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
{"title":"Making amends: Towards an antiracist critical security studies and international relations","authors":"N. Behera, K. Hinds, A. Tickner","doi":"10.1177/09670106211024407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106211024407","url":null,"abstract":"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","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"52 1","pages":"8 - 16"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44739279","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: 10.1177/09670106211024430
S. Makinda
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
{"title":"Critical security studies, racism and eclecticism","authors":"S. Makinda","doi":"10.1177/09670106211024430","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106211024430","url":null,"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","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"52 1","pages":"142 - 151"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43470363","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: 10.1177/09670106211017369
V. Peterson
The world is undeniably in trouble. Crises and corollary insecurities are legible everywhere, marked by environmental degradation, healthcare panics, stark inequalities, militarized conflicts, and the rise of authoritarian movements and virulent alt-right populisms. That racism figures in producing and structuring these entwined crises is widely recognized, and, given its disciplinary remit, international relations is best positioned to examine ‘the link between race as a structuring principle and the transnational processes of accumulation, dispossession, violence and struggle that emerge in its wake’ (Anievas et al., 2015: 9). Yet international relations’ problematic engagement with race is now well-documented,1 including the discipline’s ‘origin’ as an imperial racist project (Vitalis, 2015), the ‘willful amnesia’ that this encouraged (Krishna, 2001: 401), and the legacy of ‘racist epistemological assumptions that inform much of contemporary mainstream and even critical analyses of world politics’ (Sajed, 2016a: 168; see also Grovogui, 1996; Hobson, 2012; Gruffydd Jones, 2016). Revisiting points made in his 1997 book, Charles Mills (2015b: 542) concludes that ‘the racial contract is very much alive and well . . . and the “epistemology of ignorance” that now guards it is as active as ever’. But the problem is larger. Despite abundant evidence of institutionalized racism, international relations persists not only in habitual neglect and a deeply flawed theorization of race, but also in actively resisting, marginalizing, depoliticizing, and hence devalorizing anti-racist research and those who produce it (Bhambra et al., 2020; Chowdhry and Rai, 2009; El-Malik, 2015; Shilliam, 2020; Vitalis, 2015). Given epistemological priorities, we might expect this resistance by conventionally ahistorical, non-reflexive mainstream scholars. But it is unexpected and poses fundamental questions when ardent resistance to critique is practiced by self-identified critical scholars, whose objectives presumably extend beyond the production of ‘more accurate descriptions’ to include the reduction, or at least mitigation, of structural violence. How is it possible for those who
不可否认，世界陷入了困境。危机和随之而来的不安全感随处可见，其特点是环境恶化、医疗恐慌、严重的不平等、军事化冲突，以及威权运动和恶毒的另类右翼民粹主义的兴起。种族主义在产生和构建这些相互交织的危机中发挥了重要作用，这一点得到了广泛认可，鉴于其学科范围，国际关系最适合研究“种族作为一种构建原则与随之而来的积累、剥夺、暴力和斗争的跨国过程之间的联系”（Anievas等人，2015:9）。然而，国际关系中与种族的问题接触现在已经有了充分的记录，1包括该学科作为帝国种族主义项目的“起源”（Vitalis，2015），这鼓励了“故意健忘症”（Krishna，2001:401），以及“为当代主流甚至世界政治的批判性分析提供信息的种族主义认识论假设”的遗产（Sajed，2016a:168；另见Grovogui，1996；霍布森，2012年；Gruffydd Jones，2016）。查尔斯·米尔斯（Charles Mills，2015b:542）回顾了他1997年出版的书中的观点，得出结论：“种族契约非常活跃。而现在保护它的“无知认识论”一如既往地活跃。但问题更大。尽管有大量证据表明种族主义制度化，但国际关系不仅存在习惯性的忽视和对种族的深刻缺陷的理论化，而且还存在积极抵制、边缘化、非政治化，从而贬低反种族主义研究和研究者的价值（Bhambra et al.，2020；Chowdhry和Rai，2009年；El Malik，2015；Shilliam，2020；Vitalis，2015）。考虑到认识论的优先性，我们可能会期待传统的非历史性、非反射性主流学者的这种抵制。但是，当自我认同的批判性学者对批评进行强烈抵制时，这是出乎意料的，并提出了根本性的问题，他们的目标可能超出了“更准确的描述”，包括减少或至少缓解结构性暴力。对于那些
{"title":"Critical privilege studies: Making visible the reproduction of racism in the everyday and international relations","authors":"V. Peterson","doi":"10.1177/09670106211017369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106211017369","url":null,"abstract":"The world is undeniably in trouble. Crises and corollary insecurities are legible everywhere, marked by environmental degradation, healthcare panics, stark inequalities, militarized conflicts, and the rise of authoritarian movements and virulent alt-right populisms. That racism figures in producing and structuring these entwined crises is widely recognized, and, given its disciplinary remit, international relations is best positioned to examine ‘the link between race as a structuring principle and the transnational processes of accumulation, dispossession, violence and struggle that emerge in its wake’ (Anievas et al., 2015: 9). Yet international relations’ problematic engagement with race is now well-documented,1 including the discipline’s ‘origin’ as an imperial racist project (Vitalis, 2015), the ‘willful amnesia’ that this encouraged (Krishna, 2001: 401), and the legacy of ‘racist epistemological assumptions that inform much of contemporary mainstream and even critical analyses of world politics’ (Sajed, 2016a: 168; see also Grovogui, 1996; Hobson, 2012; Gruffydd Jones, 2016). Revisiting points made in his 1997 book, Charles Mills (2015b: 542) concludes that ‘the racial contract is very much alive and well . . . and the “epistemology of ignorance” that now guards it is as active as ever’. But the problem is larger. Despite abundant evidence of institutionalized racism, international relations persists not only in habitual neglect and a deeply flawed theorization of race, but also in actively resisting, marginalizing, depoliticizing, and hence devalorizing anti-racist research and those who produce it (Bhambra et al., 2020; Chowdhry and Rai, 2009; El-Malik, 2015; Shilliam, 2020; Vitalis, 2015). Given epistemological priorities, we might expect this resistance by conventionally ahistorical, non-reflexive mainstream scholars. But it is unexpected and poses fundamental questions when ardent resistance to critique is practiced by self-identified critical scholars, whose objectives presumably extend beyond the production of ‘more accurate descriptions’ to include the reduction, or at least mitigation, of structural violence. How is it possible for those who","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"52 1","pages":"17 - 27"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42721897","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: 10.1177/09670106211024408
