PIP: As attention has shifted from a concern for citizenship, equality, and welfare to ideas of empowerment, equity, and governance, the locus of competition over power has rested with "identity politics," a recognition of cultural diversity that claims the legitimate right to produce alternative definitions and symbols of identity in public space. The change in identity formation from universal/national to fractured/tribalizing has implications for gender relations in contexts where patriarchal power controls production and reproduction. Except for feminism, all discourses in the current competition over identity politics are patriarchal. A look at the forces of change that shifted the process of modernization to a process of globalization reveals that, while modernization tends to standardize, globalization embraces the contradictory forces of universalizing and diversifying trends. Issues of identity and inequality were not problematic until the modern and the traditional subsumed each other and, thus, revealed the inherent contradictions of modernization. The diversifying forces that jeopardize the transnationalization of identity into membership in a "human society" include 1) language differences among the working classes, 2) growing global inequalities, and 3) collective memories of antagonistic histories. An analysis of gender based on identity politics can be conducted on a macro-level to understand the reluctance of central governments to initiate certain interventions, competing needs, new contradictions, changing gender roles, and the importance of promoting a global social contract.^ieng