Racism_in_Foucauldian_Security_Studies_acceptedversion.pdf (325.16 kB)
Racism in Foucauldian security studies: biopolitics, liberal war, and the whitewashing of colonial and racial violence
journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 16:22 authored by Alison Howell, Melanie Richter-MontpetitMelanie Richter-MontpetitThis article argues that while Foucauldian security studies (FSS) scholarship on the biopolitics of security and liberal war has not ignored racism, these works largely replicate Foucault's whitewashing of the raciality and coloniality of modern power and violence. Drawing on Black, indigenous, postcolonial and decolonial studies, we show how Foucault's genealogy of biopower rests on an unspecified concept of the “human,” failing to account for how notions of “human” were constituted through the savage and slave other, how enslaved people were rendered into things, and how punitive, sovereign violence persists as a (settler) colonial technique of gratuitous, not merely instrumental, violence. FSS exacerbates these problems. This article challenges two core FSS propositions on liberal war: 1. that “human life cannot ever be secured,” which replicates Foucault's Eurocentric reliance on an unspecified “human” as the object of biopolitics; 2. that “everyone is (potentially) dangerous” and thus open to the punitive/lethal dimensions of liberal power, which reduces racism to a sorting process after the establishment of biopolitics and liberal war, rather than a precondition of it. This “methodological Whiteness” (Bhambra 2017a) results in major oversights in FSS empirical genealogies of: state violence, twenty-first-century digital and molecular revolutions, labor, capital, and enslavement.
Funding
Beyond the Erotics of Orientalism: Queer and Feminist Investments in Liberal War; The Leverhulme Trust; RF-2017-324
History
Publication status
- Published
File Version
- Accepted version
Journal
International Political SociologyISSN
1749-5687Publisher
Oxford University PressExternal DOI
Page range
1-18Department affiliated with
- International Relations Publications
Research groups affiliated with
- Centre for Advanced International Theory Publications
Full text available
- Yes
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Legacy Posted Date
2019-01-02First Open Access (FOA) Date
2020-12-29First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2018-12-29Usage metrics
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