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Racism in Foucauldian security studies: biopolitics, liberal war, and the whitewashing of colonial and racial violence

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posted on 2023-06-09, 16:22 authored by Alison Howell, Melanie Richter-MontpetitMelanie Richter-Montpetit
This 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 Sociology

ISSN

1749-5687

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Page range

1-18

Department 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

2019-01-02

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2020-12-29

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2018-12-29

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