Security as white privilege: Racializing whiteness in critical security studies

Abstract

Introduction

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 non-racialized 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 Janeiro. In the teaching board of my graduate program, all the teachers are white. In the courses I have taken in critical security studies, only white colleagues shared the classroom with me. All of this in a city where, as young Black intellectual and activist Pedro da Silva (2020) describes, there is a racial cleavage in which ‘some people wake up with the sound of gunshots from a helicopter that was used in the Vietnam War, while others wake up with the sound of seas waves’.³ Considering these elements – which largely reflect the international relations and critical security studies academy in general – it is impossible to deny that my learning process and knowledge production are intrinsically embedded in whiteness and in a system of white privilege.

Having this in mind, I draw on works in critical security studies, Black feminism, critical race studies, and critical whiteness studies, as well as works by Black Brazilian intellectuals, to better ground the discussion throughout the article. I have organized the discussion into two sections. In the first, I present some aspects I deem central regarding the importance of naming and racializing whiteness and white privilege. In the second, I bring these considerations to critical security studies. Drawing on some concepts and practices of ‘security’ in Brazil, I point to the reproduction of whiteness and white privilege logics within some of critical security studies’ framings of the concept of security. Finally, having named and racialized whiteness and its privileges within critical security studies, I posit some suggestions on how to build anti-racist knowledges and practices in our field.

On whiteness and white privilege

We live in a world which has been foundationally shaped for the past five hundred years by the realities of European domination and the gradual consolidation of global white supremacy (Mills, 1999: 20).

In making the above claim, the Jamaican Black philosopher Charles Mills calls attention to a distinctive feature of modernity: the structuring of a white supremacist global system, a process advanced by Europe through colonialism and genocide against the rest of the world. This is not a trivial matter, nor an already overcome legacy from the past. On the contrary, Mills (1999: 13–14) argues that the sociopolitical, moral, economic, cultural, and epistemic racial hierarchies established with modernity still resonate within contemporary politics, reproduced in a ‘racial polity, a racial state, and a racial juridical system’ that ‘maintain and reproduce this racial order, securing the privileges and advantages of the full white citizens and maintaining the subordination of nonwhites’.

One of the consequences of this encompassing racial system of power is that it takes whiteness as the natural and universal condition of humanity (Kilomba, 2019; Mills, 1999; Ribeiro, 2019a). Hence, whiteness is ‘neither problematized nor particularized within discourses on race because it assumes a status of normalcy’ (Hayes and Juárez, 2009: 731). As the Panamanian philosopher Linda Alcoff (2005: 205) puts it, ‘given its simultaneous invisibility and universality, whiteness has until recently enjoyed the unchallenged hegemony that any invisible contender in a ring full of visible bodies would experience’. Thus, it remains, in the words of Ruth Frankenberg (1993), an unmarked and unnamed dominant position in racial systems of oppression (see also Ribeiro, 2019a, 2019b).

Nonetheless, Black Brazilian psychologist Cida Bento (2014) reminds us that whiteness is oftentimes hidden, but always strongly operating. In this sense, critical race theorists argue that whiteness operates as ‘the fulcrum of power relations’ (Garner, 2007: 43) in modern societies structured by racism and racial privilege (Applebaum, 2010; Ribeiro, 2019b). Hence, whiteness is a location of ‘structural advantage’ (Frankenberg, 1993: 1), one that invests those positioned in it with the notion of full entitlement and belonging regarding economic, political, and social privileges and spaces (Harris, 1993; Kilomba, 2019; McIntosh, 1988).

Thus, as conceived here, whiteness has nothing to do with any fundamental biological or genetic truth. Nor is it about individual racial/cultural identity. As Noel Ignatiev (1997: 1) acutely puts it, ‘whiteness has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with social position. It is nothing but a reflection of privilege and exists for no reason other than to defend it. Without the privileges attached to it, the white race would not exist’. Ignatiev’s quote points directly to the dimension of material structural privilege inherently attached to white racial identity. As David Roediger (2002: 23) adds, rather than biological or cultural, ‘white identity is decisively shaped by the exercise of power and the expectation of advantages in acquiring property’.

