Pub Date : 2022-02-23DOI: 10.1177/09670106211064040
D. Curtis, F. Ebila, Maria Martin de Almagro
The limitations of conventional accounts of security and peacebuilding drawing upon the ‘expert’ knowledge of military elites, policymakers and civil society representatives have been widely recognized. This has led security and peacebuilding policymakers, including through the United Nations Women, Peace and Security agenda, to search for alternative forms of knowledge, such as memoirs, photographs or oral histories, that better reflect lived experiences within local communities. Building on existing work on memoirs as knowledge production artefacts and on feminist security studies, this article demystifies experiential security knowledge through an analysis of three memoirs written by women ex-combatants in Uganda. We argue that while the memoirs offer complex and contradictory narratives about women ex-combatants, they are also the products of transnational mediated processes, whereby the interests of power translate complex narratives into consolidated representations and sturdy tropes of the abducted African woman ex-combatant. This means that although the three memoirs provide some hints as to transformative ways of thinking about security and peace, and offer dynamic accounts of personal experiences, they also reflect the politics of dominant representational practices.
{"title":"Memoirs of women-in-conflict: Ugandan ex-combatants and the production of knowledge on security and peacebuilding","authors":"D. Curtis, F. Ebila, Maria Martin de Almagro","doi":"10.1177/09670106211064040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106211064040","url":null,"abstract":"The limitations of conventional accounts of security and peacebuilding drawing upon the ‘expert’ knowledge of military elites, policymakers and civil society representatives have been widely recognized. This has led security and peacebuilding policymakers, including through the United Nations Women, Peace and Security agenda, to search for alternative forms of knowledge, such as memoirs, photographs or oral histories, that better reflect lived experiences within local communities. Building on existing work on memoirs as knowledge production artefacts and on feminist security studies, this article demystifies experiential security knowledge through an analysis of three memoirs written by women ex-combatants in Uganda. We argue that while the memoirs offer complex and contradictory narratives about women ex-combatants, they are also the products of transnational mediated processes, whereby the interests of power translate complex narratives into consolidated representations and sturdy tropes of the abducted African woman ex-combatant. This means that although the three memoirs provide some hints as to transformative ways of thinking about security and peace, and offer dynamic accounts of personal experiences, they also reflect the politics of dominant representational practices.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"53 1","pages":"402 - 419"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2022-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43019937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-01DOI: 10.1177/09670106211061084
J. Hobson
This article emerges out of the racism debate in Security Dialogue (May 2020). It takes its cue from the passing claim that Orientalism/Eurocentrism is different from racism and that the former is deemed to be relatively innocuous while the latter is viewed as egregious. Here I reveal how Eurocentrism is equivalent to cultural racism. I show how racism has outwardly shapeshifted through time in everyday life and world politics, and how orthodox international relations theory’s racist trajectory has mirrored this. Since 1945, modern orthodox international relations theory has covered its racism with a non-racist mask through a sublimated discourse that focuses on cultural difference but is white racism in disguise. Unmasking modern international relations/international political economy theory exposes this sublimated racist discourse by revealing its racist double move: first, it whitewashes racism and denies its presence in the conduct of world politics and the global economy in the last three centuries, thereby providing an apologia for racist practices; second, it advances subliminal cultural-racist analytical/explanatory frameworks. I close by solving the conundrum as to how white orthodox international relations scholars who are most probably non-racist (though not anti-racist) in their personal lives embrace, albeit unwittingly, racist theories of world politics and the global economy.
{"title":"Unmasking the racism of orthodox international relations/international political economy theory","authors":"J. Hobson","doi":"10.1177/09670106211061084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106211061084","url":null,"abstract":"This article emerges out of the racism debate in Security Dialogue (May 2020). It takes its cue from the passing claim that Orientalism/Eurocentrism is different from racism and that the former is deemed to be relatively innocuous while the latter is viewed as egregious. Here I reveal how Eurocentrism is equivalent to cultural racism. I show how racism has outwardly shapeshifted through time in everyday life and world politics, and how orthodox international relations theory’s racist trajectory has mirrored this. Since 1945, modern orthodox international relations theory has covered its racism with a non-racist mask through a sublimated discourse that focuses on cultural difference but is white racism in disguise. Unmasking modern international relations/international political economy theory exposes this sublimated racist discourse by revealing its racist double move: first, it whitewashes racism and denies its presence in the conduct of world politics and the global economy in the last three centuries, thereby providing an apologia for racist practices; second, it advances subliminal cultural-racist analytical/explanatory frameworks. I close by solving the conundrum as to how white orthodox international relations scholars who are most probably non-racist (though not anti-racist) in their personal lives embrace, albeit unwittingly, racist theories of world politics and the global economy.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"53 1","pages":"3 - 20"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48513555","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-02DOI: 10.1177/09670106211050811
S. de Jong
This article develops a novel analytical framework for capturing the multiple, competing configurations that the migration-security nexus invokes in discourse and practice, combining insights from critical migration and security scholarship. The framework’s application is illustrated with an empirical case study of the protection and relocation of Afghan and Iraqi former local interpreters and other locally employed civilians working for Western armies. The analysis demonstrates that locally employed civilians (LECs) are simultaneously considered security actors in the East and security risks in the West, the ‘best and brightest’ causing brain drain and potential terrorists when crossing borders, both ‘model migrants’ and threats to western values. By uncovering the nexus’s multiple configurations and its contradictions, the framework supports the project of denaturalizing the migration-security nexus, while also showing that the discourses and practices justified through its various configurations include the legitimation of border violence and the denial of protection to migrants.
{"title":"Resettling Afghan and Iraqi interpreters employed by Western armies: The Contradictions of the Migration–Security Nexus","authors":"S. de Jong","doi":"10.1177/09670106211050811","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106211050811","url":null,"abstract":"This article develops a novel analytical framework for capturing the multiple, competing configurations that the migration-security nexus invokes in discourse and practice, combining insights from critical migration and security scholarship. The framework’s application is illustrated with an empirical case study of the protection and relocation of Afghan and Iraqi former local interpreters and other locally employed civilians working for Western armies. The analysis demonstrates that locally employed civilians (LECs) are simultaneously considered security actors in the East and security risks in the West, the ‘best and brightest’ causing brain drain and potential terrorists when crossing borders, both ‘model migrants’ and threats to western values. By uncovering the nexus’s multiple configurations and its contradictions, the framework supports the project of denaturalizing the migration-security nexus, while also showing that the discourses and practices justified through its various configurations include the legitimation of border violence and the denial of protection to migrants.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"53 1","pages":"220 - 237"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2021-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46369709","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-19DOI: 10.1177/09670106211051943
Jutta Bakonyi
This article uses the example of the Mogadishu International Airport zone and takes a spatio-temporal lens to explore how (sovereign) power unfolds in international interventions that aim at building a sovereign state. I show that the Mogadishu International Airport zone emerges as an elastic frontier zone that contradicts the sovereign imaginary intervenors aim to project and undermines many of the taken-for-granted boundaries that states tend to produce. The Mogadishu International Airport and similar zones emphasize the centrality of logistics and circulation in interventions, but also point towards their temporal and liminal character. Modularity became the material answer to the demand to secure circulation while adapting to the rapid rhythm and short timeframes of statebuilding. Modular designs enable the constant adaptation of the intervention terrain, allow intervenors to deny their power and imprint and facilitate the commercialization of supply chains and intervention materials. Sovereign power that operates through such zones becomes modular itself. It is exercised as an adaptable, in parts exchangeable, and highly mobile form of power that operates through crises and emergencies. The spaces and materials created by modular forms of sovereign power remain elusive, but nonetheless stratify experiences of power and security.
