Colouring critical security studies: A view from the classroom

Critical ≠ Post-racial

In a way, critical security studies may seem well positioned to recognize the ‘central importance of race and racism’ (Anievas et al., 2015: 3) in the teaching of international relations – especially since its criticality is premised on rethinking a foundational, orientating concept of the discipline (i.e. ‘security’). The scholarship affiliated with this brand of security studies tends to break with realist traditions as it recognizes that the ‘object of security’ is not ‘given and self-evident’. Instead, by deeming ‘security’ to be a ‘derivative concept’ (Williams and Krause, 1997: ix), it politicizes the discipline of international relations and encourages us to critically deliberate ‘whose security is being assumed and under what conditions’ (Walker, 1997: 69) and who is being deemed as a source of insecurity. In effect, critical security studies provides for an epistemological opening wherein knowledge about the political world is found not just at the level of ‘interstate politics’. The level of the individual is equally relevant, where conceptions of emancipation, ethics and inequality are pertinent factors that determine what (in)security is and how it is experienced (Booth, 1991: 321; 2005). It is in this context, then, that Walker suggests that a rethinking of security studies, and international relations in general, would have to incorporate ‘debates about political identity’ and draw insights from ‘literatures on . . . feminism and postcolonialism’ (Walker, 1997: 69; for further discussion, see Barkawi and Laffey, 2006; Enloe, 1990; Hansen, 2000). To this list, we could add scholarly works on race and racism in international relations.

However, it may not be enough to simply be critical in our pedagogical and curricular approach. There have been several works that have sought to specify the boundaries, limits and scholarly implications of social scientific criticality (e.g. Bohman, 1999; Salter, 2013; Sayer, 1997). But I am suggesting that just because a critical approach to security studies and international relations is meant to denote an epistemological opening, in reality it does not necessarily result in a brand of knowledge dissemination in the classroom that is able to remedy the discipline’s racialized foundations. The reason for this has less to do with the intellectual veracity of critical scholarship than with the long shadow of the racialized epistemic core of international relations that, animated by what Du Bois termed the ‘color line’, positions the perspectives and interests of ‘lighter races’ in the mainstream and relegates the perspectives of the ‘darker . . . races’ to the margins (Du Bois, 1903: 23). This is evident in, say, the contributions of Kerr (1916), Giddings (1898) and Reinsch (1900) to the formulation (and institutionalization) of the theoretical and methodological foundations of international relations. As Henderson (2013: 78–79) goes on to reveal, their works actively ventured to define the centre and periphery of the discipline as they placed the West in the ‘privileged position of the racial hegemon’ while naturalizing the racial inferiority (and barbarity) of the non-white races.

This is not to argue that the non-white perspective has been entirely absent in the genesis of international relations. In the early years of the discipline, prominent scholars like Merze Tate, Alain Locke and W. E. B. Du Bois, affiliated with the ‘Howard School’, were concerned with the relevance of race, racism and imperialism to the making of the global order (Henderson, 2017). And, while in the subsequent decades it was largely expunged from the mainstream, a still-active generation of scholars ‘retrieved and relaunched’ the ‘critique of race and racism’ in international relations in the 1990s (Shilliam, 2020: 153). Yet there is a reason why this critique is rarely accorded ‘centre stage’ in the curriculum of international relations courses (Krishna, 2001: 401; for further discussion, see Doty, 1993; Vitalis, 2000); why, in 1932, international relations scholar Merze Tate had to let go of the first chapter ‘on theories of imperialism’ from her book because her editor said ‘readers wouldn’t be interested’; and why Tate’s dissertation supervisor confidentially advised the Rockefeller Foundation to not fund her research since he considered ‘the history of imperial rivalries’ to be of little importance to the field of international relations (Vitalis, 2015: 18). Critical approaches – be they in security studies or international relations in general – are often placed in the margins of the discipline, as they are seen as engaging with the disciplinary mainstream from outside in. In comparison, the mainstream has remained as is and, despite the critique, its ‘racist precepts’ continue to define the structure, vocabulary and intellectual priorities of international relations today (Henderson, 2013: 90). Indeed, then, it is not surprising that my student noticed the ‘colour line’ in the curriculum of courses on the Middle East in the 2010s. Kerr (1916: 142) may have argued that ‘savages of Africa are immeasurably behind the Americans’, or that Indians and Egyptians ‘are definitely less advanced than the peoples of Europe today’, back in 1916. Nonetheless, there is a continuity between the disciplinary perspectives espoused by Kerr and the manner in which my student experienced the discipline a hundred years later.