In her groundbreaking and now classic work, Cheryl Harris (1993) also emphasizes the material and structural dimension of whiteness. She argues that, in the USA, whiteness became by law a position of social status and privilege, legitimizing the property obtained through centuries of white colonial expropriation of indigenous lands and Black enslaved work. As Aníbal Quijano (2000) and Charles Mills (1999) remind us, this is not an exclusive feature of US history. Whiteness as a position of dominance in racial social hierarchies is a structural part in the ordering of the modern capitalist world economy (and modernity itself) as a whole. According to the particularities of each national context, then, whiteness became ‘a form of racialized privilege ratified in law. Material privileges attendant to being white inhered in the status of being white. . . . [R]elative white privilege was legitimated as the status quo’ in modern polities around the world (Harris, 1993: 1745–1746).

To sum up the contributions mentioned above, then, we have white privilege as the central fulcrum of white racial identities and whiteness as a system of power. Regardless of white people’s ‘racial awareness’ and refusal to subscribe to social structures of racial oppression, we unavoidably benefit from them (Mills, 1999). Moreover, it is important to highlight, with Barbara Applebaum (2010), that there is an indivisible continuum between benefiting from and contributing to structural and systemic racism. Willingly or not, when we enjoy white privilege, we contribute to the maintenance of systems of racial oppression.

This is the reason why, according to Peggy McIntosh’s (1988: 2) oft-quoted work, white privilege may be described as ‘an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious’. We are ‘meant to remain oblivious’ to white privilege because it radically disturbs white people’s perceptions of ourselves, our accomplishments, and what we believe we are entitled to. Hence, to recognize white privilege is to activate anxieties from our colonial past (Kilomba, 2019), to face the fact that many of our social, cultural, and economic comforts are ‘based on the legacy of the conquest’ (Mills, 1999: 73).

Given the stressful implications of confronting whiteness and white privilege, white people invent a set of strategies for preventing acknowledging our convenience with systems of racial oppression. One of these ‘strategies’ is white epistemic control over knowledge production (Mills, 1999; Ribeiro, 2019a). By epistemologically controlling which knowledges are authoritative and which narratives are legitimate, whites can ‘fit within a collective, solid formation, a denial community, which denies and excludes from reality everything deemed as unimportant’ (Bento, 2014: 18).

Here, we come to the role of academia in the production and mediation – by exclusion – of what one should consider legitimate knowledge and important elements for analysis. In this sense, Grada Kilomba makes the point that ‘the academic center is not a neutral place. It is a white space where the privilege of speaking has been denied to People of Color . . . a space of v-i-o-l-e-n-c-e’ (Kilomba, 2019: 51, emphasis added). It is important to note that the reproduction of fundamentally racist knowledge within academia is not simply a non-reflected consequence of the dominant whiteness in this space. Rather, we need to insist on the fact that we, white researchers, despite our self-perception as racially aware and anti-racist, are constantly benefiting from – and therefore contributing to – the structural and systemic racism that allows our voices to be heard in positions of authority (Applebaum, 2010; Garner, 2007; Howard, 2004; Kilomba, 2019; Ribeiro, 2019a).

This is especially important in discussions on international relations – and, by extension, security studies and critical security studies – a discipline founded amid Great Powers colonialism that reproduces racist traces of the modern international in most of its analysis and theoretical frameworks (Anievas et al., 2015; Persaud and Sajed, 2018; Sabaratnam, 2020). As Sankaran Krishna (2001) pointed out some years ago, it is only by assuming a systematic ‘politics of forgetting’ towards its racist and colonial foundations that international relations may sustain its legitimacy as an academic discipline. It is important to highlight that this ‘politics of forgetting’ enacts violent epistemicidal practices against subaltern peoples and their systems of knowledge (Fernández, 2019; Oliveira, 2019).

