Subjects and (Dis)obedience

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The last commentary in our symposium on Chris Rossdale’s Resisting Militarism: Direct Action and the Politics of Subversion (Edinburgh, 2019), from Elena Loizidou. Elena is Reader in Law and Political Theory at the School of Law, Birkbeck College. Her research interests range from anarchism and political theory to theories of gender and sexuality, law and culture. Her recent publications include Disobedience: Concept and Practice (edited, 2013), Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics (2007), ‘What is Law?’’ in The Anarchist Imagination: Anarchism Encounters the Humanities and the Social Sciences (2019), ‘Law, Love and Anarchism’ (2018), and ‘Dreams and The Political Subject’, in Vulnerability in Resistance (2016). A rejoinder will follow shortly; all posts will be collected for future perusal here.

Chris Rossdale’s Resisting Militarism: Direct Action and the Politics of Subversion is a beautifully written book and one of those very rare academic books where the concrete (ethnographic) and the theoretical critique each other and reveal the complexity of socio-political phenomena such as anti-militarist actions. The contributions to knowledge that this book offers is immense: (a) it provides us with an ethnography of anti-militarist groups in Britain including, Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT), Stop the Arms Fair (STAF); Smash EDO; Plowshares (or Ploughshares) and Space Hijackers emanating either from Rossdale participating or study over the last 12 years; (b) it widens our understandings of concepts such as (but not only) militarism (through linkage of war, conflict, state violence “to more intimate relations of power, authority domination” (p. 4), anti-militarism (through questioning the prefigurative claims of the groups he has studied) and disobedience (by drawing our attention to its attachment to obedience); and (c) it expands the methodological teachings of ethnographical studies by relating them to theoretical claims. Indeed Rossdale should be congratulated for his ability to navigate effortlessly between the concrete and the theoretical and challenge our perceived notions of concepts and politics.  His method of study will guide and should guide ethnographic studies in the future.

Anyone that studies social movements, whether it is the anti-militarist, anti-capitalist or anarchist movements (as I do), tends to present such movement in radical and pure ways. More specifically we tend to present such movements them as being diametrically opposite to what the social/political order that it is contesting. Resisting Militarism presents us with a delicate and nuanced reading of the anti-militarist movement. In doing so it exposes that there is a much more intimate relationship between the anti-militarist movement and militarism, or as Rossdale puts it anti-militarist actions and militarism are ‘mutually constitutive’ of each other (p. 12).  I will go a step further and suggest that as the book reveals they are not only  ‘mutually constitutive’ but rather they depend upon each other in the way in which Judith Butler interpreted Hegel’s ‘masterand servant dialectic’ in Subjects of Desire (1999); the existence of both parties (master (militarism) and servant (anti-militarism) ) somewhat paradoxically– as the former produces and sustains war, domination, authority and the latter contests them – depends on the non-destruction of each other.  If the servant for example annihilates the master their existence – as it is inextricably link to the master’s recognition, will cease to be. Rossdale very carefully tracks down how our protesting, direct actions, blockades, and other activist actions at times resemble the very master that we may want to undo, and how prefigurative politics (politics associated with anti-militarist movements) at times fall short of their very aspirations, namely not reproducing the violence associated with militarism.  Rossdale for example, shows how gender hierarchies may permeate such groups and how such a hierarchy works against the anti-hierarchical structures and aspirations of anti-militarist groups. Nevertheless, the intention of the book is not to suggest that anti-military resistance should be abandoned. On the contrary, by demonstrating the distance between word (e.g. anti-hierarchy aspiration in the structure and organisation of resistance) and the practice Rossdale, is asking us to cultivate a more mindful ‘ethic of resistance’. It is possible as he suggests that if we become more reflective of our actions that we stop from reproducing militarism – racism, sexism, homophobia and authority, the very things that anti-militarist actions desire to challenge and change. Put differently the book teaches how we are all implicated in the production of violence despite our desires or best intentions and how we can attend to this problematic.

