Shaping positive identity in the context of ethnocultural information security and the struggle against the Islamic State

Abstract

© 2016, CA and CC Press AB. All rights reserved.Any, particularly a polycultural and polyethnic society, cannot but be concerned about the ways its ethnic identity takes shape and crops up in social contexts. Studies of various aspects of this problem look especially promising in a contemporary society that relies on electronic information sources and particularly important in view of the various strategies used by the Islamic State to lure new supporters. ISIS recommends itself to its potential supporters as an ideal place where true human values are respected and flourish and which has already united members of different eth- nic communities. The way ethnic identities are being shaped amid the alien cultural stereotypes imposed on them is determined by the way the communities with long-standing histories and specific cultures, confessions, and political preferences cooperate among themselves. Sociocultural coexistence of different ethnic groups in an electronic-information society requires social consensus based on compromises and complementary relations between the ethnic majorities and minorities. The Islamic State exploits this aspect to promote its ideas. Sociology and the humanities have written a lot about the ways ethnic identities are formed, however empirical studies offer widely different information about the age and other specifics of the process of acquiring a personal ethnic identity. This is why we have undertaken an analysis of the place and nature of ethnic identity in the matrix of the individual’s social identity, as well as the age specifics related to the samplings of specific ethnic affiliations. In Russia, social studies have never questioned the importance of the processes that form ethnic identity; this problem, however, has not yet been consistently studied and adequately represented. Psychologists and their colleagues working in other fields have been invariably attracted by the emergence and development of ethnic identity; today, the problems that have moved to the fore in national politics have added urgency to this and related subjects. Ethnic identity is “inherited” at birth; it becomes consolidated by use of the native language and the cultural environment, which, in turn, suggests the generally accepted standards of behavior and self-realization. Confessional identity, on the other hand, is a social construct that might be transformed or even radicalized. We have identified ethnocultural information security as cooperation among all of its subjects free from social violence that helps them meet their requirements through personal confidential and ethnoconfessional cognitive communication responsible for the referential value of the milieu and psychological health and full-scale personal development for all.