Francis Fukuyama: Exploring contemporary identity politics and the struggle for recognition

Watch best-selling professor Francis Fukuyama deliver the last PSA-British Library lecture for 2018 as he speaks with Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge, Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham, about identity and contemporary politics.

Against the recent rise in populist and economic nationalism, historian and bestselling author Francis Fukuyama traces the development of the idea of identity. He draws on this history to deliver a sharp warning: that unless we forge a universal understanding of human dignity, we are doomed to endure continual conflict.

Francis Fukuyama saw our current crisis coming. In 2014 he wrote that American and global institutions were in disarray and too weak to withstand the capture of the state by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions are being borne out with the rise of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarianism is destabilising the international order. These populist nationalists claim a direct connection with ‘the people’, a group usually defined in narrow and exclusionary terms. It seems that the demands of identity define world politics today. Anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicised Islam, the fractious environment of many college campuses, and the re-emergence of white nationalism – all these are rooted in challenges to the universal recognition that is the basis of liberal democracy. Too many now gravitate towards restrictive forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, or ethnicity. 

Francis Fukuyama is a Professor at Stanford University’s Institute for International Studies and Director of the Institute’s Centre on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. He is the author of Political Order and Political Decay, The Origins of Political Order, The Great Disruption, Our Posthuman Future and State Building, among others. He is known for his influential 1989 essay, The End of History? which announced the triumph of liberal democracy and was a timely and influential thesis that chimed with the ending of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union and is still highly relevant in current ideological debates. 

The lecture was filmed on 12 October 2018.