Beyond ambivalence: Locating the whiteness of security

Critical security studies’ increasing engagement with race and racism offers a welcome corrective to the subfield’s longstanding tendency to ignore such concerns. Yet our intervention begins from the premise that simply adding race and racism to the list of topics and frames of critical security analysis is insufficient. This follows from the growing recognition that critical security studies’ and international relations’ disavowal and erasure of racism is not reducible to a lack of attention to race per se. It concerns the myriad ways in which international relations (Anievas et al., 2015; Henderson, 2013; Krishna, 2001; Muppidi, 2012; Rutazibwa, 2016; Tilley and Shilliam, 2017; Vitalis, 2015) and security studies (Howell and Richter-Montpetit, 2019, 2020) are implicated in civilizational thinking at the core of white supremacy. Building on these insights, our intervention is structured around the following question: If we take seriously that international relations and security studies are implicated in civilizational thinking, how might recognition of this amend our existing critical depositions to security as well as our analytical starting points for what security is and does? Answering this question requires taking stock of how critical security studies’ orientation to security squares with wider questions concerning power and structure in global politics. In developing non-traditional approaches to security, critical security studies has cultivated an important critical distance from state security and (neo)realist accounts of war-making as security. Guided by an imperative to decentre material relationships, however, critical security studies has embraced a commitment to open-ended and ambivalent accounts of power, which unmoor security from histories and structures (Barkawi, 2011). As a result, critical security studies broadly (and its poststructuralist variants in particular) ‘fail[s] . . . to adequately situate security within complex entanglements with other technologies of power’ (Coleman and Rosenow, 2016: 203). This tendency to abstract security from wider power configurations, we suggest, has largely precluded critical approaches to security from apprehending racism as a structural form of power in global