Suspect community or suspect category? The impact of counter-terrorism as ‘policed multiculturalism’

How to think about the impact of counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation on ethnic and religious accommodation? Much of the literature draws on the concept of ‘suspect community’, suggesting it has primarily alienated the Muslim community, favouring an assimilationist model of ‘muscular liberalism’. In this article, while I consider the merits of the ‘suspect community’ hypothesis, I argue that it only partially accounts for the effects of counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation on multicultural societies. I contend that much of the literature has focused too narrowly on the discriminatory effects of counter-terrorist policies and has been unable to grasp the more insidious political effects of counter-terrorism policies based on the active participation and involvement of Muslims in their own policing. The main hypothesis of this paper is that rather than promoting ‘assimilation’, as the government would expect, or alienation, as the advocates of the ‘suspect community’ hypothesis would contend, counter-terrorist policies produce and reinforce a government of society in discrete and divided ethno-religious groups. Such ‘policed multiculturalism’—understood as the recognition and the management of diversity through a security perspective—has an important consequence in that it removes fundamental questions about pluralism from political debate, casting them instead in a depoliticised language of security.     

Becoming a black Jew: cultural racism and anti‐racism in contemporary Israel

Many scholars consider ‘identity’ and ‘identity politics’ to be among the most important means for cultural minority groups to challenge a discriminatory reality. Others caution that these processes might result in the polarisation of differences, potentially fuelling hatred, harsh conflict, exclusion and even violence. The tension between these two views is presented in this article through an examination of the way young Ethiopian Jews whose parents immigrated to Israel in the late 1980s and early 1990s have developed their own particular identity precisely in the course of and as a result of the encounter with Israeli society and its mechanisms of exclusion, discrimination, and control. The state declared a policy of assimilation, but in practice relegated the new arrivals to a status of inferiority and marginality. As a result, young Ethiopian Jews reconstructed a new, complex and hybrid Israeli identity, in which blackness is one important element. This unique identity is presented in the paper as a crucial response by the youths to a discriminatory reality of cultural racism. However, the essay also raises doubts concerning their success in minimising their subjugation and in ‘de‐racialising’ Israel.     

‘From badness to sickness’:1 the role of ethnopsychology in shaping ethnic hierarchies in Israel

This article explores the role of the psychological sciences in depoliticising processes of ethnic demarcation and marginalisation within the Jewish population in Israel. It shows how the psychological sciences have provided the scientific foundation by which cultural domination and subordination have been essentialised. The study traces the ways in which ethnopsychological discourse has changed its contours over time. Early ethnopsychological discourse provided an overt link between the ‘cultural backwardness’ and ‘psychological impairment’ of the Mizrahi Jew. In light of broad social and political transformations, in the more recent model the overt ethnic signifier was silenced, and the Mizrahi ‘impaired mind’ appeared to be detached from its ethnic roots while being attributed to the same ethnic population. Both ethnopsychological forms have focused on the individual's ‘special needs’ and ‘inherent psychological impairment’, obscuring the role of social and political forces in shaping social gaps in Israeli society and reinforcing the hegemonic discourse of nurture. The latter has provided a negative mirror image of the modern Ashkenazi secular Israeli Jew following Western cultural models of self‐control as the universal index of health and progress. This study is based on both primary and secondary sources as well as on my in situ observations.     

‘Both an Arab and a woman’: gendered,racialised experiences of female Palestinian citizens of Israel

Following feminist and postcolonial discourses, this paper uses the concept of ‘everyday experience’ as a tool to trace the social world of educated Palestinian women in Israel. The term refers to the complex array of these women's experiences in racialised and gendered social sites, as well as within the class, religious, and ethnic contexts in the subordinated group and its relations with the dominant Jewish group. Based on 108 in‐depth interviews with Palestinian women citizens of Israel, the paper claims that educated Palestinian women are located in a ‘third place’ between cultural, gender, class, national and racial structures that generates a continual ambivalence. Within this marginal, ‘unhomely’ space women negotiate their own identities and challenge dominant social definitions. Women create various modes of interim spaces and multi‐dimensional, shifting identities for themselves. The ambivalent attitudes generated by the women's experiences expose the possibility of shedding categorising markers. The omnipresent existence of the gendered, racialised regime of knowledge makes every place a potential site of subversion and resistance.     

