Making amends: Towards an antiracist critical security studies and international relations

Abstract

Introduction Controversy over an article written by Allison Howell and Melanie Richter-Montpetit (2020) on securitization theory’s supposed anti-Black thinking and methodological whiteness, a detailed rejoinder by two of the Copenhagen School’s main representatives that faults the authors’ analysis for poor scholarship and ‘deep fake’ methodology (Wæver and Buzan, 2020; see also Hansen, 2020), and the subsequent backlash towards the senior male scholars’ alleged attack against their female detractors form a telling episode of parochial academic theater. While this insular debate raged on social media, the streets of the United States and elsewhere were ablaze with massive protests against a very tangible form of racism, namely, police brutality. Protesters’ forceful assertion that Black lives matter and that racism is a structural problem globally makes it almost impossible not to think about problems of race. Yet similar claims have long been made by Black, critical race, and post/decolonial studies, while the manifestations of this systemic problem pervade the everyday lives of Black, indigenous, and people of color in rich/poor, developed/developing, and powerful/weak states alike. Let’s face it: the academy in general, the field of international relations, and the subfield of security studies all bear similar marks of the white, Western, imperial, man’s world. This is especially clear to those who engage in international relations, as we do, from diverse locations in the global South. Although a growing body of literature has emerged on race and racism in world politics that has unearthed the foundational role played by the global color line, colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy in both the constitution of a hierarchical and racialized order and the creation of the discipline (e.g. Anievas et al., 2015; Chowdhry