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Deconstructing Power and Resistance: A Response to Rossdale

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A third commentary in our symposium on Chris Rossdale’s Resisting Militarism: Direct Action and the Politics of Subversion (Edinburgh, 2019), from Rachel Zhou. Rachel is a Phd candidate in the Department of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science. Her doctoral research focuses on the making of female soldiers in the post-WWII era. Rather than taking the “existence” of female soldiers for granted, she examines “female soldiers” as historically constructed subjects which are constitutive of the politics of war. In particular, she looks at how “small” wars in the post-1945 era as transnational and imperial encounters render thinkable and possible the emergence of female soldiers and shape the subjectivities/experiences of (different) female soldiers. She takes a multidisciplinary approach that encompasses the fields of military/war history, poststructuralist feminist, critical race and postcolonial theories. She is the review article editor of Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Rossdale’s Resisting Militarism is currently discounted with use of the code NEW30 at the EUP site, and the last reply and a rejoinder will follow in the next days; all posts will be collected for future perusal here.

Is resistance possible? How could resistance be carried out? Is resistance outside or external to power it resists? Is a radical escape from power possible? These questions are perennial but now further ignited by movements taking place during a global pandemic which accentuates and exposes systems of power. Chris Rossdale’s Resisting Militarism: Direct Action and the Politics of Subversion offers answers but poses more questions.

This book is rooted in an intimate and careful interrogation of “the performances, negotiations, and debates which surround” anti-militarist direct action in UK, but transcends the ethnography with its major contributions to debates on the politics of resistance and the relations between power and resistance. Treating direct action practices as “a fruitful site through which to read the politics of both militarism and resistance” (p. 6), it successfully and provocatively unpacks how anti-militarist politics resist, subvert, are shaped by, and reproduce militarism. The intimacy between militarism and anti-militarism is critically reflected on through meticulous accounts of the “internal” politics of antimilitarist resistance, which are read in relation to, not apart from, what it is against. Sherry Ortner points out there is an “impulse to sanitize the internal politics” of resistance in studies of resistance so that “the ambivalent complexity” of resistance is usually rendered invisible, which contributes to an inadequate analysis (1995, pp. 176-180). Resisting Militarism does not repeat this pitfall and also moves beyond just taking the “internal” politics of anti-militarist practices seriously. Instead, it would challenge the very binary between “internal” and “external”. The “internal” politics identified by Ortner is “within all the local categories of friction and tension” (p. 177). But Rossdale reads these frictions and tensions among anti-militarists, including those surrounding how an anti-militarist group is organised, whether focusing on the spectacular, how to approach security, illegality, pacifism and nonviolence, and the gendered and racialised politics of the movement”, not as “internal” politics per se. In Resisting Militarism they are interrogated in relation to “external” politics not only because how “internal” politics matters to its engagements with militarism, but more importantly as attempts to determine the particular nature and micro-politics of militarism and the imperatives of resistance as well as the relationship between militarism and anti-militarism (pp. 6-7). With a particular understanding of power and the concept of prefiguration, the book provocatively disrupts the boundaries between means and ends and between resistance and power.

Thus, Resisting Militarism brilliantly demonstrates how militarism and anti-militarism are antagonistic and co-constitutive (or antagonism is always already co-constitutive) and that while power relations can be revealed by examining attempts to uproot them, spaces and practices of resistance are always already produced by and, “potentially, reproductive of precisely that which is resisted” (p. 139). This move is rare even among the works situating power and resistance in the same analytical framework and taking their intimate relationships seriously. Usually they only focus on how a certain form of resistance is produced by a form of power but not on how resistance is complicit and reproduces what it is against. Thus, they still tend to eschew a deconstructive approach to resistance taken by Resisting Militarism, as if being critical of resistance could give more ground and energy to power. Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons by Banu Bargu (2016) is another example which places power and resistance in one framework. Similarly, it also successfully demonstrates how resistance is shaped by power. However, its analysis might be criticised for overlooking how necroresistance could reproduce the logics of a “biosovereign assemblage” (Bargu, p. 53) that it is against. Rendering resistance innocent could simplify the operations of power as well as the complex relationships between power and resistance, and create spaces for imaginations of easy and straightforward resistance and thus a clean escape from power. Resisting Militarism is more cautious and actively seeks to be self-reflective. Not only (some) antimilitarist practices take a deconstructive approach to militarism. Resisting Militarism also seeks to deconstruct anti-militarism and calls for keeping antagonistic contestation in play as well as “a ceaseless openness to deconstruct that contestation” (p. 270). Remaining open to deconstruction and affirmative gestures in resistance could be the best hopes for resisting in a world where the subject, freedom and resistance are shaped and fundamentally entangled with power.