C. Baker
Both the fortification of European borders against migration from the global South and Western militaries’ involvement in wars ostensibly to prevent terrorist networks reaching Western shores belong to what critical and feminist security studies already recognize as a racialized security regime. Within this gendered racial order, policies, discourses and everyday practices surrounding border security, migration, asylum and war reinforce each other to construct ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ as normatively white spaces, under threat from racialized Others within and without (see, for example, Gray and Franck, 2019; Stachowitsch and Sachseder, 2019). Yet, on the southeastern periphery of the European Union, which was constructed as a zone of security threat in the 1990s and is now charged with securing the EU’s border with the global South, identifications with whiteness are both more complex and more consequential than Western European perspectives may know them to be.
{"title":"The contingencies of whiteness: Gendered/racialized global dynamics of security narratives","authors":"C. Baker","doi":"10.1177/09670106211024408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106211024408","url":null,"abstract":"Both the fortification of European borders against migration from the global South and Western militaries’ involvement in wars ostensibly to prevent terrorist networks reaching Western shores belong to what critical and feminist security studies already recognize as a racialized security regime. Within this gendered racial order, policies, discourses and everyday practices surrounding border security, migration, asylum and war reinforce each other to construct ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ as normatively white spaces, under threat from racialized Others within and without (see, for example, Gray and Franck, 2019; Stachowitsch and Sachseder, 2019). Yet, on the southeastern periphery of the European Union, which was constructed as a zone of security threat in the 1990s and is now charged with securing the EU’s border with the global South, identifications with whiteness are both more complex and more consequential than Western European perspectives may know them to be.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"52 1","pages":"124 - 132"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49216792","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: 10.1177/09670106211033227
Nivi Manchanda
Introduction International relations in general, and international security studies in particular, has recently and very publicly been grappling with race and racism. We might even be tempted to claim international security studies was, for once, ahead of the curve, as this grappling predated the murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020, an event that jolted race into the consciousness of people and enterprises that had hitherto practised what Charles Mills (2007: 13) has referred to as an ‘epistemology of ignorance’. Unfortunately, only the ‘timing’ of this ‘debate’ may be deemed ‘progressive’, with most of international security studies clinging to its racialized worldview and some even threatening revanchism. Rather than rehash the arguments following the vituperative reaction to an academic journal article that critiqued securitization theory for being premised on racist political thought (Howell and Richter-Montpetit, 2020), this article reflects on why the grammars of race are still so prevalent in international security studies, whether an anti-racist (sub)discipline is possible, and what strategies might tackle, and ultimately overturn, the racialized logics at the core of security studies. It concludes that in lieu of narratives of redemption, and indeed absolution, security studies must agitate for reparations and the abolition of empire. I start by adumbrating a short disciplinary history of international relations, and of the privileged location of international security studies within it, arguing that, as Alan Collins avers, ‘Security Studies is the sub-discipline of International Relations. It is the study of security that lies at the heart of International Relations. It was the carnage of World War I and the desire to avoid its horrors that gave birth to the discipline of International Relations in 1919 at Aberystwyth, United Kingdom’ (Collins, 2016: 1, emphasis in original). This is echoed by James Der Derian (1993: 95) when he claims that ‘no other concept in international relations packs the metaphysical punch, nor commands the disciplinary power of “security”’. I then analyse what Denise Ferreira da Silva (2017) has referred to as the ‘banalization of racial events’ in order to underscore and parse the normative whiteness of security studies,1 before concluding with a call to defund the contemporary (Western) imperial enterprise – a demand that I submit those working with and through notions of security are in a unique position to make, not least because they (we) have thus far aided and abetted its cause.