In the classroom, then, we are left with the challenging task of imparting knowledge that is critical while still living in the shadow of the racialized epistemic core of the discipline. To be sure, a critical security studies approach to the study of Islamism in the Middle East resulted in a not-so-white course curriculum. Yet the pervasiveness of the white-supremacist intellectual assumptions of international relations also demonstrates the need to acknowledge that the historically established ‘colour line’ is still active and synonymous with the nature and purpose of the discipline. A reparative pedagogical approach has to begin by recognizing and accounting for the genealogy of this ‘colour line’ and how it came to occupy the intellectual core of the discipline. But what is also apparent from the discussion above is that it is equally important to recognize that even a critical approach to, say, security studies or international relations is affected by the whiteness or white supremacy of the disciplinary mainstream – meaning, these racist precepts are so pervasive that critical scholarship cannot simply claim to have moved past them. Instead, a far more fruitful and reparative manner of teaching the discipline would be to accord a certain centrality to the discussion of its racialized intellectual core. And, irrespective of whether the course design and curricular approach espouses a critical outlook, students should be routinely engaged in a dialogue on the impact of race and racism on the empirical priorities, methodological approaches and theoretical assumptions of the practitioners of the discipline.

It’s the social sciences

Alongside a discussion of the colour line that occupies the intellectual foundations of international relations, a reparative approach could also be formulated in view of the multiple positionalities that shape the various ways in which disciplinary knowledge is imparted and received in the classroom. In my course, for instance, the student’s experience was shaped by the extent to which she – as a person of colour – felt represented in the curriculum. Some of the white students were probably uncomfortable with the insinuation that a reading list that was ‘just white people talking about Islam’ is somehow problematic. They may have wondered, ‘Are we allowed to talk about Islam, even though we are white?’ Then again, the nature of the link between positionality and the teaching or learning of international relations is not always as expected. This was evident in the positionality of the instructor. My feeling of being marginalized within the academy as a person of colour, as well as my frustrations with the often-pejorative disciplinary approach to the global South in international relations, led me to design a curriculum that would introduce students to the intellectual hierarchies and biases of the field. Nonetheless, I was also well aware of the boundaries of mainstream international relations. Both during my time as a PhD student and at this particular point in time, as a postdoc, I had been witness to various institutional practices like ‘hiring, promotions and tenure decisions’ being shaped by a disciplinary code of conduct regarding what counts as ‘mainstream agendas’ and as ‘socially, culturally, economically, or politically “policy-relevant,” “useful,” or “impactful” research’ (Weber, 2015: 29). Rarely was the scholarly discussion of race and racism presented as an institutional or disciplinary priority. So, keen on remaining in the mainstream and finding a place within what Agathangelou and Ling (2004) term the ‘House of IR’, I refrained from explicitly referring to the racialized landscape of international relations and my experience of the same.

Here, we could look to a wide array of works that have argued that the process of knowledge production in the social sciences is deeply positioned. In Stranger and Friend, Powdermaker (1966: 19) proposed that we are a ‘human instrument studying other beings and their societies’ and it is only natural that our ‘biological, psychological, and social conditioning’ would impact our scholarly view of the world. Similarly, emphasizing the inalienability of this conditioning to our intellectual deliberations and arguing for the primacy of the ‘issue of positionality’ in scholarly work, Abu-Lughod (1991: 141) noted that if we critically assess the ‘value, possibility, and definition of [scientific] objectivity’, rarely will we be able to disentangle who we are from what we study. In this sense, an academic text could be seen as a ‘partial truth’ that reflects both the empirical truth as well as the scholar’s positioned truth (Clifford, 1986: 7). ¹ That said, the dynamics in my classroom also revealed that the relationship between who we are and how we teach or learn is not always straightforward. Undoubtedly, race was at the forefront of how the student of colour encountered the disciplinary knowledge imparted in the classroom. Even the visibly uncomfortable white students were made aware of their race when one of their peers uttered the phrase ‘white people talking about Islam’. A greater awareness of this aspect of who they are may then have shaped how they experienced the course thereafter. However, in pursuit of my professional aspirations, I made a conscious effort not to utter the ‘R-word’, despite the course being an outgrowth of my racialized experience of the field. Certainly, race played a role here, and the discussion of positionality remains essential to any deliberation of the racialized teaching or learning of international relations. However, to understand what this positionality entails, we need to account for not just the who but also how (i.e. under what conditions) the discipline is encountered and experienced.

With this complexity of the notion of positionality in view, a reparative pedagogical approach would, at the outset, need to acknowledge that ‘our research, theorizing, and interpretations’ of the political world (Lake, 2016: 1112) is not an abstract exercise. On the contrary, it is a deeply positioned affair. As I have discussed earlier, the positioned nature of international relations is evident in the way the ‘colour line’ occupying its epistemic core leads to disciplinary knowledge that naturalizes ‘racialized accounts of world politics’. But these ‘racialized accounts’ are also ‘based on hierarchies of the human’ (Sabaratnam, 2020: 3). So, in part, a reparative approach should recognize that the way mainstream international relations theorizes the world is largely an extension of the white, male lived experience and intuitive understanding of politics and society (Lake, 2016: 1113–1114). More importantly, though, this recognition would grant space and validity to the efforts of non-white scholars and students to see themselves reflected in the teaching/learning of the discipline – even when such efforts encompass a struggle to reconcile who we are with how we are compelled to navigate the mainstream norms, practices and hierarchies of a discipline

Of course, the wider insinuation here is that the study of politics in general is much less an endeavour driven towards discovering an unequivocal truth than it is a political exercise that is shaped by our personal orientation towards how we understand what politics is and where it occurs. Additionally, it is important to emphasize to students that one cannot expunge their specific, experientially formed understanding of the political world. In fact, there is no objective understanding of the world. Instead, we should embrace the understanding of the study of politics as a ‘contest of perspectives’ (Isaac, 2016). Every theoretical framework, methodological approach and empirical focus is then an outgrowth of a particular perspective, drawn from a particular experience of politics. In the end, the disciplinary struggle is not a struggle to be more scientific. Instead, it is a struggle of individual academics to find ways to forefront what they consider the most pertinent problems that plague the world around us.

