Coloring the Lines through Culture? Race and Racialization in International Relations

Sema Binay

Prepared for MIRC -02/28/2011

This paper is an attempt to think about the curious place of race in international relations. My first objective is to account for the silence of the discipline of International Relations regarding the questions of race, racism and racialization despite the prevalence of those notions in affecting the constitution of global politics. I argue that despite the formally decolonized appearance of the modern international system, there is still a sharp contrast between the normative commitments of international society against racism and continuing regional differentiation of the patterns of poverty, inequality, discrimination and violence that can also be viewed to be racially marked. Given this picture, I investigate the potentials of studying the processes of racialization in international relations through focusing on the thesis of new racism.

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Race has a curious place in the discipline of International Relations. On the one hand, with the

accompanying problematic of colonial administration it was one of the biggest concerns of the

discipline at its inception. Yet, in the post-World War II era, it almost disappeared from the

disciplinary lexicon until its re-appearance in the margins of critical approaches, starting with

1990s and through the backdoor of post-colonial studies. The silence around race in the

discipline parallels the formal decolonization of the international system, the civil rights

movement, the establishment of laws and public policies that brought about de jure racial

equality, the normative commitments of international law against racism, as well as a taken for

granted global anti-racism sentiment. Yet, not only is there continued evidence of racial

discrimination in housing, employment police treatment, sentencing, health provisions and a host

of other domains in countries that have de jure equality, resembling patterns strikingly similar to

those of the past,1 but it is also claimed that in our contemporary world racism appears to be

devoid of its perpetrators while becoming a nearly invisible, taken for granted, commonsense

feature of everyday life and global social structure (Winant 2004: 126). The fact that racial

discrimination and racist political movements persevere in societies that accepted de jure

equality has led many to argue that there is a new form of racism that is no longer based on

biological markers of inferiority but on the notion of cultural differences. Despite the continued

relevance of racial problems and the patterns of racialization in national societies, which suggests

its relevance for the study of international relations, within the discipline of IR race continues to

be given “the epistemological status of silence around which the discipline is written and

coheres,” (Khrisna 2001: 406).

1 See Winant 2001& 2004; Sidanius and Pratto 1999 for North America, Ford 1991; Winant 2004 for Western Europe, Broome, 2002 for Australia.

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Given this picture, to study the processes of racialization that are relevant for and

constitutive of the contemporary global order becomes crucial. In that regard some important

questions that can be raised are: What are the contemporary construction of race and how do they

inform and shape global politics? How do the processes of racialization, in the sense of

attributing racial difference to groups, social practices and relationships, work in contemporary

international relations and what are the effects of those processes? How can we understand the

differences in the process of racialization across time and societies? What is the relationship

between old new forms of racism in terms of affecting international relations?

In attempting to investigate the question of how can we think about race and racialization

in international relations, in what follows, I will first examine the problematic status of the

notion of race in the discipline of IR. After reviewing some of the reasons contributing to the

silence of the discipline regarding race, I will try to outline the potentials for analyzing the

processes of racialization in global politics by focusing on the differences and interactions

between the “old-fashioned” expressions of racism and the new processes of racialization that

are affected through the expressions of cultural difference.

Race in International Relations: Silences and Proxies

Notwithstanding the official historiography of International Relations, which points out

to the interwar years’ debate between Idealism and Realism to be the context within which the

study of international relations was established as an academic discipline, the birth of the

discipline can actually be traced back to the pre- World War I years’ (1900-1910) concerns about

colonial administration. Within the context of expanding the boundaries of dominion over

peoples and resources beyond the formal territories of the US, the country’s first International

Relations journal, the Journal of Race Development (to be renamed the Journal of International

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Relations in 1919, and becoming Foreign Affairs three years later), was published in 1910

“making the case for a research agenda on the progress of backward races and states” (Vitalis,

2005: 163) The introductory article of the first issue envisages the journal to be a “forum for the

discussion of the problems which relate to the progress of races and states generally considered

backward in their standards of civilization” (Blakeslee, 1910:1). The aim of the journal then is

stated to be discovering not “how weaker races may be best exploited,” but how “they may best

be helped by the stronger” through presenting “the important facts which bear upon race

progress, and the different theories as to the methods by which developed peoples may most

effectively aid the progress of the undeveloped.” While the necessity of better understanding

those countries populated by the peoples of the weaker races is attributed to the increased

importance of these lands in the political and economic life of the West, it is emphasized that

“there has been no widespread and serious effort to understand the world-wide race problem, and

to determine the attitude which those who are advanced should maintain towards those who are

backward” (p.2). In the face of divergent views regarding not only the objectives but also the

methods of race development (ranging from mere exploitation for the benefit of the controlling

state to the “white man’s burden” to educate, and from providing the economic means of

development to bringing Christianity to the natives), among the issues the journal plans to focus

on are studies of the character of the colonial administration of different nations, and a

comparison of the methods used to advance backward peoples, such as schools, the civil service,

economic and industrial improvements; the work of Christian missions; the problems of

eugenics; race prejudice; race assimilation; race intermarriage etc.

The same introductory article maintains that this quest for better ways of understanding

and administrating the weaker races is not limited to the old European colonial powers but also a

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significant concern for the United States which “has as fundamental an interest in races of a less

developed civilization as have the powers of Europe. The key to the past seventy-five years of

American history is the continuing struggle to find some solution for the negro problem –a

problem still unsolved” (p.2) Furthermore, it is argued that the most important question facing

the US in foreign affairs “center about the pacific Ocean, -an ocean whose costs are inhabited,

for the most part, by nations of a more primitive culture than our own.” As such, the construction

of race as presented in this introduction can be viewed as an example of the colonial discourse

that inevitably constructed Europeans and North Americans as intellectually and morally

superior while viewing their others as backward and inferior, if to be brought to the appropriate

level of civilization through the colonial intervention.

The Journal of Race Development was not the only indicator of the significance of the

question of race and colonialism in the inception of the discipline. As Robert Vitalis (2005:161)

demonstrates many of the “founders” of IR were either theorists of race or experts of colonial

administration for whom “races and states were the discipline-in-formation’s most important

twin units of analysis.” However, in the process of constructing a disciplinary identity during

1950s and ‘60s International Relations seems to have become dependent on a certain willful

forgetting about both the origins of the discipline and the historical context of empire that gave

rise to the field of knowledge. At the same time, this amnesia about the disciplinary origins was

accompanied by the forgetting of the concept of race, which disappeared from the mainstream

analyses of International Relations that increasingly became about the relations of war and peace

among the major states. During the post-World War II period, the falling into oblivion of the

concept of race as a category of analysis was a consequence of not taking into account the

racialized dimensions of international relations. Darby and Paolini (1994:380) argue that during

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this period, imperial relations were not considered to be international relations and hence they

fell outside the proper concerns of the discipline as “Asia, Africa, and other non-European

territories were seen to be outside the civilized world. The European states acquired title and

ruled in their own right.” Thus, in 1993, Roxanne Doty argued that although a few International

Relations scholars in the late 1960s and early 1970s raised the issue of race in international

relations and offered some fruitful directions in which to proceed, “interest in race was not

sustained and never did cut to the heart of IR as an academic discipline” (445). Her survey of the

mainstream IR journals of World Politics, International Studies Quarterly, International

Organization, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Review of International Studies for the period

of 1945-1993 reveals only one article with the word race in title, four with the term minorities

and thirteen with the term ethnicity. A similar survey of the same journals for the period after

1993 results in 5 articles having the concept of ”race” in their title or abstract.

However, despite the exclusion of the concept of race from the disciplinary lexicon, the

post-World War II period indeed witnessed a proliferation of international legalization against

racism. International human rights laws pertaining to racial discrimination proliferated after

1945, boosted by the growing movement toward decolonization in Asia and Africa which made

the treatment of non-white and colonial peoples a major issue in international affairs. In response

to pressures on the international stage, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the

International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in 1965. The

UN launched a programme against apartheid, and proclaimed a first (1973-1983), second (1983-

1993) Decade of Action to Combat Racism and Discrimination, and the Third (1993-2003)

Decade to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination. Written before the end of the Cold War,

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the statement by Paul G. Lauren might still be seen as providing a synopsis of the status of race

in of international relations:

The first global attempt to speak of equality focused upon race. The first human rights provisions in the United Nations Charter were placed there because of race. The first international challenge to a country’s claim of domestic jurisdiction and exclusive treatment of its own citizens centered upon race. The international convention with the greatest number of signatories is that on race. Within the United Nations, more resolutions deal with race than any other subject. And certainly one of the most longstanding and frustrating problems in the United Nations is that of race. Nearly one hundred eighty governments, for example, recently went as far as to conclude that racial discrimination and racism still represent the most serious problems for the world today. (Paul G. Lauren, 1998: 4, quoted in Persaud and Walker, 2001:374)

There has been as slow retreat from overtly white supremacist rationalizations of imperial and

post-imperial forms of global domination culminating in the acceptance of formal global equality

in the 1960s (Furedi, 1998:236-38). Accordingly, in the postwar era, intense political and

cultural opposition to racialized forms of subordination, and the success of anti-colonial

movements rendered direct appeals to white superiority disadvantageous to the maintenance of

imperial and post-imperial orders. Thus on the one hand the formal legal regimes and institutions

of international order rest on and uphold norms of racial equality and universal human rights,

with international law appearing to be committed to the eradication of racism (Anghie,

2000:887). However, on the other hand, the politics of race and practices of racism have been a

part of global relations in a number of ways: racial discourses have performed a taxonomical role

by dividing up the world into various binary opposites such as civilized/uncivilized or

developed/undeveloped; race has impacted the spatial and demographic constituencies of the

world in the remaking of the New World through the displacement and disappearance of

indigenous populations; the racialized labor supply and other practices of labor recruitment have

influenced the world economy especially in stabilizing economic exploitation through the

ideology of racial supremacy in forming the deep structures of the modern world system; and

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race has been a decisive force in the constitution of social formations in producing societies

through aggravated racial othering (Persaud and Walker, 375).

Therefore, the politics of race and the processes of racialization continue to be significant

in the making of the contemporary world order, as well as in the representations and the study of

that order. Despite the formally decolonized appearance of the modern international system,

there is a sharp contrast between the normative commitments of international society against

racism and continuing regional differentiation of the patterns of poverty, inequality,

discrimination and violence that can also be viewed to be racially marked.

Notwithstanding the overall decline in the number of armed conflicts, genocides, and

international crises as well as the average number of people killed per conflict per year, the post

Cold War order of international relations was also characterized by increasing anxieties

regarding what seemed to be eruptions of ethnic violence and genocides, increasing number of

armed conflicts by non-state actors, and acts of terrorism. While the statistics show a general

decline in the number of armed conflicts since the end of the Cold War, there was also a change

in the nature of conflict: local and regional wars fought predominantly with small arms as the

weapon of choice and in poor countries within “weak” or “failed” states have replaced wars

fought between major countries or superpowers (Human Security Report, 2005) Most of the

world’s armed conflicts in the post- Cold War period took place in regions of Sub-Saharan

Africa, Central and South Asia, and the Middle East, regions consistently figuring in the lowest

ranks of the Human Development Index. As the Human Security Report 2005 states, there are

fewer conflicts in the world today than in 1990, but the share of those conflicts occurring in poor

countries has increased (p.12). While, in the post-Cold War era, war and conflict increasingly

seems to be taking place in the post-colonial spaces, the discipline of International Relations has

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been discussing the question of the relationship between poverty/inequality and war/conflict

within a framework of securitization that views insecurity as a consequence of

underdevelopment and aid policy as a tool of conflict resolution and societal reconstruction

(Duffield 2001).

Yet, the less studied aspect of the structures of global inequality and conflict is its

racialized dimensions. Even though the majority of the world’s poor are non-European and non-

white, the concept of race is largely absent from the edifice of scholarly institutional discourse

concerned with global poverty and inequality (Jones, 2008: 908). Indeed, as Anghie argues, the

vocabulary of race is no longer required in its explicit form largely because international law has

developed an extraordinarily rich and complex vocabulary to represent non-European peoples in

terms that appear natural and uncontroversial, the most notable of which is the term

“undeveloped” (2006:125). This terminology is supported by a comprehensive set of theories

involving an interrelated set of concepts that complement each other; while development is

represented as something requiring the free market, civil society and good governance, the non-

European world is marked by the lack of all of these. Although devoid of the explicit language of

race, the perspective that views the causes of poverty to be entirely indigenous, something to be

alleviated by the redeeming and neutral mechanisms of the market, and explains political failure

through indigenous corruption is an example of the tendency to attribute the causes of global

inequities to degrees of adabtability or inadequacy of local and regional institutions, and as such

it can be seen as reproducing the basic structures of differentiation that underlies the earlier

racialized forms of imperial domination.

Within this framework, to speak for the universal moral order and to maintain the

universality of European canons and traditions as the reference point from which to evaluate all

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other cultures, while not being able to imagine the formerly colonized as possessing autonomous

bodies of knowledge, become key parts of the process of racialization of international

knowledge. Grovogui emphasizes that the notion of the racialization of international knowledge

is not meant to impute racist motives to international theorists, but “to stress the use of analytical

methods that uphold ethnographic allusions associated with a hermeneutics of race and culture,”

in other words, it refers to the process of the internalization of the modern ontological discourse

pertaining to civilizations, cultures, and race (2001: 427). Grovougui and others maintain that the

westernization of the essential attributes of human civilization and the rationalization or omission

of the violence of modernity on the margins of Europe came to pass as the acceptable approach

to and representation of international relations, which lead to the sanitization of a violent world

history with the objective of securing the state against any other form of belonging, and at the

expense of a huge number of casualties that were either brown or black (Grovogui, 2001: 433,

Krishna 2001: 406-407). Accordingly, the primary problem is not that race has been ignored in

IR, it is rather that race has been given the epistemological status of silence around which the

discipline is written and coheres (Persaud and Walker, 2001: 374, Krishna 2001: 407).

Despite this generally pessimistic perspective about the status or race as a category of

analysis in the discipline, it should be noted that there have been a number of critical

contributions that aim to bring the concept of race into the study of international relations. In one

of the early examples, through a discussion of how racialized understandings of Native

Americans, Latin Americans, Asians, and Africans affected the formulations of the US national

interests, immigration policy and security discourse Michael Hunt (1987) illustrates the

relevance of constructions and hierarchies of race and ethnicity in the production of the US

foreign policy from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Roxane Doty (1993) provides an

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analysis of 1950s and 1960s writings about race in the discipline and suggests studying race

through a critical genealogy of the sites where racial differences have been constructed to see

how issues of identity and difference, self and other were articulated in terms of racial frames of

reference and with what consequences. In her later work which theorizes North-South relations

in terms of representational practices, Doty (1996) examines how the racialized categories

produced through representational practices enabled the construction of self and other with the

accompanying binary oppositions of advanced/superior, backward/inferior in the colonial

encounters, especially in the US policy regarding Philippines. A special issue of Alternatives in

2001 that centered on race in the study of IR featured a number of articles that focused on racial

assumptions in global labor recruitment and supply (Persaud, 2001); on race and education of IR

(Krishna, 2001); “racialization” of IR theory and representations of Africa (Grovogui, 2001);

racialization of Third World in the security studies through the “nuclear apartheid” argument

(Biswas, 2001), and the construction of global white supremacy in racialization of global politics

(Watson, 2001). Furthermore two edited volumes by Chowdhry and Nair (2002), and Jones

(2006) made the case for bringing race and racialization to the center of the study of international

relations with an explicit focus on and support from the post-colonial literatures.