The brilliant book thus has made significant contributions to debates on the politics of resistance. My review should stop here. Also, to offer any critique is difficult because of its constant self-reflections. However, no critique could be exactly against what this book calls for — “antagonistic contestation and a ceaseless openness to deconstruct that contestation” (p. 270). The critiques may not be antagonistic since they follow the approach Resisting Militarism takes but seeks to make some implications more explicit, ask what could be further elaborated on and whether it reproduces what it critiques, and thus they are immanent critiques.

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On Prefiguration, Diversity of Tactics, and a New Anti-Militarism

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The second post in our symposium on Chris Rossdale’s Resisting Militarism: Direct Action and the Politics of Subversion (Edinburgh, 2019), currently discounted with use of the code NEW30 at the EUP site. Today we feature Erica Chenoweth, the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, where they research and teach on international politics, social movements, and political violence and its alternatives. Erica directs the Nonviolent Action Lab at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, where they study how people can create transformative social and political change using creative, disruptive, people power. They are currently writing a book with Zoe Marks on the role of women’s frontline participation on the outcomes and aftermath of mass movements over the past 120 years. Erica is the author of Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2021), co-editor of Civil Action and the Dynamics of Violence (Oxford, 2019) with Deborah Avant, Marie Berry, Rachel Epstein, Cullen Hendrix, and Timothy Sisk, co-editor of the The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism (Oxford 2019) with Richard English, Andreas Gofas, and Stathis Kalyvas, co-author of The Politics of Terror (Oxford, 2018) with Pauline Moore, and co-author of Why Civil Resistance Works (Columbia, 2011) with Maria J. Stephan. Erica also co-hosts the blog Political Violence @ a Glance and is an occasional contributor to The Monkey Cage, where they publish regular reports about trends in US protest, counter-protest, and state response based on data collected with Jeremy Pressman through the Crowd Counting Consortium. Further posts and a rejoinder will follow this week; all will be collected for future perusal here.

I thank Chris Rossdale for the opportunity to read his excellent book, Resisting Militarism: Direct action and the politics of subversion, and I am glad to engage with his ideas here. The book recounts the current state of the UK’s anti-militarism movement, as well as debates and faultlines within the movement. This is also a book written for a movement by one of its protagonists. Rossdale is motivated to study the anti-militarism movement as a participant and observer of the movement so as to better resist militarism (p. 8). It is a critical read for those concerned with anti-militarism, the peace movement, and broader debates within progressive and radical left movements more generally.

At the outset of the book, Rossdale defines militarism as “ ‘the social and international relations of the preparation for, and conduct of, organized political violence’ ” (p. 3, quoting Stavrianakis & Selby 2013). Rossdale views anti-militarism as “a particular politics which seeks to reveal, disrupt, and subvert the social processes through which violence is made possible. It is an ethic of resistance, which recognizes that its task is never complete, and that it must adapt to new forms and sites of militarism just as militarism adapts to new constellations of resistance” (p. 270). The book therefore emphasizes prefigurative politics—the process of creating and negotiating intentional relationships between those involved in the movement to experiment with new and equitable political realities.

