Counterterrorism and race

Abu-Bakare, Amal

doi:10.1057/s41312-020-00074-x

Cited by 32 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…The overall effect of this position is that the discipline has been unwilling or indeed unable to respond to Grenfell, to the Windrush scandal, to the Black Lives Matter Movement, or the Sewell Report. 2 This stands in contrast to other disciplines, including sociology (Szetela 2020;Ellefsen and Sandberg 2022;Connelly and Joseph-Salisbury 2019), history (Hirsh 2020), as well as sub-fields such as political theory (Havercroft and Owen 2016) and international relations (Danewid 2020;Abu-Bakare 2020). British politics is conspicuous in its absence.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dear British politics—where is the race and racism?

Akram

2023

Br Polit

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This article explores the neglect of race and racism in the discipline of British politics. I outline why this has happened, the consequences of such neglect and how it might be remedied. The article proceeds in four stages: First, it makes the case that British politics has neglected race and racism. I do this by showing that race does not feature within the core concerns of the discipline, and that despite the fact that race may be noted in the relationship between demography and representation, its status as a social construct is not addressed. Second, the article explores the question of disciplinary reflexivity. Drawing on Emirbayer and Desmond’s (2012) racial reflexivity framework, I delineate the disciplinary and scholastic unconscious of British politics, showing that the reliance on the Westminster Model obscures questions of race. Next, the article discusses the Sewell Report (2021), explicating its post-racism narrative, and draws parallels between the findings of the report and the study of British politics. The final section of the article outlines a framework for a British politics of race. The framework draws on critical race theory, and Britain’s imperial history of colonialism and empire-building and thus puts the study of race at the centre of the discipline.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dear British politics—where is the race and racism?

Akram

2023

Br Polit

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“…While acknowledging the disruptive and devastating impact of colonialism within post-colonial states, it is also important to understand that "counterterrorism practices often occur under circumstances already existent, granted, and transmitted from a colonial past. " 42 Therefore, counterterrorism strategies within post-colonial states were developed and implemented through a particularly western gaze. This is the gaze that engaged in categorisations based on race and assumed the monopoly of naming.…”

Section: New Zealand's Counterterrorism Approach -Colonial Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a Decolonial Approach to New Zealand’s Counter Terrorism: Afrocentric Perspectives

Achieng

2023

NSJ

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New Zealand’s counterterrorism approach, like that of many other postcolonial states, stems from models which continue to operationalise and legitimise colonial continuities. These models are predominantly underpinned by the events of 9/11. However, the devastating attacks in Christchurch in 2019 raised concerns about the way domestic terrorism has been conceived of by the security and intelligence communities in New Zealand. Debates have emerged on the efficacy of the Western-centric Global War on Terror (GWOT) narrative on terrorism and how it fits within the realities of New Zealand’s counter-terrorism context, given the country’s national peculiarities and colonial history. Consequently, this article explores the GWOT ideology and attempts to expose terrorism as an a historical colonial concept. The argument is thus made for epistemic reconstitution and pluriversality of knowledges in how terrorism is understood and dealt with in the New Zealand context. In so doing, the article invokes decolonial thinking by drawing parallels between New Zealand’s experience and the African colonial experience, by discussing decolonisation through the lens of Afrocentrism. Animating New Zealand’s counterterrorism experience through the prism of Afrocentrism, therefore, the argument is made that the foundation of knowledge production in counter-terrorism within New Zealand is profoundly colonial.

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“…Race is understood as ‘a way of making up people’ (Ali, 2020: 583; Omi and Winant, 2015: 105), as a social construction based on and reproduced by processes of racialization. This attributes different values, characteristics, and identities to bodies and make them politically visible, actionable, and addressable in different ways (Abu-Bakare, 2020: 81; Ali, 2020). Assigning them different qualities, these processes of construction work to reproduce and reify racialized hierarchical orderings of bodies (Abu-Bakare, 2020: 82).…”

Section: Counter-terrorism As a Racializing Spoken/unspoken Formationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global silences as privilege: The international community’s white silence on far-right terrorism

Martini

2023

Security Dialogue

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Silences are not only absences in the spoken discourse or gaps in the discursive texture of international politics. They are important nodes of this texture and, as such, they constitute the political too. The said and the unsaid may work together to reify knowledge and shape international politics. Starting from this idea, this article scrutinizes global counter-terrorism as a discursive formation, composed of a spoken and an unspoken sphere. Within the silent dimension, the work focuses specifically on the silences in far-right terrorism and extremism. Scrutinizing global counter-terrorism as a racialized formation, the article argues that these silences are produced and reproduced by whiteness. Within the international community’s debates, whiteness gives rise to two kinds of silence – silence as the unspoken and the spoken as silencing. Examining them through the prism of whiteness, the article shows that these silences allow the maintenance of white privilege. This is the privilege of not being identified as a terrorist Other and not becoming the object of counter-terrorism measures, while having this privilege silenced and hidden. This work thus shows that, as gears of discursive formations, silences are racialized and may have colors – in this case, the color of white privilege.

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Counterterrorism and race

Cited by 32 publications

References 61 publications

Dear British politics—where is the race and racism?

Dear British politics—where is the race and racism?

Towards a Decolonial Approach to New Zealand’s Counter Terrorism: Afrocentric Perspectives

Global silences as privilege: The international community’s white silence on far-right terrorism

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