{"title":"Modular sovereignty and infrastructural power: The elusive materiality of international statebuilding","authors":"Jutta Bakonyi","doi":"10.1177/09670106211051943","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106211051943","url":null,"abstract":"This article uses the example of the Mogadishu International Airport zone and takes a spatio-temporal lens to explore how (sovereign) power unfolds in international interventions that aim at building a sovereign state. I show that the Mogadishu International Airport zone emerges as an elastic frontier zone that contradicts the sovereign imaginary intervenors aim to project and undermines many of the taken-for-granted boundaries that states tend to produce. The Mogadishu International Airport and similar zones emphasize the centrality of logistics and circulation in interventions, but also point towards their temporal and liminal character. Modularity became the material answer to the demand to secure circulation while adapting to the rapid rhythm and short timeframes of statebuilding. Modular designs enable the constant adaptation of the intervention terrain, allow intervenors to deny their power and imprint and facilitate the commercialization of supply chains and intervention materials. Sovereign power that operates through such zones becomes modular itself. It is exercised as an adaptable, in parts exchangeable, and highly mobile form of power that operates through crises and emergencies. The spaces and materials created by modular forms of sovereign power remain elusive, but nonetheless stratify experiences of power and security.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"53 1","pages":"256 - 278"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2021-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43506706","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-11DOI: 10.1177/09670106211054902
H. Al-Noaimi
This article investigates the development of militarism in the Arab Gulf using the militarized representation of the Bedouin and their poetic tradition as a site for its analysis. The article traces the ways in which Bedouin ‘martial masculinities’ and Bedouin culture have been appropriated and transformed by British colonialism and postcolonial nationalisms to produce unusual patterns of militarism within the Gulf. It addresses a gap in international relations and security studies literature, in which militarism is examined through state-centric and methodologically nationalist framings that largely overlook transnational and colonial histories. The article argues that contemporary displays of militarism by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates should be read in relation to how colonialism engendered militarism across the Gulf region through the paradoxical representation of the Bedouin as a ‘martial race’ whose martial-ness was also seen as a security ‘threat’ for the colonial/postcolonial state. Militarized responses and rationalities were normalized within Gulf society through the ‘Bedouin warrior’ stereotype, which served as a timeless and fixed construct, connecting the Gulf’s disjointed past to its present-day context. Significantly, the ‘Bedouin warrior’ stereotype helps foster the belief that stability and historical continuity underpin state-modernization processes in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The article’s intervention seeks to disrupt this continuity by looking at how militarism and its martial constructs created ruptures in state trajectories, using the example of the 1996 coup attempt, citizen revocations, and the depoliticization of the poetic act as evidence for the claim that militarism engenders particular insecurities for Bedouin populations in the Arab Gulf.
{"title":"Militarism and the Bedouin: Intersections of colonialism, gender, and race in the Arab Gulf","authors":"H. Al-Noaimi","doi":"10.1177/09670106211054902","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106211054902","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the development of militarism in the Arab Gulf using the militarized representation of the Bedouin and their poetic tradition as a site for its analysis. The article traces the ways in which Bedouin ‘martial masculinities’ and Bedouin culture have been appropriated and transformed by British colonialism and postcolonial nationalisms to produce unusual patterns of militarism within the Gulf. It addresses a gap in international relations and security studies literature, in which militarism is examined through state-centric and methodologically nationalist framings that largely overlook transnational and colonial histories. The article argues that contemporary displays of militarism by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates should be read in relation to how colonialism engendered militarism across the Gulf region through the paradoxical representation of the Bedouin as a ‘martial race’ whose martial-ness was also seen as a security ‘threat’ for the colonial/postcolonial state. Militarized responses and rationalities were normalized within Gulf society through the ‘Bedouin warrior’ stereotype, which served as a timeless and fixed construct, connecting the Gulf’s disjointed past to its present-day context. Significantly, the ‘Bedouin warrior’ stereotype helps foster the belief that stability and historical continuity underpin state-modernization processes in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The article’s intervention seeks to disrupt this continuity by looking at how militarism and its martial constructs created ruptures in state trajectories, using the example of the 1996 coup attempt, citizen revocations, and the depoliticization of the poetic act as evidence for the claim that militarism engenders particular insecurities for Bedouin populations in the Arab Gulf.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"52 1","pages":"529 - 545"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2021-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42901250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-11DOI: 10.1177/09670106211054901
J. Gani
In this article, I ask three key questions: First, what is the relationship between militarism and race? Second, how does colonialism shape that relationship to produce racial militarism on both sides of the imperial encounter? And, third, what is the function of racial militarism? I build on Fanon’s psychoanalytic work on the production of racial hierarchies and internalization of stigma to argue that militarism became a means through which the European imperial nation-state sought to mitigate its civilizational anxiety and assert itself at the top of a constructed hierarchy. In particular, I argue that European militarism is constituted by its colonization and historical constructions of the so-called Muslim Orient, stigmatized as a rival, a threat and an inferior neighbour. However, this racial militarism and civilizational anxiety is not only a feature of the colonial metropole, but also transferred onto colonized and postcolonial states. Drawing on examples of racial militarism practised by the Syrian regime, I argue Europe’s racial-militarist stigmas are also internalized and instrumentalized by postcolonial states via fleeing and transferral. Throughout the article, I demonstrate that racial militarism has three main functions in both metropole and postcolony: the performance of racial chauvinism and superiority; demarcation of boundaries of exclusion; and dehumanization of racialized dissent in order to legitimate violence.
