Do we live in a time of “identity tyranny”? Our public and private lives are filled with the pursuit of building, shaping, maintaining, expressing, defending, and preserving our identities. Identity is the totem concept of our time. But in scholarly reflection on collective identities an uncritically positive perception of identity is not without risk. In this issue, as a starting point for examining that risk, we approach identity neutrally as a “relational” concept: we can have an identity only in regard to someone who is not us. What does this signify in the social world? It means that each “we” and each “we feeling” reflects the emergence of a group identity and can only arise on the basis of the recognition that someone does not belong to that “we” – others are not “of us” because they are not like us. Identity implies difference. Otherness, on the other hand, can lead to alienation, exclusion, and hostility, even to the point of the entire elimination of the stranger.

Arjun Appadurai describes as “predatory” those identities that require the radical removal of outsiders in order to protect themselves. A predatory identity, which refers to otherness and foreignness, simultaneously condemns itself to annihilation. In this issue of State of Affairs authors focus on the conditions and mechanisms for the formation of predatory identities in large- and small-scale politics, in social movements and spatial planning, in relations between majorities and minorities, and in digitised and non-digitised media communication. As a background for understanding some of the sources of predation, we have included a text by Hans Joas on the predatory encroachments of politics on religion, and an interview in which the interviewees discuss manifestations of predation in the academic world, along with potential remedies.