Dangerous brown men:exploiting sex, violence and feminism in the 'war on terror'

Why is the public presentation of the war on terror suffused with sexualised racism? What does this tell us about ideas of gender, sexuality, religious and political identity and the role of the state in the Western powers? Can we diffuse inter-ethnic conflicts and change the way the West pursues its security agenda by understanding the role of sexualised racism in the war on terror? In asking such questions, Gargi Bhattacharyya considers how the concepts of imperialism, feminism, terror and security can be applied, in order to build on the influential debates about the sexualised character of colonialism. She examines the way in which western imperial violence has been associated with the rhetoric of rights and democracy - a project of bombing for freedom that has called into question the validity of western conceptions of democracy, rights and feminism. Such rhetoric has given rise to actions that go beyond simply protecting western interests or securing access to scarce resources and appear to be beyond instrumental reason. The articulations of racism that appear with the war on terror are animated by fears and sexual fantasies inexplicable by rational interest alone. There can be no resolution to this seemingly endless conflict without understanding the highly sexualised racism that animates it. Such an understanding threatens to pierce the heart of imperial relations, revealing their intense contradictions and uncovering attempts to normalise violent expropriation.

Spectatorship and the war on terror:creating consensus through global audiences

This paper considers the staging of violence, atrocities, and sexuality in the conduct of the war on terror. The piece discusses the manner in which the terms of the war on terror appear to shut down possible debate and examines the rhetorical and representational strategies that cause this. The paper argues that the war on terror includes a cultural project that seeks to create a consenting global audience. This cultural project appears more diffuse and less immediately instrumental than the military and diplomatic activities of this global battle. The piece argues that it is through the circulation of open secrets and accounts of torture and abuse that a global audience is constructed as both witness and participant in the practices and objectives of the war and that this positioning is designed to corral audience understanding into the suggested narratives of the proponents of the war. Este documento considera el escenario de la violencia, las atrocidades y la sexualidad en la conducta de la guerra contra el terror. El artículo plantea la manera en que los términos de la guerra contra el terror parecen suspender un posible debate y examina las estrategias retóricas y representativas que causaron esto. El documento plantea que la guerra contra el terror incluye un proyecto cultural que busca crear una audiencia global de común acuerdo. Este proyecto cultural parece más difuso y menos útil en el momento, que las actividades militares y diplomáticas de esta batalla global. El artículo sostiene que es mediante la circulación de secretos abiertos y de informes sobre la tortura y el abuso, que se forma una audiencia global tanto testigos como participantes de las prácticas y los objetivos de la guerra y que esa posición está designada a encerrar el conocimiento de la audiencia dentro de los relatos sugeridos por los proponentes de guerra.

Transgressing community:the case of Muslims in a twenty-first-century British city

This paper draws on ethnographic research carried out in Birmingham, UK – a city significant for its sizeable Muslim population and its iconic role in the history of minority ethnic settlement in Britain – to consider how associations of place and ethnicity work in different ways to inform ideas about ‘Muslim community’ in twenty-first-century Britain. The paper charts happenings around a local event in an area of majority Asian settlement and how representations of the area as a place of Muslim community were used to implicate it in the ‘war on terror’. The paper goes on to show how this sensibility is disrupted by Muslims themselves through alternative engagements with space and ethnicity. The paper argues that these offer a ground for making Muslim community in ways that actively engage with histories and patterns of ethnic settlement in the city rather than being determined by them.

Transgressing community:the case of Muslims in a twenty-first-century British city

This paper draws on ethnographic research carried out in Birmingham, UK - a city significant for its sizeable Muslim population and its iconic role in the history of minority ethnic settlement in Britain - to consider how associations of place and ethnicity work in different ways to inform ideas about 'Muslim community' in twenty-first-century Britain. The paper charts happenings around a local event in an area of majority Asian settlement and how representations of the area as a place of Muslim community were used to implicate it in the 'war on terror'. The paper goes on to show how this sensibility is disrupted by Muslims themselves through alternative engagements with space and ethnicity. The paper argues that these offer a ground for making Muslim community in ways that actively engage with histories and patterns of ethnic settlement in the city rather than being determined by them.

‘Enemy aliens’ in wartime:civilian internment in South Africa during World War I

This article explores the previously neglected history of civilian internment in South Africa during World War I. German, Austro-Hungarian and Turkish nationals were classified as ‘enemy aliens’. They included mostly male immigrants, but also several hundred women and children deported from Sub-Saharan colonial contact zones. The main camp was Fort Napier in Pietermaritzburg, holding around 2,500. Based on sources in South African, German and British archives, this multi-perspectival enquiry highlights the salience of the South African case and integrates it into wider theoretical questions and arguments. The policy of civilian internment was rolled out comprehensively throughout the British Empire. Not least lessons learnt from the South African War (1900-1902), when Britain had been widely criticised for harsh conditions in its camps, led to relatively humane prisoner treatment. Another mitigating factor were the pro-German sympathies of the Afrikaner population. Nevertheless, suffering occurred through isolation and deportation. Remembering the First World War mainly as a ‘’soldiers’ war’ on the Western Front generates too narrow a picture. Widening the lens on civilians of both sexes in overseas territories supports notions of war totalisation.

EU-ASEAN relations in the post-Cold War era:an analysis of the impact of normative factors on interregionalism

This thesis examines the relationship between the European Union (EU) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) with a focus on why their normative elements, e.g. values and norms, affect their ties in the post-Cold War era. Since the end of the Cold War, policy-makers and academics have become interested in region-to-region interaction, termed interregionalism. Though interregionalism is considered to have become an indelible feature of post-Cold War international politics, there are question marks over its importance. It is often argued that interregionalism reinforces the collective identity of the regional organisations involved. It is also maintained that its overall relevance to the international system depends on the level of actorness, which is primarily measured in institutional and material terms, of the participant regional organisations. This thesis contends that the normative components of the EU and ASEAN are also fundamental constituents of their actorness and, consequently, define significantly their interregionalism. This is based on a crucial observation that normative factors are of importance to the regional and international relations of the EU and ASEAN. Yet, while they strongly espouse norms and values to guide their internal and external activities, their normative premises radically differ from each other. Furthermore, these normative differences jeopardise their cooperation. Building on this observation the inquiry takes the normative components of the EU and ASEAN as the criterion as well as the focus for investigating their interregionalism. In doing so, it hypothesises that the EU and ASEAN are two different regional actors that adopt two dissimilar sets of norms to conduct their regional and international affairs and that such normative differences hinder their relations. Within this hypothesis, it seeks to address three central questions. First, what are the normative features that constitute the EU and ASEAN as actors in world politics and that make them different from each other? Second, what are the main sources of their normative differences? Finally, why do their normative differences become an obstructive factor in their relationship? To address these issues, the inquiry adopts a constructivist interpretation (of International Relations) and opts for a narrative and empirical inquiry, which is based on information and data acquired from official documents, scholarly works and interviews and questionnaires. In doing so, it finds that as they were born and evolved in two dissimilar temporal and spatial settings, the EU and ASEAN are two different norm entrepreneurs and normative powers. The former advocates a set of liberal cosmopolitan norms whereas the latter champions a set of traditional communitarian principles. Their normative differences become a major obstacle to their cooperation, especially when one regional organisation’s norms are refused or violated by the other. Thus, a key lesson drawn from these findings is that in order to explain more fully EU-ASEAN interregionalism, it is essential to consider their norms, the reasons behind their normative differences and the implication of those differences to their relations