{"title":"Racial militarism and civilizational anxiety at the imperial encounter: From metropole to the postcolonial state","authors":"J. Gani","doi":"10.1177/09670106211054901","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106211054901","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I ask three key questions: First, what is the relationship between militarism and race? Second, how does colonialism shape that relationship to produce racial militarism on both sides of the imperial encounter? And, third, what is the function of racial militarism? I build on Fanon’s psychoanalytic work on the production of racial hierarchies and internalization of stigma to argue that militarism became a means through which the European imperial nation-state sought to mitigate its civilizational anxiety and assert itself at the top of a constructed hierarchy. In particular, I argue that European militarism is constituted by its colonization and historical constructions of the so-called Muslim Orient, stigmatized as a rival, a threat and an inferior neighbour. However, this racial militarism and civilizational anxiety is not only a feature of the colonial metropole, but also transferred onto colonized and postcolonial states. Drawing on examples of racial militarism practised by the Syrian regime, I argue Europe’s racial-militarist stigmas are also internalized and instrumentalized by postcolonial states via fleeing and transferral. Throughout the article, I demonstrate that racial militarism has three main functions in both metropole and postcolony: the performance of racial chauvinism and superiority; demarcation of boundaries of exclusion; and dehumanization of racialized dissent in order to legitimate violence.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"52 1","pages":"546 - 566"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2021-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45595709","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-06DOI: 10.1177/09670106211044015
J. Huysmans
The article explores challenges that giving conceptual primacy to movement poses for thinking the politics of security. In security studies, there has been an intense interest in mobile phenomena and the nature of security techniques that seek to control, contain or steer them. However, when exploring how these mobile phenomena bear upon conceptions of politics and their contestation, the analytics tend to turn back to more static or sedentary categories and reference points. Against this background, the article develops an analytical framework for security and its politics that gives conceptual primacy to movement. Giving conceptual primacy to movement implies three key moves: (a) changing lines from enclosures and connectors to pathways; (b) shifting from understanding movement through positions and nodes to the continuity of movement; and (c) displacing architectural and infrastructural readings of the relations between movements with readings of continuously unfolding confluences of movements moving in relation to one another. Applying these three moves displaces conceptions of movement as border crossings and networked connections with the notion of entangling movements moving in relation to one another. One of the implications for security studies is that taking such a point of view challenges the use of ‘the subject of security’, understood in terms of state sovereignty and the positioning of differential security claims hooked into group identity, as a key device for making security politically meaningful and contested. The article concludes that giving conceptual primacy to movement invites security studies not to limit itself to studying the politics of movement but to also incorporate a motioning of politics.
{"title":"Motioning the politics of security: The primacy of movement and the subject of security","authors":"J. Huysmans","doi":"10.1177/09670106211044015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106211044015","url":null,"abstract":"The article explores challenges that giving conceptual primacy to movement poses for thinking the politics of security. In security studies, there has been an intense interest in mobile phenomena and the nature of security techniques that seek to control, contain or steer them. However, when exploring how these mobile phenomena bear upon conceptions of politics and their contestation, the analytics tend to turn back to more static or sedentary categories and reference points. Against this background, the article develops an analytical framework for security and its politics that gives conceptual primacy to movement. Giving conceptual primacy to movement implies three key moves: (a) changing lines from enclosures and connectors to pathways; (b) shifting from understanding movement through positions and nodes to the continuity of movement; and (c) displacing architectural and infrastructural readings of the relations between movements with readings of continuously unfolding confluences of movements moving in relation to one another. Applying these three moves displaces conceptions of movement as border crossings and networked connections with the notion of entangling movements moving in relation to one another. One of the implications for security studies is that taking such a point of view challenges the use of ‘the subject of security’, understood in terms of state sovereignty and the positioning of differential security claims hooked into group identity, as a key device for making security politically meaningful and contested. The article concludes that giving conceptual primacy to movement invites security studies not to limit itself to studying the politics of movement but to also incorporate a motioning of politics.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"53 1","pages":"238 - 255"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2021-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48947042","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-29DOI: 10.1177/09670106211038801
L. Gould, N. Stel
How must we understand and conceptualize the rationales and repercussions of remote warfare? This article contributes to scholarship on the ontology of remote war by analysing how Dutch officials engage with responsibility for the bombardment of an Islamic State weapons factory in Hawija, Iraq in 2015 under Operation Inherent Resolve. It observes that the main feature of Dutch officials’ accounts of Hawija is their diverse claims to not knowing about civilian casualties. Official narratives shifted from denial to secrecy to strategic ignorance. Bridging work on secrecy from the field of critical security studies with work on strategic ‘unknowing’ from ignorance studies, we propose a new take on the Foucauldian notion of ‘regimes of truth’. The regimes of truth that emerge to justify shifts to remote warfare – that it is riskless, precise and caring for civilian others – rely not merely on secrecy and denial but on feigned and imposed ignorance about casualties. Whereas denial can be disproven and secrecy has an expiration date, ignorance is more elusive and open-ended and hence politically convenient in different ways. Deliberate unknowing does not just postpone investigation and accountability but fundamentally and indefinitely obstructs it and thus sustains the regimes of truth for future remote wars.
