique identity. Indeed, the world is increasingly taken to be divided between religions (or 'cultures' or 'civilizations'), ig noring the relevance of other ways in which people see them selves through class, gender, profession, language, literature, science, music, morals or politics, and denying the real possi bilities of reasoned choices. When good relations among dif ferent human beings are identified in this way, human beings are deeply miniaturized and deposited into little boxes.

Here Sen overturns such stereotypes as 'the monolithic Middle East' or 'the Western Mind'. Through his penetrating inves tigation of multiculturalism, fundamentalism, terrorism and globalization, he brings out the need for a clear-headed under standing of human freedom and a constructive public voice in global civil society. The world, Sen shows, can be made to move towards peace as firmly as it has recently spiralled towards war.