Considering the ideas discussed in this section, I believe that it is fundamentally important to interrupt the ‘politics of forgetting’ whiteness and white privilege’s weight in our knowledge production. As Barbara Applebaum (2010: 9) argues, ‘for white people, it is impossible to gain an understanding of systemic racism without naming whiteness and understanding how whiteness works’. Therefore, marking and naming whiteness and acknowledging it as the dominant part of racial oppressive systems is fundamentally necessary (Ribeiro, 2019b; Roediger, 2002).

Recognizing our complicity with racial systems of oppression is just a small, though necessary, first step if white people are to take responsibility for our power positions within systems of racial oppression, including our knowledge (re)production activities (Applebaum, 2010; Ignatiev, 1997; Ribeiro, 2019b). This first step would be severely incomplete, however, if it is not accompanied by an ‘engagement with the critical anti-racist work of those positioned as racially subordinate in a white supremacist system’ (Howard, 2004: 75). I seek to take these elements seriously in the discussion that follows.

Security as white privilege: Racializing critical security studies’ frames on security

In the previous section, I presented some primary understandings of whiteness and white privilege. Now it is time to bring the discussion to how I believe they manifest in critical security studies. One important point to make here is that the label of ‘critical security studies’ encompasses a significantly diverse set of perspectives and approaches. Within the space of this short intervention, I will not be able to discuss in detail the different strands within critical security studies. I limit myself, therefore, to a more simplistic, though didactic, conception of the field. Following a commonsensical approach, I conceive critical security studies broadly as a field of studies within international relations that confronts more traditional, state-centric, and militarist writings on security studies (Buzan and Hansen, 2009). Hence, there are two pivotal movements generally made in critical security studies works: the widening and deepening of security, meaning its broadening beyond military affairs, and the transition of its referential axis from states to individuals (Buzan and Hansen, 2009).

Still in simplistic (though didactic) terms, one could say that there are two main normative approaches within critical security studies regarding the widening and deepening of security: an optimistic and a pessimistic. The first, especially present in the early approaches of the Aberystwyth School, sees the centering of security in the individual and in concerns about their well-being as a pathway to human emancipation (Booth, 1991). The latter, mostly represented by securitization theory, is more suspicious about the concept of ‘security’ and the exceptional practices discursively enabled by it. Key works in securitization theory conceive ‘security’ as a discursive dispositive that authorizes exceptional practices, usually with ‘anti-democratic and anti-creative implications’ (Wæver, 2012: 53). Securitizing issues would then be ‘a failure to deal with [them] as normal politics’ (Wæver, 2012: 53).

Having this generalist map of critical security studies in mind, one should be aware that ‘claims about security are a serious matter. They cannot be dissociated from even more basic claims about who we think we are and how we might act together’ (Walker, 2002: 66). As Rob Walker (2002: 69) reminds us: ‘the process of rethinking security must respond especially to questions about whose security is being assumed and under what conditions’. Hence, ‘if the subject of security is the subject of security, it is necessary to ask, first and foremost, how the modern subject is being reconstituted and then to ask what security could possibly mean in relation to it’ (Walker, 2002: 78, emphasis in original). Walker’s point is of central importance in the argument here presented. If security, in a sense, is about the reconstitution of the modern subject, we must remember that whiteness is the cornerstone of modern subjecthood (Grovogui, 2011; Mills, 1999). This has significant implications for both ‘optimistic’ and ‘pessimistic’ approaches in critical security studies.

