Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy

Who is better prepared to confront challenges and defend principles in a volatile modern world? Those with strong national, religious, ethnic, or tribal identities who accept democracy, or democrats who renounce identity as a kind of divisive prejudice?

Natan Sharansky, building on his personal experience as a dissident, argues that valueless cosmopolitanism, even in democracies, is dangerous. Better to have hostile identities framed by democracy than democrats indifferent to identity.

In a vigorous, insightful challenge to the left and right alike, Natan Sharansky, as he has proved repeatedly, is at the leading edge of the issues that frame our times.

Natan Sharansky, former Soviet dissident, political prisoner, and human rights icon, has spent his life championing democracy and freedom. In 1977, he was arrested by the KGB for his activism and his support for Soviet Jew' demands to emigrate to Israel and imprisoned for nine years. He is the author of Fear No Evil and The Case for Democracy. Sharansky has served as a senior minister in the Israeli government, and now heads The Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies.