Abstract:This article explores the role played by time in the maintenance of global racial difference with reference to the precarious sovereignties of Haiti, Liberia and Ethiopia during the interwar period. It suggests that the experiences of these states, understood through the discourses which sought to both support and undermine them, point to a shift away from juridical division in global order and towards a hierarchy framed in terms of racialised temporalities. While postcolonial scholarship can help us to unders… Show more
“…In the colonial present, national belonging is so all‐encompassing that it is not just states that are assigned statuses of “colonial temporalities” (“‘not‐yet’, stasis, regression, vanishing, or contemporaneous parody and failure” (Younis, :370)) but the bodies deemed to belong to those states. At the UK border, Somalis are imbued with the characteristics of their nation‐state as determined by the national order of things: they have failed in their accounts of themselves before they have even begun.…”
Section: Resultsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…For Western politicians and academics, Somalia has come to epitomize the ‘failed state’, a discourse which locates the ‘problem’ of failure as local, thereby sidestepping colonial guilt and eliminating Cold War and neo‐liberal policies. Younis (:370) argues that such epithets are continuations of the temporal and spatial logic of colonial‐racial difference: ‘the globalisation of international society’ [proceeds] on a two‐track temporality, on the one hand opening the door to a global synchrony of functionally undifferentiated political forms, but on the other adopting a stratification in political time which assigned various states (and their populations), by virtue of their ‘racial’ makeup, statuses of ‘not‐yet’, stasis, regression, vanishing, or contemporaneous parody and failure – extensions of colonial temporalities, but transposed onto a new political order.Or as Gruffydd Jones (:182) notes more prosaically “the ‘failed state’ discourse obfuscates the historical social relations of crisis while legitimizing the reproduction of imperial social relations.” She further observes how the binaries of this discourse – success/failure, strong/weak, secure/fragile – echo that of the nineteenth century which legitimized colonialism on the basis of a civilized/uncivilized dichotomy. It must also be observed that these are gendered binaries (Massey, ; McClintock, ; Peterson, ).…”
Section: An Unthought Cosmology: the National Order Of Thingsmentioning
Through the categorization of movers, states determine and fix the belonging of migrants and thereby reproduce the nation‐state system as a global reality. Some movers, however, are deemed illegible and must be identified, labelled and thus brought within the system. This paper unpicks the legal consequences of a “coloniality of power” (Quijano, 2000) embedded within the border system as a whole. The paper demonstrates this process through a post‐colonial examination of Somali migration and the application of the 1951 Refugee Convention at the UK border. The Somali migrant, like his colonized predecessor, is constructed as an unreliable informant of him/herself; a “lying native” (Bhabha, 1994) whose identity can be ‘discovered’ by the tools of the enlightened West.
“…In the colonial present, national belonging is so all‐encompassing that it is not just states that are assigned statuses of “colonial temporalities” (“‘not‐yet’, stasis, regression, vanishing, or contemporaneous parody and failure” (Younis, :370)) but the bodies deemed to belong to those states. At the UK border, Somalis are imbued with the characteristics of their nation‐state as determined by the national order of things: they have failed in their accounts of themselves before they have even begun.…”
Section: Resultsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…For Western politicians and academics, Somalia has come to epitomize the ‘failed state’, a discourse which locates the ‘problem’ of failure as local, thereby sidestepping colonial guilt and eliminating Cold War and neo‐liberal policies. Younis (:370) argues that such epithets are continuations of the temporal and spatial logic of colonial‐racial difference: ‘the globalisation of international society’ [proceeds] on a two‐track temporality, on the one hand opening the door to a global synchrony of functionally undifferentiated political forms, but on the other adopting a stratification in political time which assigned various states (and their populations), by virtue of their ‘racial’ makeup, statuses of ‘not‐yet’, stasis, regression, vanishing, or contemporaneous parody and failure – extensions of colonial temporalities, but transposed onto a new political order.Or as Gruffydd Jones (:182) notes more prosaically “the ‘failed state’ discourse obfuscates the historical social relations of crisis while legitimizing the reproduction of imperial social relations.” She further observes how the binaries of this discourse – success/failure, strong/weak, secure/fragile – echo that of the nineteenth century which legitimized colonialism on the basis of a civilized/uncivilized dichotomy. It must also be observed that these are gendered binaries (Massey, ; McClintock, ; Peterson, ).…”
Section: An Unthought Cosmology: the National Order Of Thingsmentioning
Through the categorization of movers, states determine and fix the belonging of migrants and thereby reproduce the nation‐state system as a global reality. Some movers, however, are deemed illegible and must be identified, labelled and thus brought within the system. This paper unpicks the legal consequences of a “coloniality of power” (Quijano, 2000) embedded within the border system as a whole. The paper demonstrates this process through a post‐colonial examination of Somali migration and the application of the 1951 Refugee Convention at the UK border. The Somali migrant, like his colonized predecessor, is constructed as an unreliable informant of him/herself; a “lying native” (Bhabha, 1994) whose identity can be ‘discovered’ by the tools of the enlightened West.
