West ‘Dead in the Water’ If Identity Politics Persists Warns UK Author

Doug Stokes, professor in International Security and the director of the Strategy and Security Institute at the University of Exeter, during an interview with NTD's British Thought Leaders programme. NTD

The West will be “dead in the water” if identity politics continue to undermine its culture, a British author warned.

Doug Stokes, professor in international security and the director of the strategy and security institute at the University of Exeter, said identity politics are absorbing “way too much” of the West’s cultural bandwidth while there is “bigger existential stuff going on right now,” such as the rise of communist China.

Speaking to NTD’s “British Thought Leaders” programme about his upcoming book Against Decolonisation: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West, Stokes highlighted the Race Equality Charter, to which 100 British universities are currently subscribed.

The “alleged anti-racist drive” hardwired the ideas of “structural racism” and “the perfidious malign nature of whiteness” throughout the British university system and it has “all kinds of ramifications for pluralism, equality, fairness, and academic freedom,” Stokes said.

With the lack of overt racism, “They go down the subjectivity route. So now it’s all about microaggressions,” he said. “If you raise an eyebrow when you’re talking to a non-white student, that can be coded as a racial microaggression.”

Stokes was referring to a now-deleted “microaggressions” list reportedly published by the University of Cambridge in 2021.

According to The Telegraph, the controversial list also included offences such as giving backhanded compliments, turning one’s back on certain people, or referring to a woman as a girl.

The list was reportedly published on the university’s “Report and Support” website, on which students can make allegations against teachers, staff, fellow students, or members of the public. It was removed from the website days after the Telegraph report was published.

The University of Cambridge is one of the 100 higher education providers subscribed to the Race Equality Charter.

‘The Individual Doesn’t Matter’

The charter states in its guiding principles that “racism is an everyday facet of UK society” and racial inequalities are “a significant issue within higher education” that “manifest themselves in everyday situations, processes and behaviours.”

It also said solutions to racial inequalities should be aimed at changing institutional culture instead of the individual, and that universities should consider the intersection of an individual’s multiple identities wherever possible.

Intersectionality is a term coined by U.S. black feminist scholar Kimberlé Williams. It’s now used by critical race theorists and activists to describe how “privileged” or “oppressed” someone is based on a growing list of characteristics such as the person’s race, sex, gender, gender identity, sexuality, and disability.

The same list is also increasingly adopted in equality laws and hate crime laws.

Under the framework of intersectionality, “the individual doesn’t matter, what matters ultimately are the immutable identity characteristics of groups,” Stokes argued.

Tracing the idea to French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, whose theories on power and knowledge led to the belief that we need to deconstruct Western narratives, science, objectivity, and truth, “which aren’t seen as things in and of themselves, or goods. They’re seen as ultimately ideological categories that have been used to oppress people throughout the global south,” Stokes said.

The West Will ‘Go Under’ Without Sense of Self

He called intersectional identity politics “an endless, endless kind of psychodrama, of self-flagellation, and said it has absorbed ”way too much for our cultural bandwidth” while Russian and Chinese regimes have begun weaponizing it to demoralise the West.

In addition, the mass immigration to the West is also resting “on an institutional architecture that’s under massive strain and massive creaking,” he said.

Stokes argued that Western countries will “go under” unless they re-discover their sense of self and identity.

“Because ultimately, any culture and society, if it’s going to project itself, or just exist, has to have a degree of self-confidence and a belief in itself,” he said.

“If it’s constantly being deconstructed and pulled apart, and endlessly denigrated—you’re wrong, you’re bad, you’re evil, you’re immoral, your history is bad—you know ... you’re dead in the water.”

The UK’s Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill was recently passed into law. Under the new law, universities and student unions have a legal obligation to protect freedom of speech and academic freedom, and universities that fail to protect freedom of speech and academic freedom would be in breach of the conditions of registration.

Stokes said he believes the new law is “quite strong,” and hopes it would switch universities “back to pluralism, equality of opportunity, and an emphasis on human dignity.”