Rossdale’s autoethnographic approach adds credibility to the work, and it provides numerous avenues for engaging directly with key fault lines and movement dynamics that might otherwise be easy to overlook from a distance. The book is chock-full of useful reflections about what motivates (and what ails) the contemporary anti-militarism movement in the UK in ways that resonate far beyond the anti-militarism struggle in this case. The book is important and well-researched. Rossdale should be commended for his thorough citation practices, as well as his engagement with a variety of critical approaches—particularly those of queer theory and feminist theory. The book makes numerous productive critiques about the anti-militarist movement’s need to overcome its perpetual whiteness and to center the most vulnerable in the movement’s articulation of its vision and in participants’ relationships with one another. It is also very productive that Rossdale keeps the focus on the largest sources of violence—state-led violence and the military industrial complex—while advocating for the interpretation of violence in context.

Taking Rossdale on his own terms, I first make one general observation, and then I engage with three unresolved issues that arise over the course of the book.

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Resisting the Attractions of Anti-Militarism

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After an overlong hiatus, we return to our mission with a symposium on Chris Rossdale’s Resisting Militarism: Direct Action and the Politics of Subversion (Edinburgh, 2019). The introductory chapter of Resisting Militarism is available to read here, and the whole book is soon to be released in paperback, discounted with use of the code NEW30 at the EUP site. For the first post in our series we are joined again by Anna Stavrianakis, Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex, UK, where she researches and teaches on the international arms trade, (in)security and militarism. Anna is the author of Taking Aim at the Arms Trade. NGOs, Global Civil Society and the World Military Order (Zed, 2010) and co-editor (with Jan Selby) of Militarism and International Relations. Political Economy, Security Theory (Routledge, 2012). She is an editor at Security Dialogue, where she co-edited (with Maria Stern) the special issue on “Militarism and Security: Dialogue, Possibilities and Limits” (2018). Anna is currently working on a variety of projects associated with the arms trade and the war in Yemen, one recent result being ‘Controlling Weapons Circulation in a Postcolonial Militarised World’ in Review of International Studies. Further posts will follow this week; all will be collected for future perusal here.

As a fellow traveller in the world of anti-militarist activism, it was both a pleasure and an education to engross myself in Chris Rossdale’s new book, Resisting Militarism. I happened to see Chris on a sunny summer’s day in Brighton in June 2019, shortly after the Court of Appeal issued its judgment that the UK government had acted unlawfully in continuing to licence weapons exports to Saudi Arabia given its conduct in the war in Yemen. I wanted to raise a toast to the tenacious persistence of Campaign Against Arms Trade and to celebrate their legal victory. But even with my caveat that the hard work of translating a legal decision into meaningful political change remained, Chris was reluctant to savour the moment and curious as to how I could be in celebratory mood, given what we both know about the UK government’s commitment to arms sales, in particular those to the Middle East. Resisting Militarism helps me better understand Chris’ sceptical curiosity and his relentless questioning of what constitutes success and what an anti-militarist politics entails.

Through the combination of detailed, fine-grained ethnographic description that can only emerge from years of being part of a movement, and high theory dispatched with a light touch, Resisting Militarism helps readers understand (anti)-militarism as both concept and practice. Chris is very much present in the analysis but unassumingly so. Centering gender, sexuality and race as the social relations that scholars and activists need to foreground in understanding, engaging with and challenging militarism, he outlines a prefigurative politics of engagement with power, authority and domination as the thread that weaves the intimate and the geopolitical together.

There are two core contributions that I find particularly compelling about Chris’ analysis. First is the way he breathes life into abstract definitions of militarism. Mobilising the definition that Jan Selby and I gave in our 2012 edited volume Militarism and International Relations, of militarism as “the social and international relations of the preparation for, and conduct of, organised political violence”, Chris gives purchase to it for the study of contemporary British anti-militarism by filling it with a focus on gender, sexuality and race as the core social relations that variously bolster and challenge, and always permeate, militarism and anti-militarism. In short, “militarism is not a thing that can be smashed, but a series of social relations that must be disassembled by relating otherwise” (p. 38). Crucially, this means there is no ‘outside’ of militarism: there is no separating everyday life from the preparation for organized violence. No-one is exempt from it – not even the anti-militarist movement. Chris is interested in “the depths of our imbrication within militarised relations of power” (p38) – and once we acknowledge that, the question of how we agitate for an anti-militarist present and future looks rather different from what many accounts of militarism and anti-militarism offer.

