Global Race War

Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy explores the historical connections between race and violence from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Barder shows how beginning with the Haitian Revolution and nineteenth century settler colonialism the development of the very idea of global order was based on racial hierarchy. The intensification of racial violence happened when the global racial hierarchy appeared to be in crisis. By the first half of the twentieth century, ideas about race war come to fuse themselves with state genocidal projects to eliminate internal and external enemy races. Global processes of racialization did not end with the Second World War and with the discrediting of scientific racism, the decolonization of the global South and the expansion of the state-system to newly independent states; rather it continued in different forms as the racialization of cultural or civilizational attributes that then resulted in further racial violence. From fears about the “Yellow Peril,” the “Clash of Civilization,” or, more recently, the “Great Replacement,” the global imaginary is constituted by ideas about racial difference. Examining global politics in terms of race and racial violence reveals a different spatial topology across domestic and global politics. Global histories of racial hierarchy and violence have important implications for understanding the continued salience of race within Western polities. The book revisits two centuries of international history to show the important consequences of a global racial imaginary that continues to reverberate across time and space.

Antarctica’s Gateways and Gatekeepers: Polar scenarios in a polarising Anthropocene

As the short to medium-term social and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic dominate world issues, longer-term environmental and geopolitical concerns remain of great concern. However, the appetite for tackling complex transdisciplinary anthropogenic change processes may be receding rather than accelerating. In this essay, we propose that Antarctica, the continent of peace and science, a place that assumes a role as the global imaginary Other, where short- and long-term horizons co-exist, is a site where signs of global regeneration in the Anthropocene should be clear. To provoke discussion, we imagine two scenarios set in the five Gateway Cities of Antarctica to 2050. In the ‘Gatekeepers’ scenario, there is a fragmented global order with minimal unregulated behaviour based on narrowly defined national interests; in the ‘Gateways’ scenario, values-based partnerships generate novel institutional arrangements. By contrasting these polar opposites as a performative act, we highlight the need for future-making at the interface between science and policy.

Return of the Nation-State? De-Europeanisation and the Limits of Neo-Nationalism

This commentary analyses the view that the resurgence of nationalism will lead to the return of the nation-state and an accentuated de-Europeanisation. I argue against this position. While neo-nationalism has become a major force in Europe and elsewhere, I claim it does not have a capacity to restore the nation-state. I discuss what I take to be the key features of neo-nationalism, central to which is authoritarianism, and outline four arguments why this kind of nationalism ultimately lacks a real capacity to bring about major structural change. These are: (1) it is a form of nationalism without the nation; (2) it is unable to solve the basic problem of societal polarisation; (3) it avails of divisions within the left and the centre ground rather than having any strength of its own; and (4) the global movement of which it is an expression lacks a global imaginary. Neo-nationalism has brought about a significant shift in political discourse but stops short of a major systemic transformation of European integration.

Racial Unspeakability

Increasing diversity in international student mobility/migration has gained attention in recent years (Bilecen & Van Mol, 2017). Diversity in international higher education institutions has primarily been understood in terms of diversity of national origin, meaning the dynamics of racial and ethnic differences are not adequately addressed in the literature (Estera & Shahjahan, 2018). This study uses data collected during semi-structured interviews with international and domestic students, as well as administrators, to identify narrations of race, ethnicity, and nationality that delimit a modern/colonial global imaginary (Stein & Andreotti, 2017). It further demonstrates that internal heterogeneity of both sending and receiving countries leads to varied meaning-making schemes for engaging with embodied racial differences and their attendant affective relations (Ahmed, 2013; Wetherell, 2012). The project suggests the term racial unspeakability as a culturally contingent, affective force that governs narrations of race, ethnicity, and nationality.

Visualising Anthropocene Extinctions: Mapping affect in the works of Naeemah Naeemaei

While many writers have advocated the importance of narrative as a means of engaging with the problem of extinction, this paper considers what the qualities of visual aesthetics bring to this field. In addressing this question, the discussion turns to the problem of the ethical limits of art raised by Adorno and takes a theoretical turn away from posthumanism to consider how visual responses can redirect attention back to human agency. The focus of visual analysis is on five paintings by the contemporary Iranian artist Naeemeh Naeemaei. Neither exclusively Western nor overtly internationalist in their approach, these artworks refer to the effects of both hunting and the erosion of trans-national habitats as causes of extinction, yet they also show how human affective responses to extinction can extend across geo-political borders to a more global imaginary. As such, Naeemaei’s artworks are regarded as a form of immanent critique of anthropogenic forcing. Her works adapt older traditions in Persian humanism and art to show not only how the human dominion of nonhuman animals has led to extinction, but also how this leads to an almost incalculable sense of human loss. I argue that Naeemaei’s affective imagery of loss is not simply yet another example of how the lifeworld of animals can only be understood from an anthropocentric worldview, but instead points to our inability to yet fully register the immeasurable losses of extinction and what this yet unchartered grief might imply for potential human agency.