For the ‘optimistic’, the transition of security’s reference axis from the state to the individual – framed at times as ‘citizen’, at times as a member of a cosmopolitan community of humanity – is a normatively positive movement. However, modern categories of ‘citizenship’ and ‘humanity’ – those that guarantee the protection of the individuals – were historically built upon the image of male, European, cisgender, straight, white subjects (Croucher, 2018; Grovogui, 2011; Henderson, 2013; Mills, 1999; Somers, 2008). Hence, subjects racialized in inferior positions within white-supremacist polities have been systematically excluded from fully belonging to the categories of citizenship or even humanity (Kilomba, 2019; Mbembe, 2019; Mills, 1999). Most importantly, the notion of ‘good citizenship’ is often an attribute of white self-perceptions of moral integrity, which are built upon depictions of Blackness as morally suspect and threatening (Applebaum, 2010; Kilomba, 2019). The transposition of a similar logic to the international scenario has more often than not resulted in problematic interventionist practices, rather than the emancipatory ones envisioned by the Aberystwyth School (Gomes, 2017; Wai, 2012).

In what concerns the ‘pessimistic’ approaches, one might direct a similar critical interrogation towards the opposition between ‘security’ and ‘normal politics’ that operates as a border between securitization and ‘normalcy’ (Howell and Richter-Montpetit, 2020). As white author Alison Howell (2018: 118) argues – to some extent endorsed by Black Brazilian intellectuals Ana Flauzina (2019) and João Vargas (2016) – assuming the existence of an a priori ‘normal politics’ is to ignore the ‘martial politics’ and genocidal practices that run along with political normalcy, ‘especially along lines of race, Indigeneity, disability, gender, sexuality, and class’. Hence, ‘political normalcy’ as an ideal situation is also a prerogative of white privilege. Ultimately, the axis of reference is the security of ‘[white] bodies that always belong’ (Kilomba, 2019: 56).

Here, I would like to introduce a last theoretical element to provoke our imaginations towards thinking of security as white privilege. As I discussed above, defining security is not a trivial matter – there are significant material and subjective implications regarding the decision of who/what should be secured from whom. Acknowledging this, Marxist author Mark Neocleous (2000) argues that security is a ‘police project’ legitimizing the violent intrusion by the state into civil society. Its ultimate goal is to secure private property against potential rebellious ‘poor’ in modern bourgeois societies. If we put Neocleous’s Marxist perspective in dialogue with Cheryl Harris’s (1993) abovementioned contributions, the result might be insightful. Harris claims that property was historically sedimented by law as a white privilege in the white order of US society (a claim that, as I suggested, could be transposed to most societies within the modern capitalist world economy). If we consider, with Neocleous (2000) and Harris (1993), that security is mostly about securing property, and that property is grounded on white privilege, then we might also think of security as white privilege.

Considering all the perspectives discussed until this point, we can see that whiteness and security both share an important common ground: they entail a ‘right to exclude’ – that is, to define those who enjoy the (white) privilege of being secured and those from whom one should be secured. Be it in ideas about the individual, humanity, political normalcy, or property, whiteness is always the central unnamed and unmarked standpoint that structures framings and practices on security. This has significant implications, especially in postcolonial contexts. As Brazilian experience shows, in order that white people can enjoy the privilege of feeling safe and enjoying normalcy, non-white people must be incarcerated and/or eliminated (Borges, 2019; Bravo and Drumond, 2014; Decothé, 2019; Flauzina, 2019; Vargas, 2016).

It is important to highlight that in Brazil a true genocide of Black youth (mostly) in peripheral neighborhoods coexists with an atmosphere of political normalcy. Every 23 minutes, a young Black man is murdered in Brazil (Ribeiro, 2019b). In the already high rate of murders in the decade 2007–2018 (around 550,000 murders in 11 years), ‘Blacks represents 71.5% of people murdered’ (Ribeiro, 2019b: 39). In the same period, ‘homicides of blacks increased 33.1%, while non-blacks increased 3.3%’ (Da Silva, 2020). It is important to highlight that an important part of these murders are the responsibility of the state’s police apparatus: Blacks made up 75% of the people killed in police interventions between 2017 and 2018 (Da Silva, 2020).