引言国际关系，特别是国际安全研究，最近非常公开地与种族和种族主义作斗争。我们甚至可能会忍不住声称，国际安全研究这一次走在了曲线的前面，因为这场斗争早在2020年5月25日乔治·弗洛伊德被谋杀之前，这一事件将种族带入了人们和企业的意识，而这些人和企业迄今为止一直奉行查尔斯·米尔斯（2007:13）所说的“无知认识论”。不幸的是，只有这场“辩论”的“时机”可能被认为是“进步的”，大多数国际安全研究都坚持其种族化的世界观，有些甚至威胁要复仇。这篇文章没有重复对一篇学术期刊文章的谩骂反应后的论点，该文章批评证券化理论以种族主义政治思想为前提（Howell和Richter Montpetit，2020），而是反思了为什么种族语法在国际安全研究中仍然如此普遍，反种族主义（亚）学科是否可能，以及什么策略可以解决并最终推翻安全研究核心的种族化逻辑。它的结论是，安全研究必须鼓动赔偿和废除帝国，而不是救赎和赦免的叙事。首先，我讲述了国际关系的一段短暂学科历史，以及国际安全研究在其中的特殊地位，正如艾伦·柯林斯所断言的那样，“安全研究是国际关系的子学科。安全研究是国际关系的核心。1919年，正是第一次世界大战的大屠杀和避免其恐怖的愿望催生了英国阿伯里斯特威斯的国际关系学科（Collins，2016:1，原文强调）。James Der Derian（1993:95）对此表示赞同，他声称“国际关系中没有其他概念具有形而上学的冲击力，也没有“安全”的纪律力量”。然后，我分析了Denise Ferreira da Silva（2017）所说的“种族事件的平庸化”，以强调和分析安全研究的规范性白人化，1最后呼吁为当代（西方）帝国企业提供资金——我认为，那些与安全概念合作并通过安全概念工作的人处于独特的地位，尤其是因为他们（我们）迄今为止一直在帮助和教唆它的事业。
{"title":"The banalization of race in international security studies: From absolution to abolition","authors":"Nivi Manchanda","doi":"10.1177/09670106211033227","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106211033227","url":null,"abstract":"Introduction International relations in general, and international security studies in particular, has recently and very publicly been grappling with race and racism. We might even be tempted to claim international security studies was, for once, ahead of the curve, as this grappling predated the murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020, an event that jolted race into the consciousness of people and enterprises that had hitherto practised what Charles Mills (2007: 13) has referred to as an ‘epistemology of ignorance’. Unfortunately, only the ‘timing’ of this ‘debate’ may be deemed ‘progressive’, with most of international security studies clinging to its racialized worldview and some even threatening revanchism. Rather than rehash the arguments following the vituperative reaction to an academic journal article that critiqued securitization theory for being premised on racist political thought (Howell and Richter-Montpetit, 2020), this article reflects on why the grammars of race are still so prevalent in international security studies, whether an anti-racist (sub)discipline is possible, and what strategies might tackle, and ultimately overturn, the racialized logics at the core of security studies. It concludes that in lieu of narratives of redemption, and indeed absolution, security studies must agitate for reparations and the abolition of empire. I start by adumbrating a short disciplinary history of international relations, and of the privileged location of international security studies within it, arguing that, as Alan Collins avers, ‘Security Studies is the sub-discipline of International Relations. It is the study of security that lies at the heart of International Relations. It was the carnage of World War I and the desire to avoid its horrors that gave birth to the discipline of International Relations in 1919 at Aberystwyth, United Kingdom’ (Collins, 2016: 1, emphasis in original). This is echoed by James Der Derian (1993: 95) when he claims that ‘no other concept in international relations packs the metaphysical punch, nor commands the disciplinary power of “security”’. I then analyse what Denise Ferreira da Silva (2017) has referred to as the ‘banalization of racial events’ in order to underscore and parse the normative whiteness of security studies,1 before concluding with a call to defund the contemporary (Western) imperial enterprise – a demand that I submit those working with and through notions of security are in a unique position to make, not least because they (we) have thus far aided and abetted its cause.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"52 1","pages":"49 - 59"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42246063","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: 10.1177/09670106211024418
S. Al‐Bulushi
In early 2016, I received an exasperated text message from a friend in Nairobi. Referencing the newly released political thriller Eye in the Sky, she contested the film’s portrayal of Kenya as a place of violence and terror. Having returned the previous year from Kenya, where I conducted extended ethnographic research on questions related to militarism and security, I reflected on the film and her reaction to it. In Eye in the Sky, British and American military officials rely on satellite imagery to track the movements of suspected Al-Shabaab militants in Kenya’s capital city of Nairobi. As the story unfolds, the officials close in on a home in the Nairobi neighborhood of Eastleigh, where the home’s inhabitants are in the midst of assembling vests armed with explosives. Debate quickly ensues in London and Washington about whether to launch a drone strike on this home with the goal of preventing a future – seemingly imminent – act of violence. Because the film is almost exclusively focused on the decisionmaking process leading up to a drone strike, commentators