Notwithstanding these explicit efforts to theorize constructions of race and processes of

racialization, there is still a sense in which race seems to be approached only through proxies in

IR; as a sub-category of identity formation or class relations, as a problem of underdevelopment,

or as a byproduct of colonialism/imperialism. Furthermore, one of the striking features of almost

all of the critical contributions mentioned above is that, in most of them there are obligatory

sections explaining how and why the discipline has been silent in matters regarding race and

racialization, as well as offering justifications for the relevance of such studies. Beyond the

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requirements of academic writing (that one always has to answer the questions of “why should

we care?”), the prevalent necessity for such explanations and justifications felt by many authors

can be read as a sign of not only the difficulties of studying race and racialization within the

discipline of IR but also of the continuous need for more systematic analyses of the constructions

of race and processes of racialization in the conduct of international relations.

How to Study Race and Racialization in IR?

There are various reasons for the status of silence around race and racialization in IR:

some has to do with the complex and contested character of the concept of race, and some has to

do with the epistemological tendencies of the discipline. The dominance of empiricism within

the discipline is part of the epistemological reasons, as empiricism reduces the possible analysis

of race and racism to empirical practices of overt discrimination in individual behavior or

institutional rules and discourse, and hence to a phenomena of agency and behavior seen as

aberrant to the normal social order (Jones, 2008: 909). Khrisna argues that accompanying

empiricism is the strategy of abstraction that allows the discipline to bracket the questions of

slavery, theft of land and violence from the analysis, while focusing on sovereignty as the

organizing concept: “By deftly defining international as the encounter between sovereign states,

much of a violent world history is instantly sanitized” The success of the sovereign abstraction is

then to render the loss of lives in encounters between states and non-sovereign entities of no

consequence: “Overwhelming number of the casualties in those encounters are either brown or

black, while sovereignty remains lily-white. The overwhelming discursive logic of the discipline

is oriented toward securing the state against any other forms of belonging.” (2001:406). A further

difficulty concerns the relevance of race in constructing boundaries; as race invites us to think

about construction of identities that transcend the national and territorial boundaries, the

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uneasiness about conceptualizing the relationship between domestic and foreign/international

issues has rendered race a thorny concept for IR (Doty, 1993).

Furthermore, beyond the discipline’s epistemological tendencies, the essentially

contested social, cultural and ideological character of the concept of race makes it harder to study

it within a strictly disciplinary framework. Race cannot be reduced to physical, biological or

morphological markers because although the concept of race appears to be appealing to

biologically based human characteristics, selection of these particular human features for the

purposes of racial signification is always and necessarily a social and historical process: “There

is no biological basis for distinguishing human groups along the lines of ‘race,’ and the socio-

historical categories employed to differentiate among these groups reveal themselves, upon

serious examination, to be imprecise if not completely arbitrary” (Winant, 2004; 155). If race

cannot be defined as a self-enclosed entity with positive, foundational, or essentialist properties,

then the racialization of race occurs in specific space and time, and under specific historical,

political, socio-economic, and ideo-cultural conditions (Persaud, 2002:62). This makes race not

an “empty category” but a “floating signifier” in Laclau’s sense, which can be made to include a

range of signified features depending on the way it is articulated with different elements in

varying discourses (Rattansi, 2005: 272). As the process of racialization has multiple

dimensions and always occurs in a historical context, race is always subject to mediations (in

different conjunctures, different attributes, or mixes of attributes may be used to racialize the

common sense of the social formation in question); particular elements of an identity may be

appropriated in the symbolic construction of racialized otherness; and the identity formation in

the process of racialization is always relational in the sense of being dependent upon a field of

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racialized discourses and cannot be explained through a simple binary opposition of “us vs.

them” (Persaud, 2002: 62-66).

As such, rather than a descriptive category of race, to study the processes of racialization,

which would enable an opening for discourses and practices to be seen as complex and shifting

configurations of the biological and cultural, with a variable intertwining of race, ethnicity,

nation, gender, class and sexuality, seems to be a more fertile ground to analyze the role played

by the constructions of race in affecting global politics. This approach becomes even more

relevant in the face of the debates regarding the changing characteristics of racism in the post-

colonial era.

