Are ‘core’ feminist critiques of securitization theory racist? A reply to Alison Howell and Melanie Richter-Montpetit

The Migrant Other: Exclusion without Nationalism?

“…Frameworks are in continual need of revisiting, however, thus demonstrating the beauty and danger of critical perspectives for the social scientific process: while critical theories can breathe new life and perspective into concepts entrenched in power imbalances, they can themselves become hegemonic discourses. Securitization studies is a case in point of a framework that started as a critical scholarship but is now under fire for its (and even its critics) entrenchment in racial power dynamics (Hansen 2020), and the question of whether these critiques can or will serve to refine existing scholarship or chart a new course forward remains open (Waever and Buzan 2020). In relation to migrant othering, I have explored in this article how the lives of mobile people do not easily map onto legal, political, social, or even discursive categories, yet I suggest that even critical approaches can contribute to the process of othering, for example, by focusing on the state and society producing the othering (Makarychev 2018), or even on subcategories within the migrant group, such as those involved in migration brokerage.…”

Racism and responsibility – The critical limits of deepfake methodology in security studies: A reply to Howell and Richter-Montpetit

“…They say nothing about their own methodology or data selection and give no principles for interpretation. They do not define racism (see response by Lene Hansen [2020]), and they don’t discuss at all what it means to read a theory and judge whether it is racist. Given that this is the theme of the article, it is disturbing that Security Dialogue has published it.…”

What is a minor international theory? On the limits of ‘Critical International Relations’

“…Simply abandoning use of the category of 'Critical IR' and the 'Critical IR Scholar' from scholarly parlance could help critique in IR to become more methodologically rigorous. As recent rhetorical disputes between self-describing 'Critical' traditions testify, competition about who is the 'most Critical' can vitiate the open potential in any IR theory (Hansen, 2020). Analyses are degraded and receive a degree of inoculation from appropriate scholarly evaluation, when self-describing Critical Scholars imply that achieving ethical and political purity (which may be defined variously) is the purpose and outcome of critique (Waever and Buzan, 2020).…”