have generally foregrounded the question of ‘ethical’ warfare as seen from the perspective of those who occupy imperial war rooms. In their accounts, the historical specificity of Kenya as a country that has become entangled in the war against Al-Shabaab is entirely obscured by images of a generic, lawless Africa inhabited by killers and their potential victims. Both the film and its critics in the Global north overlook the day-to-day politics on the ground that have shaped Kenya’s relationship to the racialized geopolitics of the so-called war on terror. I quickly discovered that Kenyans on social media shared my friend’s frustrations and challenged the film’s portrayal of Nairobi as a war zone overrun by Al-Shabaab militia. ‘Wow great movie this #eyeinthesky but got so many wrong things about our great nation #Kenya.’ ‘Clearly the guys who made #EyeInTheSky have never been to Nairobi. Nice film but inaccurate imagination that Nairobi is like Mogadishu.’ ‘Shocking how #EyeInTheSky depicts a real country #Kenya & city #Nairobi are under control of militants. Ridiculous!’ These impassioned interventions rejected the notion that Kenya is in any way connected to the racialized ‘ungoverned spaces’ typically associated with ‘terrorism’. They reflected an affective geopolitics about ‘us’ and ‘them’ that structures many of my middle-class interlocutors’ sense of self. Many people I encountered in the course of my research were invested in an imaginative
{"title":"Race, space, and ‘terror’: Notes from East Africa","authors":"S. Al‐Bulushi","doi":"10.1177/09670106211024418","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106211024418","url":null,"abstract":"In early 2016, I received an exasperated text message from a friend in Nairobi. Referencing the newly released political thriller Eye in the Sky, she contested the film’s portrayal of Kenya as a place of violence and terror. Having returned the previous year from Kenya, where I conducted extended ethnographic research on questions related to militarism and security, I reflected on the film and her reaction to it. In Eye in the Sky, British and American military officials rely on satellite imagery to track the movements of suspected Al-Shabaab militants in Kenya’s capital city of Nairobi. As the story unfolds, the officials close in on a home in the Nairobi neighborhood of Eastleigh, where the home’s inhabitants are in the midst of assembling vests armed with explosives. Debate quickly ensues in London and Washington about whether to launch a drone strike on this home with the goal of preventing a future – seemingly imminent – act of violence. Because the film is almost exclusively focused on the decisionmaking process leading up to a drone strike, commentators have generally foregrounded the question of ‘ethical’ warfare as seen from the perspective of those who occupy imperial war rooms. In their accounts, the historical specificity of Kenya as a country that has become entangled in the war against Al-Shabaab is entirely obscured by images of a generic, lawless Africa inhabited by killers and their potential victims. Both the film and its critics in the Global north overlook the day-to-day politics on the ground that have shaped Kenya’s relationship to the racialized geopolitics of the so-called war on terror. I quickly discovered that Kenyans on social media shared my friend’s frustrations and challenged the film’s portrayal of Nairobi as a war zone overrun by Al-Shabaab militia. ‘Wow great movie this #eyeinthesky but got so many wrong things about our great nation #Kenya.’ ‘Clearly the guys who made #EyeInTheSky have never been to Nairobi. Nice film but inaccurate imagination that Nairobi is like Mogadishu.’ ‘Shocking how #EyeInTheSky depicts a real country #Kenya & city #Nairobi are under control of militants. Ridiculous!’ These impassioned interventions rejected the notion that Kenya is in any way connected to the racialized ‘ungoverned spaces’ typically associated with ‘terrorism’. They reflected an affective geopolitics about ‘us’ and ‘them’ that structures many of my middle-class interlocutors’ sense of self. Many people I encountered in the course of my research were invested in an imaginative","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"52 1","pages":"115 - 123"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47721911","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: 10.1177/09670106211038787
M. Salter, E. Gilbert, Jairus Grove, Jana Hönke, Doerthe Rosenow, Anna Stavrianakis, M. Stern
But the inevitable postponing of critical scholarship about race, racialisation and racism forestalls the ability of Indigenous scholars and POC to invest our careers in these topics within the academy. If Universities are not yet ready to challenge white supremacy, will they ever be? And if a program on critical race thinking is not supported today, how can White scholars advance claims that academy is in fact a safe space for Indigenous scholars, let alone claim that decolonisation is occurring within the halls of the academy itself? (Todd, 2016: 13)
