New Book Reimagines National Security through the Lens of Race
Today, questions of race and racial justice are still hidden in plain sight.
It is quite common for textbooks in contemporary national security and
foreign relations law to not engage
with race at all…
Yet the lack of sustained treatment of race, which silos race as some special topic that is of marginal relevance to the discipline is deeply problematic.
- MATIANGAI SIRLEAF
This discount is only valid when purchasing online from the publisher.
Race and National Security interrogates what it would mean for the field and concept of national security to take issues of race and racial justice seriously. Conventional works tend to exclude such topics from the vaulted category of national security that directly pertain to the security of subordinated groups, such as domestic policing in the United States systemic racism in U.S. foreign policy and foreign affairs, and biometric surveillance of Afghani people. However, contributions in this volume refocus the frame of reference.
This volume is groundbreaking because it brings domestic, transnational, comparative, and international law perspectives on race and national security in conversation with each other in an effort to reform and transform national security.
The relative absence of race in national security is especially striking when one considers that the Journal of Race Development founded in 1910 was the first academic journal in the United States in the discipline. The Journal of Race Development was subsequently renamed the Journal of International Relations, and later became Foreign Affairs in 1922. It is worth remembering how demarcations based on race and empire were explicitly part of the calculus of defining the field’s initial contours.
By unearthing what is otherwise hidden in plain sight, this volume demonstrates that foregrounding race, as W.E.B. Du Bois proposed, is a task that is necessary not only for the field and practice of national security but also the discipline of domestic and international law more generally. This volume is intersectional in its approach with several of the contributions engaging with race and religion, race and gender, as well as language, and other forms of positionality.
THE CONTRIBUTORS
The volume features contributions from: Andrea Armstrong, Law Visiting Committee Distinguished Professor of Law, Loyola University New Orleans College of Law and MacArthur 2023 Fellow; Aslı Bâli, Professor of Law, Yale Law School; Monica C. Bell, Professor of Law, Yale Law School; Associate Professor of Sociology, Yale University; Adelle Blackett, Professor of Law and Canada Chair in Transnational Labour Law and Development, McGill University; Noura Erakat, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and the Program in Criminal Justice, Rutgers University, New Brunswick; James Thuo Gathii, Professor of Law and Wing-Tat Lee Chair in International Law, Loyola University Chicago School of Law; Ryan Goodman, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Professor of Law, New York University School of Law; Margaret Hu, Professor of Law and Director of the Digital Democracy Lab, William & Mary Law School; Yuvraj Joshi, Associate Professor, Brooklyn Law School; Fellow, Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights; Faculty Affiliate, UCLA Promise Institute for Human Rights; Rachel López, James E. Beasley Professor of Law, Temple University School of Law; Catherine Powell, Professor of Law, Fordham University School of Law; Adjunct Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations; Jaya Ramji-Nogales, Associate Dean for Research & I. Herman Stern Research Professor, Temple University School of Law; and Aziz Rana, J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor of Law and Government, Boston Law School.
University of Maryland, School of Law
November 17, 2023
We offer visions for reforming and transforming national security, including adopting an abolitionist framework. Race and National Security invites us to radically reimagine a world where the security state does not keep Black, Brown, and other marginalized peoples subordinated through threats of and actual incarceration, violence, torture, and death. Race and National Security is a groundbreaking volume which serves as a catalyst for remembering, exposing, and reconceiving the role of race in national security.
I conclude the volume stating that the security state has deleterious consequences for communities internally and externally and must be abolished as currently constituted. The only way to limit the excesses of the security state is to reduce its footprint in the world. If there is less contact, then there are fewer opportunities for the security state to brutalize and enact violence.
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