Observing the continuing salience of race in everyday lives of people despite the

recognition of de jure equality, many scholars argue that there has been a discursive shift through

which racist paradigms according a purely biological foundation to racial categories have

increasingly given way to a wider presupposition of cultural difference as the fundamental and

immutable basis of identity and belonging (Silverstein 2005: 365-366). In this new framework,

which might be called post-racism, or more commonly new racism, the distinctive characteristic

of the logic of differentiation is that it makes claims within the categories of the cultural and

civilizational, while the superiority of the West comes to be expressed as a moral essence (Gott,

2000: 1507).2 Barker (1982) and Balibar (1991) argue that in the post-colonial era, the

classificatory rule once played by biological difference is now assumed by the notion of cultural

difference. Accordingly, this new form of racism, in which socio-cultural differences replaces

ethnicity and biology as the stigma of otherness, is “racism without races”:

2 The notion of new racism is used across national and disciplinary boundaries, albeit with different terminologies. For instance, in the US context, the term used was symbolic racism which was defined as the “conjunction of racial prejudice and traditional American values” (Kinder 1986: 154). Accordingly symbolic racism is “based on moral feelings that blacks violate such traditional American values as individualism, self reliance, the work ethic, obedience, and discipline” (Kinder & Sears, 1991: 416). As such, because it is covert, symbolic racism can allow individuals to be racist at the same time as practicing equality. Also see Duckitt (1992) and Durrheim and Dixon (2004).

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whose dominant form is not biological hereditary but the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism which at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others, but ‘only’ the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions; in short it is what P.A. Taguieff has rightly called a differentialist racism.” (Balibar, 1991: 21)

In this “new racism” cultural difference is associated with threat: it starts with the idea of a

shared culture, feelings and lifestyle, and postulates a natural tendency for human beings to form

social units based on such similarities. The threat then, comes from those who do not share the

same culture or way of life as they are viewed to be the potential disrupters of the tradition.

Martin Marker provides a very rich account of the emergence of this new racism in the British

context of late 1970s and early 1980s, as a Tory response to the problem of immigrants. He

maintains that the danger from immigration is viewed to be that the alienness of the outsiders

cracks the homogeneity of the insiders. The section where he quotes a speech by Enoch Powell3

is very illustrative and deserves to be quoted at length:

Immigrants, Powell argued, had set up camp within our walls and their sheer permanent presence was the real problem. “The disruption of the homogenous we, which forms the essential basis of our parliamentary democracy and, therefore, of our liberties, is now approaching to the point at which the political mechanism of a ‘divided community’ take charge and begin to appear autonomously.” This is a situation that could only be put right by ‘heroic measures’, or what the rest of us know as repatriation: “They would indeed be heroic measures, measures which radically altered the prospective pattern of our future immigration, but they would be measures based on and operating with human nature as it is, not measures which purport to manipulate and alter human nature by laws, bureaucracy and propaganda.” [Barker, pp. 21-22, the quotes are from Powell’s speech.]

Accordingly, viewing a common way of life as a direct expression of human nature then leads to

the perception that the protection of this common way of life as well as the communities and

3 A conservative MP who was famous for his controversial Rivers of Blood speech, warning on the alleged dangers of mass immigration in 1968. Barker argues that his reformulation of race enabled an entire rethinking of the premises of conservatism (p.38)

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traditions built around them against outsiders is a result of natural and indispensable instincts

(Barker, 1981: 22-25). Thus the assertion that people have “genuine fears” about the immigrants

leads to the indication that the existing way of life is threatened by cultural differences of

outsiders, which then gives way to seeing the preservation of one’s culture through the exclusion

of other cultural groups. To give but another example, in their analysis of how ‘white’ New

Zealanders talk about indigenous Maori people Wetherell and Potter (1992: 137) argue that,

“culture discourse, now takes over some the same tasks as race. It becomes a naturally occurring

difference […] but this time around the ‘fatal flaws’ in the Maori people do not lie in their genes

but in their traditional practices, attitudes and values” (quoted in Leach 2005: 434).

