The Power of Identity

Manuel Castells is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also University Professor and the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and Professor of Sociology at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona. He is Distinguished Visiting Professor of Technology and Society at M.I.T., and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Internet Studies at Oxford University. He is the recipient of numerous academic awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, C. Wright Mills Award, the Robert and Helen Lynd Award from the American Sociological Association, and the Ithiel de Sola Pool Award from the American Political Science Association. He is a Fellow of the European Academy, a Fellow of the Spanish Royal Academy of Economics, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He has received 16 honorary doctorates from universities around the world. He has authored 23 books, among which are: the trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, first published by Blackwell in 1996–8, which has been translated into 20 languages; and Communication Power (2009).

List of Figures xii List of Tables xiv

List of Charts xvi

Preface to the 2010 Edition of The Power of Identity xvii

Preface and Acknowledgments 2003 xxxvii

Acknowledgments 1996 xliii

Our World, our Lives 1

1 Communal Heavens: Identity and Meaning in the Network Society 5

The Construction of Identity 6

God's Heavens: Religious Fundamentalism and Cultural Identity 12

Umma versus Jahiliya: Islamic fundamentalism 13

God save me! American Christian fundamentalism 23

Nations and Nationalisms in the Age of Globalization: Imagined Communities or Communal Images? 30

Nations against the state: the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Commonwealth of Impossible States (Sojuz Nevozmoznykh Gosudarstv) 35

Nations without a state: Catalunya 45

Nations of the information age 54

Ethnic Unbonding: Race, Class, and Identity

in the Network Society 56 Territorial Identities: The Local Community 63

Conclusion: The Cultural Communes of the Information Age 68

2 The Other Face of the Earth: Social Movements against the New Global Order 71

Globalization, Informationalization, and Social Movements 72

Mexico's Zapatistas: The First Informational Guerrilla Movement 75

Who are the Zapatistas? 77

The value structure of the Zapatistas: identity, adversaries, and goals 80

The communication strategy of the Zapatistas: the Internet and the media 82

The contradictory relationship between social movement and political institution 85

Up in Arms against the New World Order: The American Militia and the Patriot Movement 87

The militias and the Patriots: a multi-thematic information network 90

The Patriots’ banners 95

Who are the Patriots? 98

The militia, the Patriots, and American society 99

The Lamas of Apocalypse: Japan's Aum Shinrikyo 100

Asahara and the development of Aum Shinrikyo 101

Aum's beliefs and methodology 104

Aum and Japanese society 105

Al-Qaeda, 9/11, and Beyond: Global Terror in the Name of God 108

The goals and values of al-Qaeda 111

The evolving process of al-Qaeda’s struggle 115

The mujahedeen and their support bases 119

The young lion of the global jihad: Osama bin Laden 124

From bin Laden to bin Mahfouz: financial networks, Islamic networks, terrorist networks 128

Networking and media politics: the organization, tactics, and strategy of al-Qaeda 135

9/11 and beyond: death or birth of a networked, global, fundamentalist movement? 140

"No Globalization without Representation!": The Anti-globalization Movement 145

"El pueblo desunido jamas sera vencido": the diversity of the anti-globalization movement 147

The values and goals of the movement against globalization 152

Networking as a political way of being 154

An informational movement: the theatrical tactics of anti-globalization militants 156

The movement in context: social change and institutional change 158

The Meaning of Insurgencies against the New Global Order 160

Conclusion: The Challenge to Globalization 166

3 The Greening of the Self: The Environmental Movement 168

The Creative Cacophony of Environmentalism: A Typology 170

The Meaning of Greening: Societal Issues and the Ecologists’ Challenge 179

Environmentalism in Action: Reaching Minds, Taming Capital, Courting the State, Tap-dancing with the Media 186

Environmental Justice: Ecologists' New Frontier 190

4 The End of Patriarchalism: Social Movements, Family, and Sexuality in the Information Age 192

The Crisis of the Patriarchal Family 196

Women at Work 215

Sisterhood is Powerful: The Feminist Movement 234

American feminism: a discontinuous continuity 235

Is feminism global? 243

Feminism: an inducive polyphony 252

The Power of Love: Lesbian and Gay Liberation Movements 261

Feminism, lesbianism, and sexual liberation movements in Taipei 266

Spaces of freedom: the gay community in San Francisco 271

Summing up: sexual identity and the patriarchal family 279

Family, Sexuality, and Personality in the Crisis of Patriarchalism 280

The incredibly shrinking family 280

The reproduction of mothering under the non-reproduction of patriarchalism 288

Body identity: the (re)construction of sexuality 294

Flexible personalities in a post-patriarchal world 299

The End of Patriarchalism? 301

5 Globalization, Identification, and the State: A Powerless State or a Network State? 303

Globalization and the State 304

The transnational core of national economies 305

A statistical appraisal of the new fiscal crisis of the state in the global economy 307

Globalization and the welfare state 312

Global communication networks, local audiences, uncertain regulators 316

A lawless world? 321

The Nation-state in the Age of Multilateralism 323

Global Governance and Networks of Nation-states 328

Identities, Local Governments, and the Deconstruction of the Nation-state 332

The Identification of the State 337

The Return of the State 340

The state, violence, and surveillance: from Big Brother to little sisters 340

American unilateralism and the new geopolitics 344

The Iraq War and its aftermath 349

The consequences of American unilateralism 353

The Crisis of the Nation-state, the Network State, and the Theory of the State 356

Conclusion: The King of the Universe, Sun Tzu, and the Crisis of Democracy 364

6 Informational Politics and the Crisis of Democracy 367

Introduction: The Politics of Society 367

Media as the Space of Politics in the Information Age 371

Politics and the media: the citizens’ connection 371

Show politics and political marketing: the American model 375

Is European politics being "Americanized"? 381

Bolivia's electronic populism: compadre Palenque and the coming of Jach'a Uru 386

Informational Politics in Action: The Politics of Scandal 391

The Crisis of Democracy 402

Conclusion: Reconstructing Democracy? 414

Conclusion: Social Change in the Network Society 419

Methodological Appendix 429

Appendix for Tables 5.1 and 5.2 429

Appendix for Figure 6.9: Level of Support for Mainstream Parties in National Elections, 1980–2002 456

Summary of Contents of Volumes I and III 464

References 466

Index 512