{"title":"Strategic ignorance and the legitimation of remote warfare: The Hawija bombardments","authors":"L. Gould, N. Stel","doi":"10.1177/09670106211038801","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106211038801","url":null,"abstract":"How must we understand and conceptualize the rationales and repercussions of remote warfare? This article contributes to scholarship on the ontology of remote war by analysing how Dutch officials engage with responsibility for the bombardment of an Islamic State weapons factory in Hawija, Iraq in 2015 under Operation Inherent Resolve. It observes that the main feature of Dutch officials’ accounts of Hawija is their diverse claims to not knowing about civilian casualties. Official narratives shifted from denial to secrecy to strategic ignorance. Bridging work on secrecy from the field of critical security studies with work on strategic ‘unknowing’ from ignorance studies, we propose a new take on the Foucauldian notion of ‘regimes of truth’. The regimes of truth that emerge to justify shifts to remote warfare – that it is riskless, precise and caring for civilian others – rely not merely on secrecy and denial but on feigned and imposed ignorance about casualties. Whereas denial can be disproven and secrecy has an expiration date, ignorance is more elusive and open-ended and hence politically convenient in different ways. Deliberate unknowing does not just postpone investigation and accountability but fundamentally and indefinitely obstructs it and thus sustains the regimes of truth for future remote wars.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"53 1","pages":"57 - 74"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46471837","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-26DOI: 10.1177/09670106211024414
Somdeep Sen
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
{"title":"Colouring critical security studies: A view from the classroom","authors":"Somdeep Sen","doi":"10.1177/09670106211024414","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106211024414","url":null,"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","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"52 1","pages":"133 - 141"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42270677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-26DOI: 10.1177/09670106211024407
N. Behera, K. Hinds, A. Tickner
Introduction Controversy over an article written by Allison Howell and Melanie Richter-Montpetit (2020) on securitization theory’s supposed anti-Black thinking and methodological whiteness, a detailed rejoinder by two of the Copenhagen School’s main representatives that faults the authors’ analysis for poor scholarship and ‘deep fake’ methodology (Wæver and Buzan, 2020; see also Hansen, 2020), and the subsequent backlash towards the senior male scholars’ alleged attack against their female detractors form a telling episode of parochial academic theater. While this insular debate raged on social media, the streets of the United States and elsewhere were ablaze with massive protests against a very tangible form of racism, namely, police brutality. Protesters’ forceful assertion that Black lives matter and that racism is a structural problem globally makes it almost impossible not to think about problems of race. Yet similar claims have long been made by Black, critical race, and post/decolonial studies, while the manifestations of this systemic problem pervade the everyday lives of Black, indigenous, and people of color in rich/poor, developed/developing, and powerful/weak states alike. Let’s face it: the academy in general, the field of international relations, and the subfield of security studies all bear similar marks of the white, Western, imperial, man’s world. This is especially clear to those who engage in international relations, as we do, from diverse locations in the global South. Although a growing body of literature has emerged on race and racism in world politics that has unearthed the foundational role played by the global color line, colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy in both the constitution of a hierarchical and racialized order and the creation of the discipline (e.g. Anievas et al., 2015; Chowdhry
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