“…Secondly, as we have seen, sovereignty was a key goal in anticolonial projects seeking independence from imperial domination and remains a central demand in liberation movements today (Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Reynolds, 1996; Salt, 2018; Younis, 2018). Future investigations might question to what extent the notion of ‘colonial crisis’ and ‘responses to it’ can be subverted and rerouted by the colonised in acts of resistance.…”
Section: Resultsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…This article therefore contributes to interdisciplinary conversations on the question of race and racism. Although discussions of race and racism are present in IR (see among others Anievas et al, 2014; Henderson, 2013; Jones, 2008; Krishna, 2001; Sabaratnam, 2019; Shilliam, 2017; Thompson, 2013; Vitalis, 2015; Younis, 2018), they have at times overlooked their contestation as categories of analysis outside of the confines of the discipline. This ‘united front’ has undoubtedly been useful in carving out a space of possibility – where discussions around race and racism can take place in IR – but they also have the effect of glossing over some otherwise profound theoretical and political differences.…”
This article explores how International Relations (IR) might better conceptualise and analyse an underexplored but constitutive relationship between race and sovereignty. I begin with a critical analysis of the ‘orthodox account’ of sovereignty which, I argue, produces an analytical and historical separation of race and sovereignty by: (1) abstracting from histories of colonial dispossession; (2) treating racism as a resolved issue in IR. Against the orthodox account, I develop the idea of ‘racial sovereignty’ as a mode of analysis which can: (1) overcome the historical abstractions in the orthodox account; (2) disclose the ongoing significance of racism in international politics. I make this argument in three moves. Firstly, I present a history of the 17th century struggle between ‘settlers’ and ‘natives’ over the colonisation of Virginia. This history, I argue, discloses the centrality of dispossession and racialisation in the attendant attempts of English settlers to establish sovereignty in the Americas. Secondly, by engaging with criticisms of ‘recognition’ found in the anticolonial tradition, I argue that the Virginian experience is not simply of historical interest or localised importance but helps us better understand racism as ongoing and structural. I then demonstrate how contemporary assertions of sovereignty in the context of Brexit disclose a set of otherwise concealed colonial and racialised relations. I conclude with the claim that interrogations of racial sovereignty are not solely of historical interest but are of political significance for our understanding of the world today.
“…Moreover, it is a process that is deeply interconnected with empire (Anghie, 2009; Keene, 2002; Reus-Smit, 2013) and, in the more recent past, with other, more or less violent, forms of control and domination. Critical, post-colonial and feminist scholars have shown that these include economic and financial standards (Chimni, 2006; Mozaffari, 2002), hierarchies generated by international law (Aalberts, 2014, Anghie, 2009; Pahuja, 2011), relations of gender dominance (Towns, 2009; Yuval-Davis, 1997), racial hierarchies (Sabaratnam, 2017; Yunis, 2018), stratifications of class (Agathangelou and Ling, 2009; Pal, 2018) and nationality (Chatterjee, 1993, 2010). A number of scholars have further stressed that, historically, resistance has been as central a pattern as domination in the making of the international system (Crawford, 2002; Lake and Reynolds, 2008; Meger, 2017).…”
Section: The Disjuncture Between the Expansion Of International Sociementioning
International Relations scholarship disconnects the history of the so-called expansion of international society from the presence of hierarchies within it. In contrast, this article argues that these developments may in fact be premised on hierarchical arrangements whereby new states are subject to international tutelage as the price of acceptance to international society. It shows that hierarchies within international society are deeply entrenched with the politics of self-determination as international society expands. I substantiate this argument with primary and secondary material on the Minority Treaty provisions imposed on the new states in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe admitted to the League of Nations after World War I. The implications of this claim for International Relations scholarship are twofold. First, my argument contributes to debates on the making of the international system of states by showing that the process of expansion of international society is premised on hierarchy, among and within states. Second, it speaks to the growing body of scholarship on hierarchy in world politics by historicising where hierarchies come from, examining how diverse hierarchies are nested and intersect, and revealing how different actors navigate these hierarchies.
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