Breaking the silences,breaking the frames: a gendered diasporic analysis of sexual violence in the DRC

ABSTRACT

The role of diasporas in fuelling conflict has been extensively studied, with much less attention being paid to their role in peace-building. It is increasingly recognised that diasporas from conflict regions are contributing to the reconstruction of their countries of origin, acting as ‘peace-makers’ rather than ‘peace-wreckers’. Women and men migrants have also been found to engage differently towards their country of origin, but attention to women’s activism is still scarce. This article addresses the issue of political activism by Congolese women in the diaspora in both the UK and Belgium. Their activities are assessed analytically through the prism of ‘mechanisms of framing’, which shape the ways in which messages are conveyed during the mobilisation process. The paper discusses diagnostic, motivational and prognostic frames to address sexual and gender-based violence against Congolese women in the protracted conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Framing strategies vary among Congolese diaspora women’s groups depending on the national context in which they are embedded (Belgium and the UK) but a variety of narratives is also discerned which transcends and is shared among Congolese women beyond national borders.     

‘They should have just taken a gun and shot my son’: Taser deployment and the downtrodden in Canada

This study interrogates ostensible differential deployment of an increasingly ubiquitous tool of policing in Canada – the Taser. Taser-related deaths are problematized as evidence of a teething new urban terrorism essentially against the downtrodden. The paper argues that a combination of intersecting factors: gender, low socio-economic status, mental illness, drug use, and ethnicity are fundamental to who gets tased by the police. The paper investigates the death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekański at Vancouver airport as a quintessential ‘media event’. It highlights the concomitant disarticulation of the police as repositories of order and their re-articulation as insouciant villains. Dziekański's death, the paper contends, inter alia benefitted from the Canadian ‘cultural feeling rules’ in a manner that earlier recorded Taser-related fatalities did not. In addition, the paper argues that if the current trend continues, not only will the downtrodden continue to bear the brunt of Taser injuries and fatalities, but there may be scant public outcry accompanying such gory incidents.     

Flexible ethnic identity,adaptation, survival,resistance: The Garifuna in the world-system

In this paper we examine flexible ethnic identity formation as a mechanism of accommodation and resistance deployed by a particular social group with origins in the periphery as they respond to changing political and economic forces in the world-system. This paper addresses criticisms that world-system analyses are ‘too macro’ or ‘structurally deterministic’ by examining on the ground action and responses by a local oppositional movement within its broad political and economic context. Its focus is an historical case study of a particular group of people whose origins lie in European colonial expansion into the Caribbean in the seventeenth century. The paper begins by recounting ethnographic reports of Garifuna origin myths, then sketches this group's forced incorporation in a colonial world-system (and their responses), discusses their assignment to ‘minority group’ status within newly independent Belize at about the same time they are establishing transnational communities via migration to the United States, and concludes with some thoughts on the emerging ‘virtual communities’ of Garifuna and indigenous peoples around the world that are emerging on the worldwide web today. We explore what the notion of ethnic identity means in this particular case, and how and why it changes over time. We also try to understand if this flexible identity, and the social movements that arise as it is redefined, can be understood as a form of ‘resistance’. Finally, we ask if diasporic identity movements of indigenous people, like the Garifuna, actually or potentially can contribute to rising challenges against the forces of contemporary ‘globalization’.     

Love thy neighbour? Exploring prejudice against ethnic minority groups in a divided society: the case of Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland has seen a rise in racially motivated crimes and incidents reported to police in recent years and, although this has been accompanied by intensified media coverage, this phenomenon has been the subject of relatively little research. The purpose of this study is to evaluate empirically three theories that have been proposed to explain prejudice towards ethnic minorities in Northern Ireland; economic self-interest, social contact, and ‘sectarianism as racism’. Using the 2013 Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey, which contains new questions on contact with ethnic minorities, this study looks at attitudes towards Eastern Europeans, Muslims and a third category of ‘other ethnic groups’. Results from multivariate linear regression provide evidence for all three theories but also show that the strength and significance of predictive variables for prejudice vary across the minority groups. The findings that there are different motivations for prejudice towards different groups can inform policies to tackle racism in Northern Ireland.     

Fratricide identities: the land conflict between indigenous Leco and peasant unions in Apolo,Bolivia

This article explores processes of identity-building and claims-making by rural social groups in the context of recent multicultural and plurinational reforms in Bolivia, focusing on an analysis of the narrative apparatus that underpins a paradigmatic land conflict between an indigenous organization and a peasant union in the Bolivian Amazon. The institutional shift that characterized the country after Evo Morales’ election has been reflected and absorbed at the local level. Here, however, the new claims for recognition cannot be understood only through the –often abused – lenses of ‘resistance struggle’, ‘cultural oppression’ and ‘political discrimination of minorities’. In fact, these claims are the result of a complex interaction between institutional changes, and social actors’ ability to respond to them, proposing powerful narratives that provide society and individuals with new shared meanings and mechanisms of self-identification.     

The Power of Ethnic Nationalism: Foucault's Bio-power and the Development of Ethnic Nationalism in Eastern Europe

Although the ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ brands of nationalism are frequently contrasted, the origins of the civic/ethnic dichotomy remain under-theorised. By building upon Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, this article argues that, during the eighteenth century, the articulation of power shifted across the board from a pre-modern control over the ending of life, to a modern expression of power as control over the production of life (dubbed ‘bio-power’ by Foucault). Given the Foucauldian claim that power is built upwards from ‘its most infinitesimal mechanisms’, it is suggested that expressions of bio-power were first enacted in that social structure most amenable to biological manipulation—the family—and then expanded upwards towards the widest understanding of a kin collective—the ethnic group. As the shift to bio-power took hold, so too did visions of the political nation-state begin to take shape in Eastern Europe. A fusion of doctrines of self-determinism with the expression of power as ‘control over the production of life’, then saw the ethnic nation-state gain credence as a social and political construct in Central and Eastern Europe. This article takes Romania as a case study through which the mechanisms of this exploratory argument can be illustrated.     

Too hot to handle: African Caribbean pupils and students as toxic consumers and commodities in the educational market

Secondary sources are used in this paper to highlight how African Caribbean pupils and students – the Black British-born descendants of post-war Caribbean migrants – are victims of symbolic violence, because they are denied the educational capital needed to improve their social status. Since African Caribbean children entered the 1960s British educational sector, their learning has been perceived as problematic by the State. Although assimilation, integration and multicultural education policies were implemented to supposedly address the ‘problem’ of educating Black children, subsequent government reports identified racism as a significant barrier in their education. I argue here that the contemporary marketisation of education makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish between racism and competition, as causal factors of ethnic differences in educational attainment. Moreover, due to increasing private sector intervention and decreasing mediation by the State, racism is now hidden within the vicissitudes of the educational market. School exclusions and discriminatory practices in universities are viewed in this paper as major barriers to the economic success and future social mobility of Black Caribbean pupils and students. I conclude by suggesting that marketisation policies can be appropriated to ameliorate racism in education, but only if the political will to do so exists.     

