Race and racism in critical security studies

Abstract

Oh my body, make of me always a man who questions! (Fanon, 1967: 232)

What happens to research when the researched become the researchers? (Smith, 2013: 183)

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)

In the current moment, we are witnessing a resurgent political urgency around demands to overthrow the inequities that are entrenched in oppressive structural formations such as racism and colonialism. Debates about race and racism are also unfolding in academia. While there has been a long tradition of speaking plainly about race within international relations (Doty, 1993; Grovogui, 2001), the past decade has seen a re-engagement not just with race as an analytical category but also with racism (Anievas et al., 2015; Muppidi, 2018; Rutazibwa, 2016; Vitalis, 2015), frequently articulated in terms of, or alongside calls for, the decolonization of academia.

As editors of a scholarly journal, we believe that our role is to foster academic debate on matters such as these. This special forum is born out of Security Dialogue’s ongoing commitment to the creation of a structured, reflexive space for critical attention to the question of race and racism in critical security studies. This reflective and forward-thinking forum includes both junior and senior authors from an array of disciplinary homes who responded to the following call for contributions, which was circulated via Twitter and Facebook on 21 July 2020:

The spectres of race and racism haunt the field of critical security studies, not just the broader discipline of International Relations (Anievas, Manchanda and Shilliam, 2015; Carrozza, Danewid and Pauls, 2017; Eriksson Baaz and Verweijen, 2018; Moffette and Vadasaria, 2016; Hobson, 2012). Inspired by these challenges, Security Dialogue seeks to publish a Forum of short interventions engaging the future of the field.

Questions have long been raised about the Eurocentric, Anglophone and colonial orientation of the field; the question of racism is distinct if related (Grovogui, 2001; Vitalis, 2015; Muppidi, 2018). Rutazibwa argues that ‘racism is the oil in the system of colonial power that makes a sustained discrimination of and violence against certain people not only possible but also invisible and acceptable,’ and so we wish to follow her call ‘to contribute to a radically different, anti- or non-racist IR and everyday’ (2016).

We are eager to include the issues of methodologies and methods, mentoring, publication and professionalization in our discussions as well as epistemological and ontological critiques and advances. As a scholarly community and as a journal, we wish to solicit imaginative and creative reflections on the ‘reparative possibilities’ (Sedgwick, 1997) of our philosophical and critical theoretical foundations. We also want to engage scholars who have incorporated these questions of race and racism, diversity and equity into their reframing of existing critical theoretical traditions. This forward-looking conversation will include accountings for the cost of those assumptions and limited perspectives at the foundation of the field, but also projections about how critical security studies might move forward in novel and ethico-politically committed ways.

We seek interventions of 2,000–5,000 words, which will undergo a peer review supervised by Marsha Henry and Claudia Aradau from the journal’s editorial board. We anticipate that most contributions will follow conventional academic style, but we are open to considering alternative formats, in discussion with the editors. (Security Dialogue, 2020)

As editors, we chose to issue this call for papers because the time is clearly overripe for scholarly discussions about race and racism in security studies. We also view the sober, measured pace, structured generosity and rigor, and cultivated agonism of the peer-review process as having a unique value when held up, for example, against the combustive immediacy of social media.

The volatile tweets and social media campaigns that multiplied after the publication of the responses to Alison Howell and Melanie Richter-Montpetit’s (2020) article made urgently clear the need for a more measured scholarly forum on race and racism within critical security studies (for the responses to Howell and Richter-Montpetit’s article, see Hansen, 2020; Wæver and Buzan, 2020). Vitriol was also directed at the integrity of the journal’s process and editorial independence.

Security Dialogue follows the same editorial process regardless of the subject-matter of a particular article, its theoretical frame or the political conclusions that one might draw from it. That spirit of ecumenical rigor is also embedded into our editorial process: the editorial team meets monthly to discuss all articles that meet the journal’s minimum requirements regarding style, format and scope, and makes a decision by consensus on which articles to send through peer review. The journal is bound by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines for peer review, and these are followed whenever questions arise. All of our reviews are double-anonymized – that is, the authors are unknown to the reviewers, the reviewers unknown to the authors – except in rare cases where it is not possible to avoid self-identification and, by mutual agreement between editors, authors and reviewers, the process is treated as single-anonymized. To be clear, this forum was subject to double-anonymized review. Editors are guided, not bound, by review reports, although all reports are shared both with the authors and with the reviewers themselves, and in this way we are answerable to our editorial board and the wider scholarly community. Once articles have been accepted, they proceed to one of our specialist language editors. At no stage in the process do we notify possible interlocutors to warn them of an impending critique, and articles are published in the order that that they are accepted. We regard such procedures as important aspects of editorial independence and a safeguard against the inherent politics of privilege in our profession.

In order to manifest our commitment to the journal’s principles of objectivity and independence, for this special forum we followed a format similar to that of our special issues: we enlisted two senior colleagues who were not members of the editorial team to select contributions that would move through peer review. We then enlisted three senior peer reviewers to review the manuscripts. The editor-in-chief handled final revisions for publication, and the manuscripts then moved through our usual process of extensive language and copy editing.

We are confident that the peer-reviewed interventions presented here will push the conversations about race and racism in critical security studies and beyond in exciting, unexpected and productive ways. To encourage conversations between and across the contributions, we are publishing this forum as a special supplement.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Mark B Salter

Emily Gilbert

Jairus Grove

Anna Stavrianakis

Author biographies

Mark B Salter is Professor in Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. His current research is on critical security studies. He is the editor of Making Things International 1 and 2.

Emily Gilbert is a Professor at the University of Toronto, cross-appointed between the Canadian Studies program and the Department of Geography & Planning. She has published widely on issues relating to borders, economies, security, and war, including ‘The gift of war: Cash, counterinsurgency and “collateral damage”’ in Security Dialogue 46(5).

Jairus Grove is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at University of Hawai’i, Manoa. His research centers on the ecology and future of global warfare, and is the author of Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World, 2019.

Jana Hönke is Professor at the University of Bayreuth working at the intersection of Global Political Sociology and Peace and Conflict Studies with a focus on Africa. She is the author of Transnational Companies and Security Governance, 2013, and co-author of The Global Making of Policing: Postcolonial Perspectives (with Mueller), 2016.

Doerthe Rosenow is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Oxford Brookes University. Her current research is on decolonial thought, settler colonialism and Indigenous writings. She is the author of Un-making Environmental Activism: Beyond Modern/Colonial Binaries in the GMO Controversy, 2017.

Anna Stavrianakis is Professor of International Relations in the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex. She researches and teaches on questions of (in)security and militarism, with a focus on the international arms trade. Recent publications have appeared in International Political Sociology and Review of International Studies.

Maria Stern is Professor in Peace and Development Studies at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. Her research interests are in feminist theory, critical security studies, critical war and military studies. Recent articles have appeared in European Journal of International Relations and International Affairs.

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