As the previously discussed data and analytical perspectives point to the undoubted racist traces of public security in Brazil, we need to highlight that white people in the country – willingly or not – are structurally beneficiaries and accomplices of state violence against the Black population (Ribeiro, 2019b). Enjoying security is thus a white privilege whose other side is the systematic murdering of Black youth living in Brazilian slums. Hence, there is nothing ‘emancipatory’ about security in this context, nor can the ‘exception measures’ enabled by securitization be neatly separated from ‘normal politics’. On the contrary, security in Brazil presupposes a ‘state project aimed to eliminate the Black population’ (Flauzina, 2019: 146), being an institutionalized reminiscence of ‘the colonial-enslaver past of the country – and its consequent racism’ (Da Silva, 2020).

My point here is not only to highlight the deep structural racism embedded in ‘security’ concepts and practices. The point I want to foreground is that whiteness and white privilege are structuring cornerstones investing with legitimacy and authority such conceptions and practices of security. If critical security studies’ authors aim to dismantle racism and seek ‘reparative possibilities’ for the field, we must face how the racist concepts and practices on security we usually criticize ultimately benefit us. Hence, naming and marking whiteness as a racial position structuring critical security studies’ perspectives is a necessary first step towards anti-racist/abolitionist scholarship within the field.

Final remarks: Towards ‘reparative possibilities’ within critical security studies?

In this short intervention, I aimed to highlight how whiteness and white privilege, although notably unnamed and unmarked, are structural and structuring categories in critical security studies practices and understandings. Therefore, naming and racializing whiteness in the field is a necessary first step if we are to be able to imagine reparative possibilities within it. As Philip Howard (2004: 75) highlights:

it is vitally important that racially dominant bodies that would take up anti-racist work and live out oppositional whiteness realize that their choice to do so does not stop the privilege of whiteness from converging upon their bodies, nor does it guarantee that they have escaped the looming possibility that whiteness will find expressions through their bodies and work. Dominant anti-racist scholars need to consciously and continuously take responsibility for their implication in whiteness regardless of their personal politics.

Hence, to recognize the racial implications of our whiteness and privileges does not mean an ‘arrival’ at an absolute anti-racist awareness. Rather, it means assuming our involuntary complicity with a system of structural racial oppression and acknowledging the necessity of maintaining a ‘constant vigilance’ (a term that will certainly provoke goosebumps in some critical security studies scholars) on our practices, works, and social relations.

As Grada Kilomba (2019: 11) puts it, ‘this path of collective conscience-taking . . . is not a moral path, but a responsibility-taking path. The responsibility of creating new forms of power and knowledge’. To take this responsibility, then, demands that we ‘stop asking the classical moral question “Am I a racist?” and wait for a comfortable answer, and start asking “How can I dismantle my own racism?” This question, by itself, already starts the process’ (Kilomba, 2019: 46). To that, Djamila Ribeiro (2019b: 13) adds: ‘racism was invented by whiteness, so that white people must take responsibility for it. . . . That does not mean that one should feel guilty for being white: the point is to take responsibility. Guilt drives to inertia, responsibility drives to action’.

In this process of taking responsibility, to name, recognize, and constantly confront the racism that we inevitably reproduce as white scholars is important, but only the first step towards anti-racist/abolitionist knowledges and practices. Being aware of our positions in systems of power and privilege and how they reverberate in our work, we should aim to disturb and disrupt these very positions, for it is ‘only when power structures are reconfigured that many marginalized identities may finally reconfigure our notions of knowledge’ (Kilomba, 2019: 13). We are not exempt from the possibility of making mistakes in the process of confronting our privileged positions in knowledge production. In my own effort to name and disturb whiteness in critical security studies, I may have reproduced several racist and racially problematic assumptions, alongside a set of privileged positions and ignorance. The point, I think, is that we can no longer afford not to face the question of whiteness and white privilege and their constant reproduction in our field.

Footnotes

Funding

The author is funded by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal do Nível Superior – CAPES – Brazil (grant code 001) and by the Coordenação de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa (CCPG) of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.