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Is IR Theory White? Racialised Subject-Positioning in Three Canonical Texts

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This post is a little introduction to my recently published (open access) article in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, in which I use the scholarly literature on whiteness to examine three highly influential books in International Relations (IR) – Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics, Robert Keohane’s After Hegemony and Alexander Wendt’s Social Theory of International Politics.

Of course, the answer is what you might expect (duh); but I hope the route to reaching that conclusion might be something worth considering, and maybe not exactly what you were expecting. It articulates an account of whiteness which is ultimately less pessimistic than the oft-caricatured ‘identity politics’ framings of race – indeed it argues that it is absolutely possible to overcome the limitations of whiteness as a standpoint, but that this would not be transformative without other structural changes.

Screenshot 2020-11-29 at 12.37.32

I began thinking about this issue because I was simultaneously excited, provoked by and wary about a framing emerging from the student movement at UCL: “Why is My Curriculum White?” – a moment in which both Nathaniel Coleman and Adam Elliott-Cooper played leading roles. We were also increasingly having conversations with students and colleagues at SOAS about race and decolonisation in the curriculum whilst we witnessed what was going on in South Africa and elsewhere.

Despite the care and precision with which the UCL collective expressed itself on the question of whiteness as an ideology, the media and the Right concocted a fevered moral panic around the issues, proclaiming an attack on Western Civilisation, free speech and academic freedom by the ungrateful, and the emergence of ‘reverse racism’ and so on. It did not help that some contributions from elsewhere in the movement seemed to be rather essentialist around the questions of race and racism (in ways which had been long abandoned with respect to gender, for example). From a political point of view, the ‘culture wars’ framing of matters was eliciting a set of destructive emotional responses anticipated in the whiteness literature itself – shame, guilt, anger, denial – which were a (sometimes intentional) distraction from more transformative and productive conversations.

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Loving Exclusions: Marriage, Emotional Attachments and Global Inequalities

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A guest post from V. Spike Peterson. Spike is Professor of International Relations at the University of Arizona. She is a critical social theorist whose research interests stem from anti-war, civil rights and feminist activism in the US and many years of work/travel/residence ‘outside’ of the West. Background studies in anthropology, historical sociology and communications inform her work in IR, which queries how structural hierarchies of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity/race and nation are historically produced, ideologically normalized, continuously intersecting, and potentially transformed. Her publications span genealogies of sex, family, science and state formation; critiques of informalization, global political economy and its in/securities; intimate-global relations, racial logics, citizenship regimes, alt-right nationalisms, and the politics of im/migration in our fraught neoliberal, neo-imperial present. Her most recent work aims to raise critical awareness of how power relations of privilege operate to reproduce intentional and – surprisingly and importantly – unintentional resistance to transformative social change.

Ah, love! Fairy tales and romantic comedies promote living the quest for love and its idealized consummation in the ‘happily ever after’ of married life. What could be better than love? The ‘sanctity of marriage’ and ‘love of family’ are touted by conservatives, love of god by religious believers, love of one’s nation by patriots, love of oneself by self-help manuals and consumerist advertising, and love of prosperity by economists. Academics too are on board, urging closer attention to emotional investments and erotic practices in studies of social life, and asking how institutions idealizing love also foster inequalities and exclusions. I explore here the loving exclusions of marriage: the state-sanctioned institution widely presumed to epitomize love, its passionate commitments, and its importance for happy couples, healthy families, thriving communities, and stable nations.

Lauren Berlant observes that ‘intimacy builds worlds,’1 and I argue that the intimacy of marriage has built a world of inequalities. The heteropatriarchal premises of marriage are deeply ingrained, not only in laws but in hearts and minds worldwide. Given these premises, it is no surprise that feminists and queers have developed trenchant critiques of the institution. I endorse these critiques but argue that even more is at stake: that the institution of marriage produces not only inequalities of gender and sexuality but also, and inextricably, of race, class and national prosperity. That these inequalities are geopolitically problematic is readily acknowledged, but how marriage figures in producing, exacerbating or complicating them is rarely addressed. The point is not to judge individuals – who have varying reasons for supporting and/or participating in marriage – but to critically assess the political work that institutions do.