From consensual reconciliation to a discourse of friendship

When in multicultural states the concept of reconciliation is tied to national unity in order to institute consensus and stability, the outcome often is exclusion and oppression of those others who do not ‘fit’ or who ‘disturb’ the very consensus and unity reconciliation purports to form. The hidden side of violence embedded in consensual reconciliation is the main theme of this paper. Our aim is to problematize the relations between reconciliation and nationalism on the one hand, and to offer an alternative working concept of friendship on the other. Based on an ethnographic case study of conflict between religious and secular groups in Israel, we examine the language of reconciliation and its semiotic gestures, in order to demonstrate that sentiments of ‘neither/nor’ or ‘either this or that’, when rooted in nationalist ideology of unity, obfuscate identities for purposes of homogeneity, closing the social and cultural space for different others who are present but not included in the discourse of reconciliation. By contrast, a discourse of friendship signifies a movement (rather than diffusion) between social and cultural identities. Our concept of friendship is based on a civic idea of causing no harm to others as a way of life.     

Jewish Geopolitics: Nationalism and the Ties between the State and the Land

Professor Yosseph Shilhav's article in this issue of National Identities entitled ‘Jewish Territoriality between Land and State’ is an important addition to the literature on territoriality and national sovereignty. His carefully researched and insightful study of the religious affinity between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel is especially timely because of the urgency that the present intifada has given to the debate within Israel over the political future of the West Bank and Gaza. What is most provocative, as well as innovative, is Dr Shilhav's thesis that the clash of opinion within Israel over the solution to the Occupied Territories is not, as commonly understood, a political debate between ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’, but is rooted in differences of religious interpretation concerning the ‘sanctity of the Land’. It is with this thesis that I take issue.     

Israel's immigration policies: the twofold face of the ‘demographic threat’

This article deals with the discursive practices employed in various public sites of Israeli society to support and legitimise the immigration policy towards prospective immigrants from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) from 1989 to 1990. During those years Israeli society witnessed one of the country's biggest immigration waves. However, like many state policies, Israel's immigration policy towards prospective immigrants from the FSU has not been carried out uncontested. There were vibrant and often heated public disputes concerning this policy. The purpose of the article is to reveal the racist attitudes of Israeli society expressed in the discursive practices that have been employed to support immigration from the FSU in these public disputes. Assuming an inextricable combination of old and new racism, these practices — involving processes of adverse racialisation of Arabs and Mizrahi Jews — have portrayed them as a demographic threat to Israeli society, a threat that can be forestalled by the admission of prospective immigrants from the FSU. However, the fact that these processes are not directed only against Arabs but also against Mizrahi Jews discloses some of Zionism's inner tensions and ambivalence. It challenges the thesis advanced by Lustick, for instance, that the exclusive goal of Israel's immigration policies is to marginalise and to contain the Palestinian minority by allowing the entrance of non‐Jews to Israel as long as they are not Arabs. Not disputing the immensely significant role that the goal of Palestinian containment plays in Israel's immigration policies, I intend to show that this goal exists alongside a perception of Mizrahim as a ‘demographic threat’ to Israel's ‘European character’.     

Racism and xenophobia experienced by Polish migrants in the UK before and after Brexit vote

In recent years the public discourses on Polish migration in the UK have rapidly turned hostile, especially in the context of economic crisis in 2008, and subsequently after the EU referendum in 2016. While initially Poles have been perceived as a ‘desirable’ migrant group and labelled as ‘invisible’ due to their whiteness, this perception shifted to the representation of these migrants as taking jobs from British workers, putting a strain on public services and welfare. While racist and xenophobic violence has been particularly noted following the Brexit vote, Polish migrants experienced various forms of racist abuse before that. This paper draws on narrative interviews with Polish migrant women illustrating their experiences of racism and xenophobia in Greater Manchester before and after the Brexit vote, and how they make sense of anti-Polish discourses and attitudes. This paper illustrates the importance of the interplay between the media and political discourses, class, race and the local context in shaping relations between Polish migrants and the local population.     

