E/CN.4/2003/24 page 8 or implicitly provides the principal basis for the mindset and practices of discrimination, racism, xenophobia and intolerance. The exaggeration of the factor of identity, a defensive reflex against homogenization, exacerbates the tendency to turn back in on the nation, community, group, ethnic grouping, religion and way of life, pitting “our values” against “theirs”. The most extreme, violent and intractable of today’s major new conflicts are essentially rooted in cultural antagonisms, the common feature of which is the emergence of the other, often one’s erstwhile neighbour, as a threat, an enemy, someone who is radically and irredeemably different, a “complete stranger”. 10. This ominous trend towards globalization has even been given its own theory, i.e. an intellectual construct providing it with a conceptual and historical justification and rationale. Samuel Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is a case in point.1 In this context reality, illusions, fantasies, strategies and the manipulation of control and domination become intermingled and distort the objective perception of problems and formulation of sustainable responses to discrimination. 11. In the spirit of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, which place the question of racism and discrimination in the wider global context, it is therefore necessary to devise a new approach in which action must be informed by reflection on the underlying causes, mechanisms, processes, expressions and modalities of racism and racial discrimination. In other words, in the fight for political, social and economic democracy, legal instruments and mechanisms must be designed on the basis of an intellectual strategy that seeks to attack the cultural roots of discrimination, which ultimately mould attitudes and behaviour. The Special Rapporteur therefore believes that at the heart of discriminatory cultures and practices stand two particularly sensitive concepts which foster and shape the majority of today’s cultural conflicts: the manipulation of diversity and exaggerated concern with identity. 12. According to the dominant way of thinking, the concept of diversity appears, increasingly, as the response to the risks of cultural homogenization posed by globalization and to exaggerated concern with cultural, religious, ethnic and community-based identity. The concept has ideological and historical connotations and is influenced, to an excessive degree, by context and political, philosophical and ideological factors. Diversity itself is not a value, in the ethical sense of the term. From a philosophical perspective, the notion of diversity had powerful connotations in the philosophical and scientific discourse of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Scientific and philosophical treatises on the diversity of species and races produced theories about natural hierarchies. They served not only as an ideological and philosophical prop for the formulation of theories based on racial, ethnic, social and religious discrimination, but also as an intellectual framework to justify practices of exploitation and domination such as the slave trade or colonialism, which are specifically mentioned in the final document of the Durban Conference. It is precisely this manipulation of diversity which lies at the heart of ethnocentricism. All manifestations of ethnocentricism have been constructed, historically, ideologically and culturally, around the concept of diversity interpreted as radical difference, inequality, and discrimination against the other. It would therefore be useful to revisit the concept of identity in the framework of a new intellectual and ethical strategy against racism and discrimination.