Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Claire Blencowe, University of Warwick

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Description:

Over the last decade, we have witnessed a rise in what has been labelled national ‘populism’, both across the Global North and South. The notion corresponds to discourse and policy which is typically nationalist or ethnonationalist and mobilises racism - even when disguising it in non overtly racialized language - as a core part of its political project. In the US, the ascendancy or Donald Trump to the presidency coincided with a rise of fascist groups such as the Proud Boys, and white nationalism cut across a number of Trump’s policy agendas. Similar forces surged elsewhere, including the steady rise of the far-right in France and Germany, the normalisation of racist immigration rhetoric in Australia, as well as racism emanating from the political agendas of the BJP in India or Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.

It is understandable that in this context researchers’ eyes are turned towards far-right movements quite directly. However, as Mondon and Winter (2020) have emphasised, there is often a strong overlap and sometimes also a common ideological strand connecting liberal and illiberal racisms, a strand which, in many ways, echoes liberalisms own contradictions vis-à-vis race. Illiberal racism regularly draws on already developed liberal structures, in particular in the cases of border control, carceral geographies (including migrant detention) and extractivism, often shrouding racial violence within the bureaucratic architecture of the capitalist state. In the Global North, populist or rightwing governments enforce “Zero Tolerance” or “Hostile Environment” policies following already available and well developed anti-immigration policies, as it was the case for both the Trump administration in the US and the May administration in the UK. The European Union, awarded with a Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, looks up to the Australian “Pacific Solution” for extending its hotspot system and entirely offshoring asylum processing to third countries. Yet, also in the Global South, liberal or even ostensibly anti-neoliberal governments keep deploying extractivist policies and devise mega-projects that displace already impoverished indigenous and rural communities, while also participating in the externalization of borders, detaining and dispersing migrants, as it is the case with the current AMLO administration in Mexico.

Instead of being in any straightforward opposition then, liberal and illiberal rule coexist, but are nonetheless unevenly distributed across different geographies, displacing illiberal practices to carceral spaces, land and sea borders, third “safe” countries, and “enemy” countries in the context of the War on Terror, whereby international troops - especially US, Australian, and British ones, have been under investigation for war crimes and human rights violations.

The racial violence exerted in all these cases is not only downplayed in liberal discourse and politics, but it is actively disavowed through mechanisms of cooptation of both human rights policies and racial, sexual and gender minorities within the enforcement of those policies. For example, Fundamental Rights Officers as part of the European Union claim to ensure human rights are protected despite thousands of violent and illegal border removals being reported; other institutions make use of “Equality and Diversity” agendas to provide an egalitarian sheen over structural violence and discrimination. The smooth co-existence of liberalism and racism is also reproduced in swathes of popular culture, which in more subtle ways frame the military, police state or carceral state as upholders of peace in a post-racial context, rather than as impediments to racial justice.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda