Race and the Imagined Community

Author(s):  
Tahir Abbas

This opening section of the book explores a set of overarching themes relating to matters of ethnicity, politics and religion that impact on discussions relating to the nature of the relationship between the concepts of Islamophobia and radicalization. It provides personal history by way of an introduction to the author and includes a summary of the key perspectives from which the issues at hand are considered in the book, which includes history, politics, sociology, culture, security studies and international relations. The overall argument made here suggests that Islamophobia is an identifiable form of racism and hostility to an actual and perceived ‘other’. This Islamophobia has the effect of radicalizing young Muslims in the Global North, which leads to further instances of Islamophobia, creating a perpetual cycle.

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 765-790 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe Turner

This article proposes that ‘internal colonisation’ provides a necessary lens through which to explore the relationship between violence and race in contemporary liberal government. Contributing to an increasing interest in race in International Relations, this article proposes that while racism remains a vital demarcation in liberal government between forms of worthy/unworthy life, this is continually shaped by colonial histories and ongoing projects of empire that manifest in the Global North and South in familiar, if not identical, ways. In unpacking the concept of internal colonisation and its intellectual history from Black Studies into colonial historiography and political geography, I highlight how (neo-)metropolitan states such as Britain were always active imperial terrain and subjected to forms of colonisation. This recognises how metropole and colonies were bounded together through colonisation and how knowledge and practices of rule were appropriated onto a heterogeneity of racialised and undesirable subjects both within colonies and Britain. Bringing the argument up to date, I show how internal colonisation remains diverse and dispersed under liberal empire — enhanced through the war on terror. To do this, I sketch out how forms of ‘armed social work’ central to counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq are also central to the management of sub-populations in Britain through the counterterrorism strategy Prevent. Treating (neo-)metropoles such as the UK as part of imperial terrain helps us recognise the way in which knowledge/practices of colonisation have worked across multiple populations and been invested in mundane sites of liberal government. This brings raced histories into closer encounters with the (re)making of a raced present.


Author(s):  
Andrew R. Hom ◽  
Cian O’Driscoll ◽  
Kurt Mills

Despite the numerous issues with victory identified in this book, a traditional notion of victory still holds sway today. Therefore, this conclusion extracts shared themes, emerging tensions, and further avenues of inquiry running through the book as a whole. To do so, it highlights the normative, political, and temporal dimensions of moral victory. Normative includes the importance of moral context for thinking about victory and efforts to reinterpret such thinking in more ethical terms. Political pertains to the relationship between dramatized notions of victory, (relaxed) limits on fighting, and an opposite interest in restraint. And temporal concerns whether victories actually mark clean and durable endings to war as well as the creative use of time to negotiate victory differently. These issues also connect the volume to International Relations and Security Studies literatures. We close by proposing how these reflections on victory might help reconstruct the just war tradition.


Author(s):  
Mark Laffey ◽  
Suthaharan Nadarajah

This chapter examines postcolonialism, a recent and increasingly influential set of positions and perspectives within the wider discipline of International Relations, and its implications for Security Studies. It first considers the genealogies of postcolonialism, tracing its emergence in a set of transnational debates about the mutually constitutive relations between knowledge and imperialism. It then discusses the standard account of world history as organized around Westphalian sovereignty which informs Security Studies and shows how postcolonialism puts it in question. It also explores the relationship between culture and imperialism according to postcolonialism; Subaltern Studies and its significance to postcolonialism; the concepts of Orientalism and Occidentalism; and how contrapuntal analysis enables a postcolonial critique of Security Studies. The chapter concludes by asking what it might mean to decolonize Security Studies and whether there can be a postcolonial Security Studies.


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (04) ◽  
pp. 747-751
Author(s):  
Juanita Elias

The diverse collection of short reflections included in this Critical Perspectives section looks to continue a conversation—a conversation that played out in the pages of this journal (Elias 2015) regarding the relationship between two strands of feminist international relations scholarship: feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist international political economy (IPE). In this forum, the contributors return to some of the same ground, but in doing so, they bring in new concerns and agendas. New empirical sites of thinking through the nexus between security and political economy from a feminist perspective are explored: war, women's lives in postconflict societies, and international security governance institutions and practices.


