Richter-Montpetit, M. orcid.org/0000-0003-3365-3617 and Howell, A. (2019) Racism in Foucauldian security studies: biopolitics, liberal war, and the whitewashing of colonial and racial violence. International Political Sociology, 13 (1). pp. 2-19. ISSN 1749-5679
Abstract
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.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) (2018). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association. This is an author produced version of a paper subsequently published in International Policy Sociology. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Politics and International Relations (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 05 Sep 2018 13:58 |
Last Modified: | 28 Dec 2020 01:38 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Oxford University Press (OUP) |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1093/ips/oly031 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:135287 |