The response of the British International Studies Association - Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Group on Racism and/in Security Studies: 

Dear CPD Members, We write to you in the middle of a pandemic in the knowledge that many of you are going through real upheavals, grief, and hardship as a result of COVID-19 and its broader fallout. Given the context, we hesitated over the question of whether to engage with recent events in security studies, however, as these events are already having real consequences for our wider community, it is important for them to be acknowledged and denounced. On May 15, Ole Wæver and Barry Buzan published an open access reply to a critique of securitization theory alongside a widely shared public Twitter thread summarising their key objections. With 5,500 views at the time of writing, this response is already one of the most widely read comments on race and International Relations published to date in an academic journal. With this in mind, it is deeply regrettable that the authors make their assertions on what should and should not be done within the frames of a race critique without meaningfully engaging with any of the existing work on race. We believe that an intellectual assessment of a piece of work on questions of race, as much as on questions of securitization, should faithfully engage existing relevant scholarship, otherwise the latter is treated as a matter for informed reflection and ‘race’ is left as a matter for common sense. This is particularly troubling because the response reaches well beyond the article it aims to challenge and sets out some boundaries for race critique more broadly. This assertion of authority over the field – an assertion without any base in existing race literature or consultation with existing scholars of race – implicates our members and our intellectual mission and may well have far-reaching consequences. To be clear, our intellectual mission at CPD is firmly to support scholarship on colonialism and race in IR; to build a community equipped with a consciousness of the broader ethics of speaking about race and the far-reaching implications of doing this in public and academic spheres; and to support members of this community against their own (often hostile) institutional and disciplinary contexts. With this in mind, we are acutely conscious of how Wæver & Buzan’s intervention plays into the hands of various elements among the hard right and, as a result, is detrimental for our community. Consider how ‘common sense’ understandings of race in the present global context of fascist resurgence are increasingly informed by the far-right whose ideas are absorbed uncritically into media and academic fields. We therefore lament the uncritical reproduction of coded arguments within Wæver & Buzan’s response and amidst the wider fallout. Our community will immediately recognise these as arguments which have elsewhere been used to wholesale shut down debates on race and decolonisation. Those who are attentive to race and racism in scholarship and society are well aware that the broader ecology of knowledge we are situated in is dominated and distorted by the racist right in the current historical moment. Therefore, any relatively public intervention will have broader ramifications, far beyond its original intentions. Indeed, Wæver & Buzan’s public response has immediately been seized upon by prominent racists and held up as an exemplar of how to shut down anti-racist scholarship more broadly. The authors of the original article have predictably been overwhelmed with hate mail from these fascist circles. Our own inboxes have filled with concerned messages from emerging scholars who are beginning to wonder whether IR is a hostile terrain for work on race and one which is determined and contained by its dominant figures. We fully condemn all forms of targeted bullying and abuse of members of our community and stand in solidarity with those who are questioning whether IR can now be a fertile space for intellectual inquiry on race and racism. We encourage those in IR more broadly to read, teach, and engage with existing critical work on race within the discipline and beyond. We also encourage those weighing in on this matter to be attentive to broader ecologies of knowledge in which the racist right presently dominates, and in which terms like ‘identity politics’, ‘SJW’ and ‘woke’, when used as derision, feed into a growing hard right and fascist agenda. Within this agenda is also a long-term commitment to reverse equalities progress in higher education, both in terms of its intellectual content and the spaces carved out for students of colour. We therefore firmly ask those who are specifically stoking reaction outside of the bounds of good-faith intellectual engagement to cease their provocations and call off the dogs. Finally, we encourage our own members to keep focused on the vital archive of work and the supporting institutional spaces created predominantly by scholars of colour in IR who have worked for decades against a broader climate of hostility. We reaffirm our commitment to supporting you all, both morally and intellectually, as members of our community. This moment of grim public conflict will eventually fade, but our vast archive and communities of solidarity will remain long after. Yours will be the task of community-building and enriching the archive in the years and decades to come.