Critical security studies, racism and eclecticism

Abstract

Introduction This forum is about race and racism in critical security studies, as well as the latter’s reparative possibilities. Racism is a ubiquitous ailment in many societies and manifests itself differently under varying circumstances (Clair and Denis, 2015; McWhorter, 2019). It is a complex phenomenon that is sometimes hard to define or dismiss. In most cases, racism may be invisible, systemic or structural. For the purposes of this article, racism includes bigotry, prejudice or discrimination against people on the basis of identity, usually race, ethnicity or culture. The above terms are problematic and require explanations, but these cannot be provided in such a short article. Racism may be directed against people who are in a majority, as was the case in South Africa for over a century until the 1990s. It may also be directed against a minority, as is the case in the USA with regard to blacks, in China with regard to Uighurs, and in Myanmar in relation to the Rohingya. This definition of racism is minimalist and may not cover racism in some circumstances. Moreover, racism is primarily about power, control and exploitation. Those who have lived the experience of racism and those who have only read about it understand it in profoundly different ways. Although racism has been largely associated with relationships in which whites discriminate against non-whites, there have been situations in which whites have been at the receiving end of racism. For example, the Anglo-Celtic in Australia discriminated against Aborigines for centuries and against the newly arrived white Italians and Greeks after World War II. The expulsion of Asians from Uganda under Idi Amin in the 1970s resulted from racism perpetrated by non-whites against other non-whites. The call for interventions in this forum refers to critical security studies as a field of study and practice, but this field comprises different research programmes that are sharply divided (Mutimer, 2010). So, establishing that these competitive programmes, such as constructivism, post-structuralism and critical theory, are racist would be difficult (see Hansen, 2020; Howell and RichterMontpetit, 2020; Wæver and Buzan, 2020). In what follows, I explain the global multiracial forces that gave rise to critical security studies, as well as some reparative possibilities. In the next section, I explore the diverse global forces that brought into being critical security studies and posit that claims about its origins in the Frankfurt School and Antonio Gramsci are exaggerated (Bilgin, 2008). I argue that persistent claims of its intellectual heritage from only European sources have effectively reduced the visibility of the racial diversity of its bases and