{"title":"Race and racism in critical security studies","authors":"M. Salter, E. Gilbert, Jairus Grove, Jana Hönke, Doerthe Rosenow, Anna Stavrianakis, M. Stern","doi":"10.1177/09670106211038787","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106211038787","url":null,"abstract":"But the inevitable postponing of critical scholarship about race, racialisation and racism forestalls the ability of Indigenous scholars and POC to invest our careers in these topics within the academy. If Universities are not yet ready to challenge white supremacy, will they ever be? And if a program on critical race thinking is not supported today, how can White scholars advance claims that academy is in fact a safe space for Indigenous scholars, let alone claim that decolonisation is occurring within the halls of the academy itself? (Todd, 2016: 13)","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"52 1","pages":"3 - 7"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46651075","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: 10.1177/09670106211027797
L. Guerra
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
{"title":"Security as white privilege: Racializing whiteness in critical security studies","authors":"L. Guerra","doi":"10.1177/09670106211027797","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106211027797","url":null,"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","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"52 1","pages":"28 - 37"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47406699","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: 10.1177/09670106211024423
M. Tazzioli
However, the governing of migration is characterized by a multiplication of hierarchies and racialized differences among migrants themselves, and this requires bringing into the analysis the mundane administrative, legal and police practices enacted by states and non-state actors ([7]). 4 Throughout this intervention, I use "migrant" to broadly refer to individuals who have been racialized, labelled and governed in that way, and I speak about "migrants and refugees" when I am also including those subjects who are shaped and targeted by humanitarian technologies. Migrants are deemed to be nothing but (black) bodies to be saved, and the political debate on migrants' deaths has been characterized by a "race to the bottom" - that is, by disputes over whether there is a moral duty to rescue all migrants, whether it is feasible to attempt to do so, and whether or not they should be allowed to disembark in Europe ([14]). On this occasion, then, migrants were crafted neither as threats nor as subjects of pity and bodies to be rescued;instead, the Italian government shaped its narrative in medical terms: migrants' lives, the argument went, should not be put at risk and could not be protected at this time. [Extracted from the article] Copyright of Security Dialogue is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)
{"title":"The making of racialized subjects: Practices, history, struggles","authors":"M. Tazzioli","doi":"10.1177/09670106211024423","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106211024423","url":null,"abstract":"However, the governing of migration is characterized by a multiplication of hierarchies and racialized differences among migrants themselves, and this requires bringing into the analysis the mundane administrative, legal and police practices enacted by states and non-state actors ([7]). 4 Throughout this intervention, I use \"migrant\" to broadly refer to individuals who have been racialized, labelled and governed in that way, and I speak about \"migrants and refugees\" when I am also including those subjects who are shaped and targeted by humanitarian technologies. Migrants are deemed to be nothing but (black) bodies to be saved, and the political debate on migrants' deaths has been characterized by a \"race to the bottom\" - that is, by disputes over whether there is a moral duty to rescue all migrants, whether it is feasible to attempt to do so, and whether or not they should be allowed to disembark in Europe ([14]). On this occasion, then, migrants were crafted neither as threats nor as subjects of pity and bodies to be rescued;instead, the Italian government shaped its narrative in medical terms: migrants' lives, the argument went, should not be put at risk and could not be protected at this time. [Extracted from the article] Copyright of Security Dialogue is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"52 1","pages":"107 - 114"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47646425","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}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：