The contingencies of whiteness: Gendered/racialized global dynamics of security narratives

Abstract

Both the fortification of European borders against migration from the global South and Western militaries’ involvement in wars ostensibly to prevent terrorist networks reaching Western shores belong to what critical and feminist security studies already recognize as a racialized security regime. Within this gendered racial order, policies, discourses and everyday practices surrounding border security, migration, asylum and war reinforce each other to construct ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ as normatively white spaces, under threat from racialized Others within and without (see, for example, Gray and Franck, 2019; Stachowitsch and Sachseder, 2019). Yet, on the southeastern periphery of the European Union, which was constructed as a zone of security threat in the 1990s and is now charged with securing the EU’s border with the global South, identifications with whiteness are both more complex and more consequential than Western European perspectives may know them to be. The ascription of ‘whiteness’, and other categories, in any system of racialization rests on imaginations that inexorably link bodily markers to descent from a certain territory of the globe and the set of cultural traits primordially associated with it in any racism’s symbolic cartography of modernity, rationality and personhood (Ahmed, 2002; Mills, 1997). While the labels and details of racialized categories vary across differently geographically and historically situated ‘global racisms’ (Zakharov and Law, 2017: 1), all stem from hierarchies that invest whiteness with an advanced capacity for humanity and reason, and blackness with its lack. Whiteness itself has its own core and peripheries, being more stably ascribed when Northern or Germanic Europe is the imagined zone of origin than to imagined origins from the much wider hinterland where ‘Europe’ edges into the Mediterranean or Asia: full acceptance into whiteness thus depends on how far individuals and institutions at the core of whiteness recognize those on its peripheries as white. This phenomenon is widely perceptible across the global politics of race, known as ‘contingent’ (Hylton, 2018: 50), ‘liminal’ (Ciccariello-Maher, 2012) or ‘malleable’ (Christian, 2019) whiteness, or being ‘white but not quite’ (Agathangelou, 2004: 23; Alcoff, 1998: 9). Migration often exposes those who are racialized as unquestionably white in their nation of origin to being treated as not quite as white when they move – such as Central and East European migrant workers in the UK since 2004, moving