I recap several entwined inquiries: how marriage matters constitutively to the intergenerational continuity of states/nations; how Eurocentric manipulation of marriage figures in producing modernity’s ‘race difference’; and how fluid, ‘mobile essentialisms’ of race matter affectively, culturally and materially in our colonial present of increasing global inequalities, migration pressures, nationalist populisms and xenophobic hostilities. The hope is to illuminate unfamiliar terrain: how marriage historically and currently re/produces inequalities through the state/nation’s regulation of sexual practices, ethnic/racial relations, resource distributions, and citizenship (hence, im/migration) options.2

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Disordering the Intimacies of Four Continents: A Reading Group

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Many Disorder-ers recently enjoyed the 2020 Annual Conference of Millennium: Journal of International Studies, held online last month on the theme of ‘Entanglements and Detachments in Global Politics’. A welcome excuse to meet up, we put together a roundtable on Lisa Lowe’s widely celebrated book The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015) and recorded it for posterity in this podcast. Enjoy!

Disordering “The Intimacies of Four Continents”: A Reading Group

Chair: Meera Sabaratnam
Participants: Rahul Rao, Joe Hoover, Paul Kirby, Nivi Manchanda, Charmaine Chua, Srdjan Vucetic

This panel brings together members of the collective blog The Disorder of Things to read and comment on Lisa Lowe’s book The Intimacies of Four Continents. Centrally concerned with the nature of historical entanglements, Lowe’s work locates what has been understood as liberal humanism within the matrix of empire, racial hierarchies and interconnectedness that transformed the world in recent centuries. The contributors to this round table will read the book and discuss its general arguments plus the specific contributions of each chapter, as well as reflecting on how the methods, analysis and conclusions of Lowe’s book may contribute to shifting our understanding of the international and future directions for research.

Danish Innocence, Muslim Guilt

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This is the third in our short series of posts exploring the weavings of structural and interpersonal racism in the Danish context. Following Somdeep Sen’s enraging piece on racism in the Danish academy and Chenchen Zhang’s detailed analysis of the statistical and discursive invention of “non-Western immigrants”, Mahvish Ahmad explores the co-construction of Danish innocence and Muslim guilt in everyday life – a deeply personal account which illuminates a broader, structural picture.

It was difficult for me to write this blog. I left Denmark years ago, in large part because I was tired of the big and small insinuations about Muslims that were a part of national politics and everyday life. I grew up reading gross generalisations about Muslims in Danish newspapers. I read stories about my oppression as a Muslim woman and how I should be grateful that Denmark saved me. I watched the Islamophobic far right gain unprecedented levels of power and the center-left throw Muslims under the bus by changing their position on immigration because that was the only way they could imagine staying in government. I reeled from stories about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that the Danish state took part in to stay in America’s good books, only to deny settlement to refugees escaping the violence they had helped unleash. In visits to Pakistan, which our family went on every summer, I saw a country destroyed by the same wars. The horror of imperial violence and racial stereotypes bled into everyday interactions. It manifested itself when my boss told me that he would never hire a woman with a veil because he was uncomfortable with this supposed symbol of female oppression. This was before he denied me a raise because he didn’t feel it suited women to insist on a higher salary. It showed itself when a journalist insisted that my father, a Muslim man whom he had never met, must be a misogynist. It revealed itself when my brother was racially profiled and strip searched by police because him and two friends were the only brown guys in a club at which the cops were searching for drug dealers. It showed its ugly face when my brother’s drunk colleague admitted to me that all her co-workers hated my “gangsta” brother but “fuck,” she loves her favorite “perker,” a derogatory term for non-white Danes. It felt close when friends saw visa applications for spouses rejected, because their partners came from the Muslim-majority countries their parents were born in. And yes, racism circulated in the corridors of Danish academia, where I as a student of social and political science was taught to talk about Denmark’s foreign policy instead of its support for imperial war and where I was told about immigration and integration but never about racial governance.

