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**Identity Politics
**Part of the pressure on governance will come from new forms of identity politics centered on religious convictions and ethnic affiliation. Over the next 15 years, religious identity is likely to become an increasingly important factor in how people define themselves. The trend toward identity politics is linked to increased mobility, growing diversity of hostile groups within states, and the diffusion of modern communications technologies.
While we do not have comprehensive data on the number of people who have joined a religious faith or converted from one faith to another in recent years, trends seem to point toward growing numbers of converts and a ***deepening religious commitment ***by many religious adherents.
Such religious-based movements have been common in times of social and political turmoil in the past and have oftentimes been a force for positive change. For example, scholars see the growth of evangelism in Latin America as providing the uprooted, racially disadvantaged and often poorest groups, including women, “with a social network that would otherwise be lacking… providing members with skills they need to survive in a rapidly developing society…(and helping) to promote the development of civil society in the region.” [10]
At the same time, the desire by activist groups to change society often leads to more social and political turmoil, some of it violent. In particular, there are likely to be frictions in mixed communities as the activists attempt to gain converts among other religious groups or older established religious institutions. In keeping with the intense religious convictions of many of these movements, activists define their identities in opposition to “outsiders,” which can foster strife.
Radical Islam. Most of the regions that will experience gains in religious “activists” also have youth bulges, which experts have correlated with high numbers of **radical **adherents, including Muslim extremists. [11]
cia.gov/nic/NIC_globaltrend2020_s3.html#page83
**Identity Politics
**Part of the pressure on governance will come from new forms of identity politics centered on religious convictions and ethnic affiliation. Over the next 15 years, religious identity is likely to become an increasingly important factor in how people define themselves. The trend toward identity politics is linked to increased mobility, growing diversity of hostile groups within states, and the diffusion of modern communications technologies.
- The primacy of ethnic and religious identities will provide followers with a ready-made community that serves as a “social safety net” in times of need—particularly important to migrants. Such communities also provide networks that can lead to job opportunities.
While we do not have comprehensive data on the number of people who have joined a religious faith or converted from one faith to another in recent years, trends seem to point toward growing numbers of converts and a ***deepening religious commitment ***by many religious adherents.
- For example, Christianity, Buddhism, and other religions and practices are spreading in such countries as China as Marxism declines, and the proportion of evangelical converts in traditionally heavily Catholic Latin America is rising.
- By 2020, China and Nigeria will have some of the largest Christian communities in the world, a shift that will reshape the traditionally Western-based Christian institutions, giving them more of an African or Asian or, more broadly, a developing world face.
- Western Europe stands apart from this growing global “religiosity” except for the migrant communities from Africa and the Middle East. Many of the churches’ traditional functions—education, social services, etc.—are now performed by the state. A more pervasive, insistent secularism, however, might not foster the cultural acceptance of new Muslim immigrants who view as discriminatory the ban in some West European countries against displays of religious adherence.
Such religious-based movements have been common in times of social and political turmoil in the past and have oftentimes been a force for positive change. For example, scholars see the growth of evangelism in Latin America as providing the uprooted, racially disadvantaged and often poorest groups, including women, “with a social network that would otherwise be lacking… providing members with skills they need to survive in a rapidly developing society…(and helping) to promote the development of civil society in the region.” [10]
At the same time, the desire by activist groups to change society often leads to more social and political turmoil, some of it violent. In particular, there are likely to be frictions in mixed communities as the activists attempt to gain converts among other religious groups or older established religious institutions. In keeping with the intense religious convictions of many of these movements, activists define their identities in opposition to “outsiders,” which can foster strife.
Radical Islam. Most of the regions that will experience gains in religious “activists” also have youth bulges, which experts have correlated with high numbers of **radical **adherents, including Muslim extremists. [11]
cia.gov/nic/NIC_globaltrend2020_s3.html#page83