Contemporary Processes of Racialisation joint workshop
When:
—
Venue:
Online
Free, but registration is essential here via the IHR website
In April we have two papers:
- "A paradigm of racialization: counter-radicalization and its discontents" Fahad Ahmad PhD, (at University of Toronto).
- “Constructing Preto”: Police Violence and the Construction of Race in São Paulo and Los Angeles, Sebastian Sclofsky, PhD (California State University, Stanislaus).
A paradigm of racialization: counter-radicalization and its discontents, Fahad Ahmad, PhD
In the context of the ‘War on Terror,’ counter-radicalization has emerged as a technology of counterterrorism that uses preemptive interventions to prevent future political violence (an inherent unknown). While claiming to rely on ‘soft’ interventions, counter-radicalization has directly and directly been used to apply social control upon Muslim communities residing in global north countries. Empirical studies from U.K., Canada, and elsewhere have underscored that a narrow understanding of radicalization as “a psychological or theological process by which Muslims move toward extremist views” (Kundnani 2012) has resulted in their targeting as the “suspect community” (Breen-Smyth 2014). The political, cultural, and religious expressions of Muslim communities are bound to risk (Heath-Kelly 2013) justifying widespread surveillance including of young people and children. Building on scholarship that has recognized racialization to be an integral part of enabling counter-radicalization (Ali 2021), this paper seeks to identify and compare the process of racialization in counter-radicalization efforts in Canada and the U.K.
Based on interviews with leaders of Muslim civil society organizations in the two countries, I show how racialized practices are a core aspect of counter-radicalization. The experience of counter-radicalization at the community level has left the impression that the risk of political violence/terrorism is bound to Muslimness itself. This is based upon Orientalist ideas of the Muslim Other that can be traced back to the racial logic of European colonization (Hallaq 2018).
Finally, the preemptive basis of counter-radicalization is animated by the racial imaginaries which normalize widespread surveillance of Muslims (and other racialized peoples), making their benign actions and expressions appear risky. By identifying racialization as a central tenet of counter-radicalization, this work raises serious doubts about realigning counter-radicalization technologies to tackle white supremacy.
“Constructing Preto”: Police Violence and the Construction of Race in São Paulo and Los Angeles, Sebastián Sclofsky, PhD
Race is a socio-political category constructed and reproduced through social actions. Barbara Fields (1990) argues that race continues to exist today because social actions continue to routinely create and re-create race today. Racism, Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields explain, is the application of “a social, civic, or legal double standard based on ancestry” (2014, 17), and the ideology that explains and justifies this double standard. I argue that violent police actions in São Paulo’s periphery and South L.A. are social practices, which produce and reproduce race by applying this double standard based on ancestry. In other words, these police actions can be understood as racist, as they are regular social practices which construct blackness, makes those defined as black as vulnerable to premature death, and justify this vulnerability by reproducing the association of blackness with threat and danger.
The socio-economic transformations of the last half-century marked by the rise of neoliberal capitalism, have produced extreme levels of inequality, and created new forms of vulnerability that have disproportionately affected a racialized surplus population, which have been historically excluded and portrayed as a threat to the well-ordered society. The police play a central role in attempting to pacify these areas, and through their actions police produce and reproduce racial identities.
Based on ethnographic work conducted in São Paulo’s periphery and South L.A, I suggest that rather than seeing race as a pre-existing category, we need to examine how race is constructed through daily police practices and how racism, as an ideology, justifies violent police actions.
Contact name:
Katy Pettit
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Fahad Ahmad, PhD
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Dr. Fahad Ahmad is an interdisciplinary scholar interested in racialized practices of national security, policing, and surveillance; civil society and resistance; and racial justice and inequality. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at University of Toronto. He has a PhD in Public Policy from Carleton University.
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Sebastian Sclofsky, PhD (California State University, Stanislaus)
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Sebastián Sclofsky is an Assistant Professor of criminology at California State University, Stanislaus. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Florida. His research focus on state violence, particularly police violence, in the US and Latin America. His work examines how policing and police violence produce racial, spatial, and civic identities among residents of São Paulo’s periphery and South L.A. He recently began a new research examining the development of tough-on-crime policies in Latin America, their relation to neoliberalism, and their effects on low-income communities. Together with Dr. Daniel Gascón, they have created an International Research Collaborative as part of the Law and Society Association, which brings together scholars analyzing state violence, human rights, and policing in the Americas. Sebastián was born in Uruguay, lived in Brazil, and now the US. He has been involved in human rights issues, particularly in the search for truth and justice regarding the human rights violations during Uruguay’s military dictatorship.