It was difficult for me to write this blog because I spent years seeped in a society where you were not allowed to utter the word, racism, especially not if you’re Muslim like I am. To write now, openly, about the racism of big, violent policies and small, aggressive interactions feels overwhelming. In the first drafts of this blog, I kept listing every public and personal example I could think of, only to find myself getting more and more angry at the oppressive silencing of debates on racism that was so central to Danish debates when I was growing up. You see, I learnt that people like me have three options. We can loudly and boisterously proclaim our love for Denmark and our gratitude that we have been released from a life in a Muslim-majority country. We accept, in other words, that Denmark is fundamentally good and the world of Muslims fundamentally bad. Politicians like Naser Khader – who supported a Danish ban on burkas and who played on tropes of violent Muslims to falsely accuse my good friend, the female imam Sherin Khankan, of being a “closet Islamist” – is the most prominent example of this position. Alternatively, we can engage these topics respectfully and apologetically, desperately trying to convince good Danes that we’re not all that bad. That’s what Ozlem Sara Cekic, a parliamentarian, did when she drove around the country meeting neo-Nazis for tea and cake. Or, we can stay quiet because that is often the only way to get through the day. Engagement was too tiring for me, so I was mostly evasive. To now write against a tried and tested survival strategy, developed and honed after years in Denmark, feels strange. It’s weird to use the word “racism” in the context of Denmark, not because racism does not exist, but because I have spent my entire life being told that I absolutely cannot and should not use that word about the Danes.

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The Epistemic Production of “Non-Western Immigrants” in Denmark

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This post is the second in a short series exploring the weavings of structural and interpersonal racism in the Danish context. Following Somdeep Sen’s moving and enraging piece on racism in the Danish academy, Chenchen Zhang analyses the statistical and discursive invention of “non-Western immigrants” and considers how this contributes to the ordering of everyday life.

Successive governments in Denmark have introduced ever more restrictive immigration laws and integration policies in recent years. However, it is not all immigrants that are equally concerning to policy makers and the Danish public. What occupies the centre of policy debates and media discourse are the so-called “non-Western immigrants” (ikke-vestlige indvandrere). But what does this category mean exactly? According to the national statistical agency Statistics Denmark, Western countries refer to the member states of the EU (including the UK), Andorra, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Norway, San Marino, Switzerland, Vatican City, Canada, the USA, Australia, and New Zealand. Non-Western immigrants, then, refer to foreign-born residents from the rest of the world.

Source: Danmarks Statistik, created with mapchart.net

Furthermore, the category of “non-Western immigrants” in public debates on migration and integration almost always includes both (foreign-born) immigrants and their (Danish-born) descendants. A descendant, according to Statistics Denmark, refers to a person born in Denmark to non-Danish born parents (when neither of the parents is a Danish citizen born in Denmark).

The establishment and operation of these concepts by Statistics Denmark, which maintains a population register (the CPR register) that covers all residents of Denmark, has profound implications for the problematization and government of the population group known as non-Western immigrants. Social statistics, as Foucauldian scholars argue, is a fundamental technology of power of the modern state. The statistical knowledge produced about non-Western immigrants creates the group as such by describing its “own regularities” (Foucault, 2007): the rate of criminalisation of its members, their employment rate, income level, education level, and so forth. This knowledge enables politicians, media professionals, and social scientists to talk about non-Western immigrants – people from over 150 countries across the world – as a somewhat monolithic object of governmental intervention and social scientific inquiry.

The statistical production of non-Western immigrants, for example, is the precondition for Danish authorities to create of a list of “ghetto” neighbourhoods where controversial integration policies have been introduced. The plan includes, for instance, mandatory day care for children born in the “ghetto” areas from the age of one and doubled punishments for offences. A “ghetto” is officially defined as a neighbourhood in which over 50% of the residents are non-Western immigrants and descendants, while also meeting 2 out of 4 additional criteria about crime rate, employment rate, education, and income.

