Making Identity Count
The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1736.
How do different countries perceive the self and their significant others? Furthermore, what discourses of identity dominate the self, and which discourses occupy a more peripheral space?
This research project assembles a constructivist, intersubjective database of national identities that will become a key source for International Relations scholars who wish to include constructivist arguments in their scholarship. The project covers eleven great powers (Brazil, China, Estonia, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, USSR/Russia, USA, and UK) in nine years (1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, 2015, 2020).
The first series of national identity reports was released in September 2019. The latest addition to MIC is Estonia, which was completed in 2025 at the University of Tartu.
About Our Project
Project Coordinators
Amit Julka is an Assistant Professor at the Department of International Relations, Ashoka University. He received his PhD in Political Science from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and was both a Fellow and Research Associate at the Asia Research Institute, NUS. His research interests include the role of mass common-sense and popular culture in foreign policy, Gramscian theory and South Asian politics. He is currently working on his book, Common Sense Matters: India and the Kashmir Crisis, 1947-50 (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press)
Manali Kumar is an International Postdoctoral Fellow with the Institute of Political Science at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland). She received her PhD in Political Science from the National University of Singapore. Her current research probes the extent to which a state’s national identity and interests change as it becomes constructed as a “rising power.”
Co-Principal Investigator
Srdjan Vucetic is a Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa. His research interests involve international hierarchy, international security, and foreign and defence policy analysis. He is the author of The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations (Stanford, 2011) and Greatness and Decline: National Identity and British Foreign Policy (McGill-Queen’s, 2021).