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Articles

Gender, race and Orientalism: The governance of terrorism and violent extremism in global and local perspective

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Pages 559-584 | Received 24 Feb 2022, Accepted 07 Jul 2022, Published online: 26 Jul 2022
 

ABSTRACT

In this article, we investigate two complementary elements of the Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) agenda. The first concerns the ways in which race and gender structure the logics of the multilateral counterterrorism landscape that has taken form since the adoption of UNSC Resolution 2178 in September 2014. The second traces how this global discourse in turn shapes local dynamics, specifically in relation to the reproduction of P/CVE discourse in Australian national P/CVE strategy. We argue that the ways in which the governance of terrorism and violent extremism can be imagined discursively, in practical, material form, is shaped by co-constitutive racialised and gendered assumptions, logics, and representations. We pay particular reference, at the global level, to the post-2014 landscape at the United Nations, and its implications for the reproduction of gendered, racialised and orientalist governance logics at the local level, in the Australian context. We demonstrate that race and gender together mould the governance of terrorism and violent extremism and its range of practices. We work, especially, to extend the knowledge base of critical research on race and gender in the governance of terrorism and violent extremism, and to contribute to decolonising neoliberal global governance.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the special issue Editors and anonymous Reviewers for their constructive and generous comments. Any mistakes and omissions are ours. In Australia, many of us live and work on land alienated from First Nations peoples and communities. We acknowledge the harms that this has perpetuated, and commit ourselves to generating knowledge in the hope for a better future.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Australian Prime Minister’s comments were made in response to a question on whether Australia “should have done more” to be a leader in the Pacific region given recent Chinese efforts to “increase influence” in the region.

2. In articulating a concept of “global governance” as developed from Western cultural, discursive practices, this is not to say that the practices of global governance do not exist in localised and contested forms that challenge universal notions.

3. See also Ucko (Citation2018, 253 − 254) for a detailed chronological overview.

4. The UN is the central governing body and key “thought leader” of and across counterterrorism discourse. As an institutional source of development expertise, the United Nations is “home” to a number of global development agendas, such as Agenda 21 (on the promotion of sustainable development), the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (and the associated 17 Sustainable Development Goals and their corresponding “targets”), and the Women, Peace and Security Agenda (WPS, growing out of UNSCR 1325).

5. See also Shanaah and Heath-Kelly’s excellent Citation2022 analysis of national-level P/CVE policymaking and the social and political construction of the Muslim “threat” across various country examples.

6. These terms we group together here because they are often used interchangeably, and in their use frequently conflate racialised and religious identification categories.

7. Following his election, for example, Trump transition officials “floated the idea of renaming the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) programme ‘Countering Radical Islam or Countering Violent Jihad’” (Patel and Koushik Citation2017, 1).

8. For a nice overview of the promise and also some of the potential pitfalls of Indonesia’s National Action Plan for P/CVE, see Sumpter and Wardhani (Citation2022).

9. Light and Savage refer to Gambetta and Hertog’s 2009 research, which reports that engineers and graduates of fields “centred on problems that have a single, clear-cut, black and white answer are significantly over-represented among violent extremists” (2013: 47).

10. DFAT is the primary governmental body in Australia for the promotion of foreign affairs, and defines its mission as promoting and protecting “Australia’s international interests to support our security and prosperity” (Commonwealth of Australia Citation2022a).

11. This is set out in documents produced by various government departments, including DFAT, but also the Department of Home Affairs, in which the “Centre for Counter-Terrorism Coordination” (CCTC) is located.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dr Penny Griffin

Penny Griffin is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations in the School of Social Sciences at UNSW Sydney.

Dr Maryam Khalid

Maryam Khalid is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language and Literature at Macquarie University.

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