Colouring critical security studies: A view from the classroom

Abstract

A few years ago, during the first session of my elective security studies course on Islamist politics in the Middle East, I went around the room and asked the students, ‘Why are you taking this course?’ In their responses, the students expressed interest in topics like ‘global terrorism’, ‘Islamic fundamentalism’, ‘Muslim immigrants’, ‘radicalism among young Muslims’ and the ‘influx of Muslim refugees’. These themes were familiar, not least because they have become somewhat synonymous with mainstream academic and popular discussions of Islam and the Middle East. However, it was the response of a student of colour that stood out. She announced, ‘I’m taking this course because the literature is not just white people talking about Islam.’ Sensing that her statement had made some of the other (white) students visibly uncomfortable, she approached me at the end of the session and explained, ‘My family is from the Middle East, and I am just tired of the Eurocentric approach to the way we are taught about the Middle East. What about the opinions of people who look like me?’ There was no mention of race or racism in the description of the course. Come to think of it, I was strategic in my reluctance to use the ‘R-word’ (Rutazibwa, 2016: 193). Knowing the contentious nature of its deployment (Rutazibwa, 2016: 192), I was worried about the optics and professional consequences of me, an early-career researcher of colour employed at a predominantly white department, openly pursuing racial diversity in the curriculum of a course catering to a largely white student body. Instead, I had chosen the somewhat less contentious alternative ‘Eurocentrism’ to describe the course as an opportunity for students to learn about the hierarchies and biases that animate the epistemological foundations of international relations as a discipline. The discussions in the course were inspired by the intellectual ethos of critical security studies and used Islamist politics as the empirical basis for deliberating how and why the Middle East came to be seen as a bastion of ‘backwardness’ and a source of insecurity (vis-a-vis the West) in global politics (Lockman, 2004; Nayak and Malone, 2009; Ramakrishnan, 1999; Teti, 2007). Students read Said’s (1979) work on the construction of the ‘Orient’ in the Western imagination as a place of exotic barbarism, Collins and Glover’s (2002) assessment of the discursive politics of America’s global war on terror, Abu-Lughod’s (2013) writings on the perception of Muslim women as victims in need of saving, and Anderson’s (2006) critique of American political scientists’ overwhelming