The contingencies of whiteness: Gendered/racialized global dynamics of security narratives

Abstract

Both the fortification of European borders against migration from the global South and Western militaries’ involvement in wars ostensibly to prevent terrorist networks reaching Western shores belong to what critical and feminist security studies already recognize as a racialized security regime. Within this gendered racial order, policies, discourses and everyday practices surrounding border security, migration, asylum and war reinforce each other to construct ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ as normatively white spaces, under threat from racialized Others within and without (see, for example, Gray and Franck, 2019; Stachowitsch and Sachseder, 2019). Yet, on the southeastern periphery of the European Union, which was constructed as a zone of security threat in the 1990s and is now charged with securing the EU’s border with the global South, identifications with whiteness are both more complex and more consequential than Western European perspectives may know them to be.