Beauty as violence: ‘beautiful’ hair and the cultural violence of identity erasure

Curious observations of hair and hairstyles worn by many women of Black African descent reveal the triumph of a Eurocentric dominant ideology of beauty. I assert in this study that the process of attaining the hegemonic ideology of ‘beautiful’ hair, often defined as a European and Asian texture and style of hair, is a violent journey. This study draws largely from Johan Galtung's seminal theoretical works on violence, particularly his articulation of cultural violence as a creation of ideology through psychological process of indoctrination and brainwashing, and the internalization of this process. From this theoretical framing, and a demythologization of the multiplicity and flexibility narrative of postmodern self and identity, this study examines the attitudes of young Black South African women toward their natural hair and their perception of ‘beautiful’ hair. Through a survey of 159 Black female students in a rural South African university with a predominantly Black student population, and face-to-face conversations with five female students, the study asserts that many Black African women's relationship with their hair is shaped by violence. The physical and cultural violence perpetuated in the quest for ‘beautiful’ hair is consequently creating a generational cycle of identity erasure.     

Racial contestation and the emergence of populist nationalism in the United States

Much of the discussion surrounding nationalism still revolves around the ethnic versus civic nation divide. For purposes of this paper it is more useful to view the United States from the tri-modal perspective offered by Anderson, in which the United States is a creole (or settler) nation. All of Anderson's types can be seen as variants of ethnic nationalism. Kaufmann argues that the US evolved from ethnic to civic nationalism by the 1960s. This argument overlooks the importance of phenotype-based racism in the evolution of creole, or white settler colonial nationalism. We want to argue that US nationalism evolved from ethnic, to white racial nationalism in the interwar years. Since the 1920s, the political establishment has opted for civic nationalism that is based upon ‘white assimilationism’. This civic nationalism has been challenged by multiculturalism since the 1960s. In the context of a democratic political culture, the content of American nationalism has become ‘populist’ in the sense that it has come under popular contestation from the assimilationist right and the multiculturalist left. This populist nationalism includes aspects of ethnic and civic nationalism. Racial formation theory will be used to show that national identity may remain under ‘relatively permanent political contestation’ with racial cleavage as a major fault line in that contest. The issues of immigration and the treatment of Muslims since 9/11 will be addressed in order to make the case.     

On the threshold: becoming Romanian Roma,everyday racism and residency rights in transition

ABSTRACT

This article examines the reaction of welfare state actors and ‘Romanian Roma’ migrants to the political environment on migration in the UK. Based on the ethnographic fieldwork between January 2013 and March 2014, the article focuses on how processes of everyday racism infused understandings of the legal framework for European migrants’ residency rights. The article first explores how state actors developed ideas about ‘Romanian Roma families’ as opposed to ‘Romanian-not-Roma families’ in a context marked by pervasive uncertainty about legal entitlements, welfare restructuring and decreasing resources. Second, I draw on new migrants’ accounts to identify their perceptions and understandings of discrimination placed within their previous experiences of racism and state violence. The article argues that processes of racialisation are subtly enfolded into everyday life shaping the narratives through which both welfare state actors and new migrants understand their situated experiences and future plans. The article reveals the small and mundane practices that reproduce racialised hierarchies which maintain the notion of ‘Roma’ as a group with particular proclivities and the affects for their socio-legal status as European migrants in the UK.     

The roots of black resistance: race,gender and the struggle for urban land rights in Salvador,Bahia, Brazil

In Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, during the past ten years, the city has transformed its historical centre into cultural sites for leisure tourism. This process has included projects of ‘slum clearance’, negatively impacting black communities who have historically occupied these areas. In this essay, I present an ethnographic account of Gamboa de Baixo, a black coastal community in the centre of Salvador, and its political movement against urban renewal programmes. Specifically, I focus on the articulation of racial and gender politics in black women's grassroots activism against land expulsion and for access to material resources. This case in Salvador unearths one aspect of institutional racism in Brazil and the formation of an anti‐black racism resistance movement. Resistance to urban renewal plans in Salvador demonstrates how struggles for urban land rights are a crucial part of engaging in the broader national and international politics of race. In black communities in Brazil and throughout the African diaspora, urban land and territorial rights are the local idioms of black resistance.