The Power of Identity: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume II (The Information Age) 2nd Edition - Softcover

In the second volume of his Information Age trilogy, Manuel Castells examines the threat posed to the nation-state by the rise of collective "resistance identities," which may over time develop into "project identities" with specific socially transformative goals in mind. His scope is broad, encompassing everything from Mexico's Zapatista movement to the rise of militias in the United States to broader antipatriarchal projects launched by feminists, gay communities, and environmental activists. Castell's dry academic style may be distancing to some readers; Benjamin R. Barber's Jihad vs. McWorld provides a similar argument (with equal intellectual rigor) in slightly more accessible prose.

The Power of Identity is the second volume of Manuel Castells’ trilogy, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. It deals with the social, political, and cultural dynamics associated with the technological transformation of our societies and with the globalization of the economy. It analyzes the importance of cultural, religious, and national identities as sources of meaning for people, and the implications of these identities for social movements. It studies grassroots mobilizations against the unfettered globalization of wealth and power, and considers the formation of alternative projects of social organization, as represented by the environmental movement and the women’s movement. It also analyzes the crisis of the nation-state and its transformation into a network state, and the effects on political democracies of the difficulties of international governance and the submission of political representation to the dictates of media politics and the politics of scandal.

This substantially expanded second edition updates and elaborates the analysis of these themes, adding new sections on al-Qaeda and global terrorist networks, on the anti-globalization movement, on American unilateralism and the conflicts of global governance, on the crisis of political legitimacy throughout the world, and on the theory of the network state.