ORCID iD

Lucas Guerra

Notes

Lucas Guerra is a Ph.D. student in International Relations at the Institute of International Relations of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (IRI/PUC-Rio), where he is a member of the research group Security and Development in the Global South (SEED–BRICS Policy Center). His research interests center on the reproduction of coloniality in international peace processes and security practices, and he is currently researching indigenous politics amidst conflicts in Latin America. Lucas is co-author of a chapter in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies, and his work has been published in Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Monções: Revista de Relações Internacionais and Carta Internacional.

References

Alcoff

(2005) Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. New York: Oxford University Press.

Anievas

Manchanda

Shilliam

(2015) Confronting the global colour line: An introduction. In: Anievas

Manchanda

Shilliam

(eds) Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line. Abingdon: Routledge, 1–16.

Applebaum

(2010) Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility, and Social Justice Pedagogy. Plymouth: Lexington Books.

Barkawi

Laffey

(2006) The postcolonial moment in security studies. Review of International Studies 32(2): 329–352.

Bento

MAS

(2014) Notas sobre a expressão da branquitude nas instituições [Notes on the expression of whiteness in institutions]. In: Silveira

Nogueira

Bento

MAS

(eds) Identidade, branquitude e negritude: Contribuições para a psicologia social no Brasil [Identity, Whiteness, and Blackness: Contributions to a Social Psychology in Brazil]. São Paulo: Casa do Psicólogo, 14–33.

Bhuta

(2008) Against state-building. Constellations 15(4): 517–542.

Booth

(1991) Security and emancipation. Review of International Studies 17(4): 313–326.

Borges

(2019) Encarceramento em massa [Mass Incarceration]. São Paulo: Pólen Livros.

Bravo

Drumond

(2014) Challenging modernities in Rio de Janeiro: A critical analysis of the ‘pacification’ project. In: Batchelor

Kenkel

(eds) Controlling Small Arms: Consolidation, Innovation and Relevancy in Research and Policy. Abingdon: Routledge, 218–235.

10.

Buzan

Hansen

(2009) The Evolution of International Security Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

11.

Chowdhry

Nair

(2002) Power in a postcolonial world: Race, gender, and class in international relations. In: Chowdhry

Nair

(eds) Postcolonialism and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender and Class. London: Routledge, 1–32.

12.

Croucher

(2018) Globalization and Belonging: The Politics of Identity in a Changing World. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

13.

Da Silva

(2020) Racismo e segurança para além da ponta do iceberg [Racism and security beyond the tip of the iceberg]. Folha de S. Paulo, 2 July. Available at: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/colunas/perifaconnection/2020/07/racismo-e-seguranca-para-alem-da-ponta-do-iceberg.shtml (accessed 1 August 2020).

14.

Decothé

(2019) ‘Baixada Cruel’: Uma cartografia social do impacto da militarização na vida de mulheres da Baixada Fluminense [‘Cruel Baixada’: A Social Cartography on the Impact of Militarization on Women’s Life at Baixada Fluminense]. Master’s degree dissertation, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

15.

Fernández

(2019) As Relações Internacionais e seus epistemicídios [International relations and its epistemicides]. Monções 8(15): 458–485.

16.

Flauzina

(2019) Corpo Negro caído no chão: O sistema penal e o projeto genocida do Estado brasileiro [Black Corpse on the Ground: The Penal System and the Brazilian State’s Genocidal Project]. São Paulo: BRADO.

17.

Frankenberg

(1993) White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

18.

Garner

(2007) Whiteness: An Introduction. Abingdon: Routledge.

19.

Gomes

(2017) A Escola Galesa de Estudos Críticos em Segurança Internacional – 25 anos depois [The Aberystwyth School in critical security studies: 25 years later]. Carta Internacional 12(1): 173–197.

20.

Grovogui

(2011) To the orphaned, dispossessed, and illegitimate children: Human rights beyond republican and liberal traditions. Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 18(1): 41–63.

21.

Hansen

(2020) Are ‘core’ feminist critiques of securitization theory racist? A reply to Alison Howell and Melanie Richter-Montpetit. Security Dialogue 51(4): 378–385.

