Editor's introduction to special issue on ‘Us vs Them’

Two years ago the theme of the annual APCS conference was Hope for Hard Times: Anxiety, Alienation and Activism. In 2008, the theme was Ethics in an Age of Diminishing Distance: The Clash of Difference. Meanwhile, we at PCS have long hoped to create a special issue devoted to understanding what has been implicit in our hard times and explicit in the clash of difference: how do we understand the way that the us becomes constituted in opposition to a them, and is there any hope of getting beyond the kind of polarizations in which we either refuse to, or simply cannot, find ourselves in the other? Many social theorists have written about the lack of accountability and responsibility of corporate and government leaders to their workers and citizens that marks contemporary Western culture. For Zygmunt Bauman (2001), one significant consequence of the precarious state in which many of us find ourselves is the creation of ‘us vs them’ polarizations. He notes, ‘The kind of uncertainty, of dark premonitions and fears of the future that haunt men and women in the fluid, perpetually changing social environment in which the rules of the game change in the middle of the game without warning or legible pattern, does not unite the sufferers: it splits them and sets them apart’ (p. 48).

I began writing this introduction during the heady week in which Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. For many of us, what makes Obama attractive is his seeming ability to resist the pull to polarize, apparent both in the way he lives and in the way he thinks. He first came to prominence in 2004, when he proclaimed that there are no red (Republican majority) states, no blue (Democrat majority) states - only the United States of America. This at a time when US governmental and media discourse seemed downright giddy with the pleasures of provoking ‘us vs them’ hatred as frequently as possible: the good ‘Coalition’ vs the Axis of Evil, freedom