Author(s):  
Mark Laffey ◽  
Suthaharan Nadarajah

This chapter examines postcolonialism, a recent and increasingly influential set of positions and perspectives within the wider discipline of International Relations, and its implications for Security Studies. It first considers the genealogies of postcolonialism, tracing its emergence in a set of transnational debates about the mutually constitutive relations between knowledge and imperialism. It then discusses the standard account of world history as organized around Westphalian sovereignty which informs Security Studies and shows how postcolonialism puts it in question. It also explores the relationship between culture and imperialism according to postcolonialism; Subaltern Studies and its significance to postcolonialism; the concepts of Orientalism and Occidentalism; and how contrapuntal analysis enables a postcolonial critique of Security Studies. The chapter concludes by asking what it might mean to decolonize Security Studies and whether there can be a postcolonial Security Studies.


1991 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammed Ayoob

This article reviews some recently published volumes on the subject of Third World security and, in the light of the analyses presented in these books, attempts to discuss a series of major issues in the field of Third World security studies. These include (1) the applicability of the concept of security as traditionally defined in the Western literature on international relations to Third World contexts; (2) the domestic variables affecting the security of Third World states; (3) the impact of international systemic factors on Third World security; (4) the effect of late-twentieth-century weapons technology on the security of Third World states; and (5) the relationship between the security and developmental concerns of Third World states. The author concludes that while international and technological factors have important effects on the security of Third World states, the major variables determining the degree of security enjoyed by such states at both the intrastate and interstate levels are related to the twin processes of state making and nation building that are at work simultaneously within Third World polities.


Author(s):  
Tarak Barkawi

International relations (IR) and security studies lack a coherent and developed body of inquiry on the issue of empire. The central focus of IR situates discussion of imperialism and hierarchy outside the core of the discipline, and on its fringes where scholars from other disciplines engage with IR and security studies literature. Similarly, security studies focus on major war between great powers, not “small wars” between the strong and the weak. The general neglect of empire and imperialism in IR and security studies can be attributed to Eurocentrism, of the unreflective assumption of the centrality of Europe and latterly the West in human affairs. In IR this often involves placing the great powers at the center of analysis, as the primary agents in determining the fate of peoples. Too easily occluded here are the myriad international relations of co-constitution, which together shape societies and polities in both the global North and South. In 1986, Michael Doyle published Empires, a thoughtful effort to systematize the historiography of empire and imperialism with social science concepts. It is rarely cited, much less discussed, in disciplinary literature. By contrast, the pair of articles he published in 1983 on Kant and the connection between liberalism and peace revived the democratic peace research program, which became a key pillar of the liberal challenge to realism in the 1990s and is widely debated. The reception of Doyle’s work is indicative of how imperialism can be present but really absent in IR and security studies.


Author(s):  
Brynne D. Ovalle ◽  
Rahul Chakraborty

This article has two purposes: (a) to examine the relationship between intercultural power relations and the widespread practice of accent discrimination and (b) to underscore the ramifications of accent discrimination both for the individual and for global society as a whole. First, authors review social theory regarding language and group identity construction, and then go on to integrate more current studies linking accent bias to sociocultural variables. Authors discuss three examples of intercultural accent discrimination in order to illustrate how this link manifests itself in the broader context of international relations (i.e., how accent discrimination is generated in situations of unequal power) and, using a review of current research, assess the consequences of accent discrimination for the individual. Finally, the article highlights the impact that linguistic discrimination is having on linguistic diversity globally, partially using data from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and partially by offering a potential context for interpreting the emergence of practices that seek to reduce or modify speaker accents.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miranda Lynn Groft ◽  
Nathan Pistory ◽  
Rachel Hardy ◽  
Peter Joseph McLaughlin

With the proliferation of neuroscience-related messages in popular media, it is more important than ever to understand their impact on the lay public. Previous research has found that people believed news stories more when irrelevant neuroscientific explanations were added. We sought to reveal whether such information could cause a change in social behavior. Specifically, based on publicized findings of the relationship between social behavior and the neurotransmitter oxytocin, we proposed that participants would accept more strangers into their in-group, or alternatively decrease in-group size, if told that there were oxytocin-based (relative to psychological construct-based) health benefits for doing so. In two tasks, participants were shown faces and written information about stimuli that could match their race, politics, and religion to varying degrees. In spite of evidence that participants processed the primes, and were sensitive to their level of similarity with stimuli, oxytocin-based priming did not alter categorization, or pupil dilation. It did not alter cross-race viewing behavior, as measured by an eye tracker, in consistent ways. Unexpectedly, pupil dilation increased when viewing stimuli of the same religion, an effect entirely related to White liberal Christians viewing other Christians. Overall, these results suggest that neuroscience information may impact some judgments, but lay people will not alter their likelihood of acceptance of strangers simply because they were primed with a neuroscience- (or more specifically, neurotransmitter-) based reason for doing so.


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