The structure of racism in foreign policy: analysing three decades of US policy towards Somalia

This article theorises how racism functions as a defining logic of US foreign policy. To do so, it places sociological theories of political power and structural racism in dialogue with the scholarly fields of critical terrorism studies and psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalytic perspectives on ideology, fantasy and jouissance (enjoyment) complement critical terrorism studies’ interest in understanding how States justify their violence against non-State actors. Likewise, psychoanalysis’ capacity to unveil how people become active or passive subjects of racialised fantasies, and the relationship between collective and individual subjective activation, offers new analytical entry-points for sociologists investigating structural racism. This article shows how US political elites produce ideological fantasies that are often considered ‘colorblind,’ but ultimately reproduce a structure of global racial violence. Over the course of three decades the US’ ideological fantasies remained malleable, allowing the government to repeatedly alter its content to fit its varied geo-political and economic interests abroad. The victims of these racist fantasies are those living in Somalia and the Somali diaspora. Altogether, this article illustrates how material practices of racist violence are linked to ideological processes, through which US citizens come to see the racialised “other” as a potential threat to their existence.