| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
175369
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
This article provides a re-theorization of the Prevent strategy as racialized bordering. It explores how knowledge regarding the racist logics of British counter-terrorism are supressed through structures of white ignorance and how International Relations scholarship is implicated in this tendency to ‘whitewash’ Prevent’s racism. Building on the use of science fiction in International Relations, the article uses China Miéville’s novel The City and the City to undertake the analysis. Miéville evokes a world where the cities of Ul Qoma and Besźel occupy the same physical space but are distinct sovereign jurisdictions. Citizens are disciplined to ‘see’ their city and ‘unsee’ the other city to produce borders between the two. The themes of coding signifiers of difference and seeing/unseeing as bordering practices are used to explore how Prevent racializes Muslims as outsiders to a white Britain in need of defending. Muslim difference is hypervisibilized or seen as potentially threatening and coded as part of racialized symptoms which constitute radicalization and extremism. This article shows how the racial bordering of Prevent sustains violence perpetrated by white supremacists, which is subsequently ‘unseen’ through the case of Thomas Mair.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 2 |
ID:
161495
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
A succession of media scandals and policy arguments in the UK in recent years has been integral to the construction of a so-called ‘Muslim Problem’. Media and political attention paid to Muslims in British public life, across a vast and varied range of issues, suggests a social preoccupation that exceeds the security framing the ‘War on Terror’ once imposed. In this article, we develop and apply Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian theory of ideology to produce an original conceptual and analytic framework centred on the social functions served by, as well as the co-constitution of, anxiety and fantasy. We then apply this framework to explore three scandals relating to child sexual exploitation, halal meat and education. We show that the representations of British Muslims that these scandals entail are best understood as ideological fantasies, mobilized to suture traumatic gaps and conceal contradictions in wider social practices around such issues. We argue that the unrelenting media and political focus on myriad aspects of British Muslims’ imagined lives is symptomatic of what Žižek calls an ‘unbearable anxiety’: Islamophobic ideological fantasies conjure a ‘conceptual Muslim’ to sidestep confrontation with the Lacanian ‘Real’ – antagonistic and anxiety-inducing structures and practices underpinning British society, of which we do not speak.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|