The Making Identity Count (MIC) project was initiated in 2015 by Ted Hopf, Srdjan Vucetic, and Bentley Allan to address a theoretical and methodological issue at the heart of constructivist research in International Relations — while qualitative/interpretivist approaches were great at recovering/producing the richness of identity discourses, they could not preserve reliability across different spatio-temporal contexts, thus limiting their applicability. Conversely, positivist/quantitative approaches to identity relied on reductive, apriori generalizations that sacrificed validity at the altar of reliability. Thus, the project had a simple aim in mind: to build a method that recovers identity in a manner that preserves the semantic richness of interpretivist techniques along with the reliability of positivist research?

On the basis of this methodological question, the project also cast a more ambitious empirical goal - the creation of a qualitative and quantitative database of identity discourses across major world powers from 1950-2010. In the initial phase, the project focused on the United States, Russia/Soviet Union, United Kingdom, China, India, Brazil, Germany, France, Italy and Japan. However, subsequently, the project also expanded its focus on other regions and countries such as Southeast Asia (under ‘MIC-ASIA’), and Estonia.

Since its inception, MIC has aided several research projects that have culminated in publications, which can be accessed on our page here.