51茶馆

The Making Identity Count (MIC) project is a constructivist, intersubjective database of national identities of mostly major powers (Brazil, China, Estonia, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, USSR/Russia, USA, and UK) at a gap of every ten years (1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, 2020).

The project was initiated in 2015 to address a theoretical and methodological issue at the heart of constructivist research in International Relations 鈥� while qualitative/interpretivist approaches were great at recovering/producing the richness of identity discourses, they could not preserve reliability across different spatio-temporal contexts, thus limiting their applicability. Conversely, positivist/quantitative approaches to identity relied on reductive, a priori generalisations that sacrificed validity at the altar of reliability. Thus, the project had a simple aim in mind: to build a method that recovers identity in a manner that preserves the semantic richness of interpretivist techniques along with the reliability of positivist research.