10 research outputs found
Rituals of World Politics: On (Visual) Practices Disordering Things
Rituals are customarily muted into predictable and boring routines aimed to stabilise social orders and limit conflict. As a result, their magic lure recedes into the background, and the unexpected, disruptive and disordered elements are downplayed. Our collaborative contribution counters this move by foregrounding rituals of world politics as social practices with notable disordering effects. The collective discussion recovers the disruptive work of a range of rituals designed to sustain the sovereign exercise of violence and war. We do so through engaging a series of âworld pictures' (Mitchell 2007). We show the worlding enacted in rituals such as colonial treaty-making, state commemoration, military/service dog training, cyber-security podcasts,algorithmically generated maps, the visit of Prince Harry to a joint NATO exercise and border ceremonies in India, respectively. We do so highlighting ritualsâ immanent potential for disruption of existing orders, the fissures, failures and unforeseen repercussions. Reappraising the disordering role of ritual practices sheds light on the place of rituals in rearticulating the boundaries of the political. It emphasises the role of rituals in generating dissensus and re-divisions of the sensible rather than in imposing a consensus by policing the boundaries of the political, as Rancière might phrase it. Our images are essential to the account. They help disinterring the fundamentals and ambiguities of the current worldings of security, capturing the affective atmosphere of rituals
The hostile environment, Brexit, and âreactiveââ or âprotective transnationalismâ
The âreactive transnationalism hypothesisâ posits a relationship between discrimination and transnational practice. The concept has generally been studied using quantitative methods, but a qualitative approach augments our understanding of two contextâspecific dimensions: the nature of the discrimination involved, and the types of transnational behaviour that might be affected. Drawing on inâdepth interviews with Bangladeshâorigin Muslims in London, Luton and Birmingham, in the UK, we demonstrate how antiâAsian and antiâMuslim racism have been conflated with intensified antiâmigrant racism in the context of âhostile environmentâ immigration policies and the EU referendum (Brexit), producing an amplification of racist discourses associated with purging the body politic of its nonâwhite bodies. The insecurity generated is altering some people's relationships to Bangladesh, incentivizing investment in land and property âback home'. While this represents an example of âreactive transnationalism', we argue that âprotective transnationalismâ might be a more appropriate way of describing the processes at work