Taking a line from Orwell about surrendering to words, Brubaker and Cooper argue that the social sciences have done exactly that with identity. The term means too much when used strongly, too little when used weakly, and often nothing at all, and the confusion carries intellectual and political costs.

The constructivist rescue is no help either. Calling identities made, shifting and plural, so as to acquit the word of essentialism, leaves no reason to keep it, and no way to account for self-understandings that harden, for categories imposed coercively from outside, or for the singular belonging that identity politics actually seeks.

They propose dividing the work among plainer terms: identification and categorization for what people and institutions do to themselves and each other; self-understanding and social location for the situated sense a person has of where they stand and what that disposes them to do; and commonality, connectedness and groupness for the felt cohesion of a group.