Balibar emphasizes that what is at work here is a new way of naturalizing human

behavior and social affinities: in this framework, not biology or genetics but culture functions

like a nature, and “it can in particular function as a way of locking individuals and groups a

priori into a genealogy, into a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin” (1991:

22). But As Paul Gilroy maintains, divisions based on cultural difference are:

[J]ust as intractable and fundamental as the natural hierarchies they have partly replaced, but they have acquired extra moral credibility and additional political authority by being closer to respectable and realistic cultural nationalism and more remote from biologic of any kind. As a result, we are informed not only that the mutually exclusive cultures of indigenes and incomers cannot be compatible but also that mistaken attempts to mix or even dwell peaceable together can only bring destruction. From this perspective exposure to otherness is always going to be risky” (2004: 157)

. It is argued that an important characteristic of this new racism is that it can be expressed

openly in formal settings by denying the existence of racial discrimination in society; indeed new

racism can present itself as having drawn the lessons from the conflict between racism and anti-

racism as it appears not to be relying on “old-fashioned” expressions of racial inferiority and

segregationism (Balibar 1991: 22, Leach 2005: 434). However, despite the “subtleness”,

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“covertness” and the “symbolic” nature of the expressions of new racism, the idea of hierarchy is

re-introduced as the “different” cultures are those which constitute obstacles, or which are

established as obstacles to the acquisition of culture as reproduced in an industrialized, formally

educated society that appreciates and promotes individual enterprise, and social and political

individualism (Balibar, 25).

Nevertheless, notwithstanding the widespread usage of the notion of new racism, there

are also critics who question the common assumptions and prevalence of this thesis. For instance

Leach (2005: 434) argues that the formal expressions of “old fashioned” racial inferiority were

not especially popular before de jure racial equality as those expressions were not as open, overt,

blatant, and direct as are commonly presumed. Furthermore, he claims that there is nothing

especially new about formal expressions of cultural difference or the denial of societal

discrimination, as the formal denial of societal discrimination has been a long-standing feature of

societies that espouse democratic egalitarianism. Accordingly, in his view new racism is quite

old, and by emphasizing an empty temporal distinction between old and new, the notion of new

racism serves to obscure the important historical continuities in formal expressions of racism.

I suggest that Leach’s contentions should be taken not as a direct rejection of the new

racism thesis, but as an invitation to look at more deeply into the differences and interactions

between the “old-fashioned” expressions of racism and the new processes of racialization

through the expressions of cultural difference. Especially in thinking of the processes of

racialization in international relations, where explicit references to notions of biological

inferiority are less common than references to race through mediations, to analyze the processes

by which racial meanings are attached to particular issues becomes even more vital. There is

already a growing literature that analyzes the issue of immigration by paying attention to the

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dynamics of the racialization of immigrants through the expressions of cultural difference

(Ibrahim 2005; Duffield 2006; Silverstein 2005). Yet, in order to understand how those processes

of racialization affect the constitution of global politics, there is still need for analyses that

compare different processes of immigrant racialization as occurring in different countries.

Furthermore the relevance of racialization is vital in investigating the degrees to which, and the

forms whereby biological and cultural immutabilities and inferiorizations are present in different

versions and particular instances of anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim statements and practices,

especially within the context of the “Global War on Terror.” If as Duffield argues (2006:71) the

immigrant –the embodiment of cultural difference in motion- became the first iconic figure of

socio-cultural racism, increasingly “the Muslim” is also constructed as the enemy, the outsider to

whom our culture and “democratic values” are entirely alien and from which we must defend

ourselves (Newman and Levine, 2006:37).

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---------- (2006) “Decolonizing the Concept of ‘Good Governance’” In Branwen Gruffydd Jones (ed) Decolonizing International Relations, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers

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