22.

Harris

(1993) Whiteness as property. Harvard Law Review 8(106): 1707–1791.

23.

Hayes

Juárez

(2009) You showed your Whiteness: You don’t get a ‘good’ White people’s medal. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 22(6): 729–744.

24.

Henderson

(2013) Hidden in plain sight: Racism in international relations theory. Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26(1): 71–92.

25.

Hill

(2005) Beyond the Other? A postcolonial critique of the failed state thesis. African Identities 3(2): 139–154.

26.

Howard

(2004) White privilege: For or against? A discussion of ostensibly antiracist discourses in critical whiteness studies. Race, Gender & Class 11(4): 63–79.

27.

Howell

(2018) Forget ‘militarization’: Race, disability and the ‘martial politics’ of the police and of the university. International Feminist Journal of Politics 20(2): 117–136.

28.

Howell

Richter-Montpetit

(2020) Is securitization theory racist? Civilizationism, methodological whiteness, and antiblack thought in the Copenhagen School. Security Dialogue 51(1): 3–22.

29.

Ignatiev

(1997) The point is not to interpret whiteness but to abolish it. Race Traitor 2: 1–6.

30.

Kilomba

(2019) Memórias da plantação: Episódios de racismo cotidiano [Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism]. Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó.

31.

Krishna

(2001) Race, amnesia, and the education of international relations. Alternatives 26(4): 401–424.

32.

Mbembe

(2019) Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

33.

McIntosh

(1988) White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women’s studies. Working Paper 189. Wellesley, MA: Wellesley Centers for Women.

34.

Mills

(1999) The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

35.

Neocleous

(2000) Against security. Radical Philosophy 100: 7–15.

36.

Oliveira

(2019) Exclusão do sujeito negro e a negação de raça na produção acadêmica em Relações Internacionais no Brasil [Exclusion of the Black subject and racial denial in academic production in international relations in Brazil]. Monções 8(15): 366–396.

37.

Persaud

Sajed

(2018) Race, gender, and culture in international relations. In: Persaud

Sajed

(eds) Race, Gender, and Culture in International Relations: Postcolonial Perspectives. Abingdon: Routledge, 1–19.

38.

Quijano

(2000) Coloniality of power and Eurocentrism in Latin America. International Sociology 15(2): 215–232.

39.

Ribeiro

(2019a) Lugar de Fala [Place of Speech]. São Paulo: Pólen Livros.

40.

Ribeiro

(2019b) Pequeno manual antirracista [The Antiracist Manual]. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.

41.

Roediger

(2002) Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

42.

Sabaratnam

(2020) Is IR theory white? Racialised subject-positioning in three canonical texts. Millennium 49(1): 3–31.

43.

Somers

(2008) Genealogies of Citizenship: Knowledge, Markets, and the Right to Have Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

44.

Vargas

(2016) ‘Desidentificação’: A lógica de exclusão antinegra do Brasil [‘De-identification’: The logics of anti-Black exclusion in Brazil]. In: Pinho

Vargas

(eds) Antinegritude: O impossível sujeito negro na formação social brasileira [Anti-Blackness: The Impossible Black Subject in Brazilian Social Formation]. São Felix: Editora UFRB.

45.

Vitalis

(2015) White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

46.

Wæver

(2012) Aberystwyth, Paris, Copenhagen: The Europeanness of new ‘schools’ of security theory in an American field. In: Tickner

Blaney

(eds) Thinking International Relations Differently. Abingdon: Routledge, 48–71.

47.

Wæver

Buzan

(2020) Racism and responsibility – The critical limits of deepfake methodology in security studies: A reply to Howell and Richter-Montpetit. Security Dialogue 51(4): 386–394.

48.

Wai

(2012) Epistemologies of African Conflicts: Violence, Evolutionism, and the War in Sierra Leone. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

49.

Walker

RBJ

(2002) The subject of security. In: Krause

Williams

(eds) Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases. London: UCL Press, 61–83.