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Race, Racism and Academia: A view from Denmark

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Earlier in the year, just as the COVID-19 pandemic began taking lives and livelihoods across the world, the backlash to a published article on racism at the roots of securitization studies was picked up by the Danish press. The resulting narratives and racist cartoons produced to illustrate the backlash were at once shocking and unsurprising, considering the cultivated racial innocence of the Danish context and the collective denial of racism within the country, especially among the cultured intellectuals within the university system. This short series of reflections emerges out of collective conversations around that time among scholars of colour with experiences of the Danish academy. Over the coming days, Somdeep Sen, Chenchen Zhang, and Mahvish Ahmad share testimonies which movingly illustrate how structural and interpersonal racism are experienced in everyday academic life in Denmark. These testimonies indirectly situate the racist backlash to critical IR scholarship in its broader context of structural and societal racism in spaces where such racism is innocently disavowed.

This first post is authored by Dr Somdeep Sen of Roskilde University and the series is edited by Lisa Tilley.

In late March 2015 I ran into a fellow PhD student in the hallway outside my office. I was looking for a pair of scissors and asked him if he had one I could borrow. He said, “I don’t, but I am sure you can find one at the [department’s] reception.” I had been working non-stop in order to submit my dissertation that day and was exhausted. So, I said, “The reception seems so far away. I’m too tired.” He responded, “You’re such a lazy n*****!”.

This wasn’t my first experience of racism in Denmark. In fact, my first encounter with everyday racism in the country happened the day after I arrived in Copenhagen to start my PhD. It was a Friday afternoon in late September 2011, and I was standing in front of a furniture store talking to the owner about buying a cupboard that was displayed outside. Suddenly an old woman hit me with her tote bag and began yelling at me in Danish, while pointing to her (white) skin. At the time, I knew that racism was an unavoidable feature of my everyday life in Europe. Still, I naively believed that I would be sheltered from such incidents on the elevated (intellectual) plateau where the academy seems to reside. “Educated people,” my (lower) middle class Indian upbringing assured me, “would never behave like that.”

Of course, through a slew of experiences of racism in the past nine years I have come to realize that the color lines are just as prominent “up here”. Here are a few examples: I was having drinks with a few colleagues on a Friday night at a bar in downtown Copenhagen. We were discussing the dating experiences of non-Danes, when one of them, a postdoc, said to me, “You are fine, but I think most Indian men smell bad”. On another occasion, I was discussing the skills and qualifications of incoming migrants in Denmark with a tenured professor at a conference and he said to me, “You’re Indian. I guess your skill is raping women”. At another university organized social event, a PhD student insisted on calling me a “black baby”. He was (drunkenly) concerned that if he was unable to have a child with his partner, they would have to adopt a “black baby”. While rubbing his hands on my head, he kept repeating, “what would I do with a black baby like this one?”. Once, when leaving my office on a Friday evening, a colleague noticed that I was carrying books in a plastic bag. He commented, “It will be funny to see how many people think you are a bottle collector”. More recently, when I asked a colleague how the previous semester had been in terms of his teaching load, the conversation quickly devolved into him proclaiming that the biggest challenge to Danish society and culture was the “trend” of Danes marrying foreigners. He knew well that I was married to a Dane.

To be sure, everyday racism in academia is not a uniquely Danish problem. In fact, my experiences are all but commonplace for BAME (Black, Asian and minority ethnic) scholars in largely white academic institutions in the Global North. This is evidenced not least by the experiences shared by black scholars on Twitter with the hashtag  #BlackInTheIvory and the treatment that has been meted out to Errol Henderson for authoring an op-ed titled “Being Black at Penn State”. Neither is any of this surprising.  Academic institutions are intimately involved in the making of the hierarchies that inform the international political order. Furthermore, as social scientists, we are well aware that the very foundations of our disciplines are racialized and deeply formed by an effort to marginalize indigenous and non-white perspectives on politics and society.

But, as is often the question, so what?

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