Security as white privilege: Racializing whiteness in critical security studies

Abstract

In this article, I argue that whiteness and white privilege are structural and structuring of concepts and assumptions central to critical security studies, even though they oftentimes remain unnamed and unmarked in discussions within the field. I owe this discussion to a set of important contributions in international relations pointing to and reflecting upon the centrality of race and racism as structuring categories of modern world politics (Anievas et al., 2015; Henderson, 2013; Sabaratnam, 2020; Vitalis, 2015).1 More specifically, I owe it to reflections from critical security studies pointing to the racist implications of traditional frameworks in security studies, which naturalize political categories that reinforce white supremacy, such as sovereignty, ‘humanitarian’ intervention, and the primacy of the nation-state (Barkawi and Laffey, 2006; Bhuta, 2008; Hill, 2005; Wai, 2012). In spite of these important contributions, critical security studies authors often mobilize race and racism as referring to racialized non-white Others, who are somehow brought from outside to within the field in order to disturb some of its main assumptions. In such framing of critical approaches, whiteness within critical security studies remains an unmarked, unnamed, and nonracialized norm, taken for granted and therefore naturalized.2 With this in mind, here I propose to racialize whiteness as a structural and structuring power position within critical security studies. I stand for the urgent necessity of naming whiteness, making it visible, and recognizing its implications for our knowledge production and political activism. Any discussion on race, racism, and ‘reparative possibilities’ for critical security studies, as proposed in this special issue, must acknowledge whiteness as the dominant part of racial oppressive systems, along with the role that white critical security studies scholars play within racist systems of social domination. At this point, I think it is important to mark my own positionality as author. Here I ‘speak’ from a privileged position of whiteness within the racial regime of a deeply racist country: Brazil. Moreover, it is important to highlight the institutional context within which I write this article: between the air-conditioned walls of an elitist university in the whiter and richer region of Rio de