Admittedly, my propositions here run against the grain with regard to the disciplinary norms whereby it is the ‘prestige of terming [an] academic venture as scientific’ that takes priority over its ability to display the diversity of ways in which the political world is encountered and experienced (Sen, 2018: 105). If it’s not scientific, notes Jackson (2011), the assumption often is that it is erroneous. Accordingly, international relations as a discipline aspires to appropriate ‘the cultural prestige associated with the notion of “science”’ by posturing like the natural sciences and underlining a disciplinary commitment to ideas of ‘truth, progress [and] reason’ (Jackson, 2011: 2–3). In part, this claim to its scientific-ness is a reflection of the rise of positivism in the human sciences in general (Steinmetz, 2005). Furthermore, the limited access to research funds (Flyvberg, 2001: 2) has led to the marginalization of research agendas focused on issues of identity and positionality – often considered not particularly conducive to generalizations – in favour of far more easily quantifiable problematiques that have a greater likelihood of being funded by grant-giving institutions. Of course, what this ignores is that, for the social sciences, ‘it is the social that is the science’ (Sen, 2020a). And our task as practitioners and students is to capture the variety of ways in which the political world is encountered and experienced. The questions of identity and positionality in general and of race in particular therefore cannot be relegated to disciplinary margins. They should be very much in focus in our intellectual gaze. And it is only when that is the case that a discipline like international relations can claim to provide an inclusive perspective on politics and society (Sen, 2020a).

Postscript: Possibilities of a non-racist discipline

The question remains: What would a non-racist discipline look like? It is presumptuous to think that any number of reparative pedagogical strategies would allow us to simply escape international relations’ historically entrenched racist precepts. Aijaz Ahmad (1992: 77) once wrote that ‘history is not really open to correction through a return passage to an imaginary point, centuries ago, before the colonial deformation set in’. Ahmad was of course referring to the English language and the feasibility of effacing it as an integral facet of the colonized people’s identity (for further discussion, see Sen, 2020b: 142–146). Without stretching this metaphor too far, I would argue that international relations’ racist history is not open to course correction either. But while we cannot change this history, we can choose what to do with it.

At the outset, then, this requires the recognition of a foundational dilemma, namely, that racism is not just an aspect of international relations: it characterizes the very nature and purpose of the discipline. A non-racist international relations would thus need to position itself as not just an endeavour to add a critical pillar within the existent white-supremacist disciplinary structures and norms. It would need be something else altogether. For one thing, cognizant of the racialized intellectual foundations of international relations as it is taught today, the non-racist international relations would look elsewhere for the intellectual building blocks of a new epistemic core. To this end, it would need to draw on a well-established (albeit ignored and marginalized) legacy of scholarship within international relations that has deliberated the role of racism and white supremacy in the making of the global order. However, the purpose of this scholarly legacy in the non-racist discipline is not to simply speak to the mainstream from the outside in or languish in the category of ‘critical approaches’ that often appears at the back end of international relations curricula and textbooks. Instead, in a non-racist international relations, the works of, among others, Alain Locke ([1916] 1992), W. E. B. Du Bois (1903, 1915) and Merze Tate (1943, 1961), along with the more recent scholarly engagement with questions of race and racism, ² would be placed at the very top of the disciplinary hierarchy as the mainstream and recognized for their indispensable contribution to the scholarly agenda of international relations.

However, the racism of international relations is not just a matter of its core intellectuality orientation. It is equally reflected in the material consequences of its racist precepts, evident not least in hirings, tenure decisions and grant-giving practices. All of these act as the infrastructure that keeps up the colour line and function as a nexus of (dis)incentives that renders it professionally unwise to critique international relations’ racialized epistemic core. In contrast, in the non-racist international relations, practitioners of the discipline would not need to fear – as I did – the optics and consequences of critiquing international relations’ racist legacy. On the contrary, such efforts would be deemed an extension of the core purpose of the non-racist discipline. Seen together, what I propose here is the abandoning of international relations in its current form. However, theorizing ‘interstate relations’ (Weber, 2015: 29; for further discussion, see Wight, 1960; Cox, 1981) remains a worthwhile disciplinary agenda. And the non-racist international relations can make an invaluable contribution to this agenda by revealing the multiple, positioned ways in which politics is understood and experienced.