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- Convenors:
-
Victoria L. Klinkert
(University of Sussex)
Insa Koch (University of Sankt Gallenis)
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- Chair:
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Noor Blaas
(Utrecht University)
- Discussant:
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Mihir Sharma
(Universität Bremen)
- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel examines emerging moral economies of racial reckoning in the face of growing fascism, an on-going genocide in Palestine, and backlash against the demands raised by racial justice movements since 2020.
Long Abstract
In the aftermath of the global uprisings of Black Lives Matter movements in 2020 and the proliferation of discourses of racial reckoning, the moral terrain of liberal modernity appears increasingly unstable. The institutional absorption of anti-racist vocabularies, the elite capture of anti-discrimination and hate crime laws, state and corporate complicity in the ongoing genocide in Palestine as well as increasing polarisation at the grassroots level reveal the limits of liberal unmasking.
And yet, what appears as a moment of crisis is less a rupture than a revelation, laying bare enduring continuities between colonial governance and contemporary moral, legal and political orders. Far-right and authoritarian politics are once more becoming normalised in mainstream institutions, reshaping public discourse and policy, while governments deploy criminal, immigration, and counter-terrorism laws to suppress anti-racist, anti-colonial, and pro-Palestinian mobilisations.
This panel invites ethnographic and analytical contributions that examine the moral economies of racial reckoning—the circulations of affect, guilt, solidarity, legitimacy and law and that structure governance, resistance, and complicity. We ask: how are racial reckonings mobilised, managed, and foreclosed within liberal states? What continuities link Europe’s colonial pasts to present claims of moral authority? How do global responses to Palestine, post-2020 institutional reforms, and discourses of “diversity” and “inclusion” expose or reproduce these continuities? And how do law, policing, and legal frameworks shape, constrain, or facilitate these processes of reckoning?
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Through the perspective of affect theory, this paper explores how the recent backlash against decolonial theory in the Global North was anticipated by divisions within the decolonial movement in Southern California that were already becoming visible in 2020.
Paper long abstract
This paper deals with a highly sensitive, ethically, and politically contentious subject matter. Based on my previous research experience as a critical anthropologist of security and migration, and of vigilance cultures in particular (Whittaker et al. 2023), I will be talking about my current ethnographic research, which focuses on decolonial community defense groups in the Californian borderlands. Drawing on affect theory (Massumi 2002; Stewart 2007), I explore the moral economy of threat and promise that emerged at the time of the Black Lives Matter and #FreeThemAll protests of 2020. I argue that the recent backlash against decolonial theory (both within and outside the academy) in the Global North was anticipated by divisions within the decolonial movement in Southern California that were already becoming visible at that time. I will focus on three particularly divisive and racialized issues that are tied to what can be intense feelings of threat and promise: gun ownership, education, and gender/sexuality. Tensions over these and/or other issues, which are largely inevitable within any given group or movement, gave rise to remarkable racial reckonings. These may be interpreted as predictive of the transnational anti-decolonization Stimmung (Borneman and Ghassem-Fachandi 2017) we can observe today.
Paper short abstract
This paper analyses how liberal institutions manage far-right racism through media portrayals that frame prejudice as ignorance to be corrected by institutional models of truth. It argues this audit-style governance misrecognises racism’s relational, historical, and socio-economic roots.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how liberal institutions attempt to manage and neutralise far-right racism through what can be understood as a form of political audit culture. Drawing on British media interventions such as Channel 4’s 100% English (2006) and the BBC’s invitation of Tommy Robinson onto “free speech” programming in the early 2010s, the paper analyses a recurring liberal strategy: placing racist subjects into ostensibly neutral, experimental settings designed to correct their beliefs through exposure to scientific truth.
I argue that these interventions function as political technologies disguised as education. Racism is framed as an epistemic error; an outcome of ignorance, misinformation, or irrational belief rather than as a relational, historical, and socio-economic phenomenon rooted in deindustrialisation, class dislocation, political abandonment, and affective grievance. The racist subject is positioned as an object of audit: scrutinised but not reciprocally addressed, governed through external judgement and expected to internalise expert knowledge in order to reform themselves. Scientific presenters, geneticists, sociologists, and media producers emerge as auditors who classify deviance, design corrective interventions, and offer redemption through self-improvement.
Situating this logic within a longer intellectual history, the paper traces how Kantian assumptions about a rational, unified subject underpin liberal models of political management. The paper concludes by suggesting that far-right persistence should be understood not as a failure of education, but as a failure of liberal governance to engage the relational conditions through which political identities are formed.
Paper short abstract
How does the German state apparatus stifle dissent against the ongoing Gaza genocide? What role do sectors of knowledge production play in pacifying and coopting the call for a free Palestine? And how has it been confronted from within the movement?
Paper long abstract
As the horrors of the genocide in Gaza continue, globally a new generation of activists has been politicized regarding the over 78-year history of settler colonialism in Palestine. In Germany, which is the second largest weapons supplier to Israel, those who are part of the pro-Palestine movement face an oppressive and criminalizing status quo. Hereby, the bourgeois state apparatus uses different mechanisms to crush the movement for a free Palestine, both through force and cooptation. Hence next to brute police violence and political bans, sectors of knowledge production play a pivotal role in subverting the Palestine solidarity movement. This takes on the forms of smear campaigns and hegemonic scholarship that serves as a legitimizing framework for imperialist warfare, racist policies and militarization. But also, through the appropriation and defanging of decolonial language into the ivory tower. In this paper, I analyze what the German ruling class’s mechanisms of sabotaging the Palestine solidarity movement are, what their function is and what role intellectuals have in this context.
In a second step, I delve into how activists in the Palestinian solidarity movement have responded to this repressive status quo. Within the movement, there are ongoing debates on a wide array of issues regarding strategy and tactics. This includes debates that center questions of practical solidarity with national liberation movements, organizational models, identity and class, united fronts, and working-class power. Here I showcase what pacifying modes of knowledge production take on within the movement but also how they have been confronted.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines racial reckonings in the UK asylum and refugee sector after 2020, analysing how liberal institutions absorb and delimit abolitionist demands, and how migrant justice movements sustain anti-racist practices amid colonial continuities and intensifying border violence.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines contemporary forms of racial reckoning in the UK ‘asylum and refugee sector’ in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings and the growth of abolitionist and border abolitionist currents. It situates these developments within longer histories of colonial governance, racialised welfare, and postimperial nationalisms, tracing how liberal institutions manage, absorb, and delimit demands for racial justice amid far-right resurgence, authoritarian governance, and intensifying border violence.
Drawing on a collaborative ethnographic case study at Revoke, a grassroots youth organisation in East London, the paper explores how migrant rights casework, in-house therapy, transformative justice practices, and political education become sites where questions of racial reckoning and abolition are worked through day-to-day. Here, while critiques of NGO-isation and institutional capture have increasingly been articulated through abolitionist frameworks, we argue that the very language and ethics of ‘abolition’ have themselves become vulnerable to co-optation; folded into liberal state projects, professionalised care regimes, and forms of academic extractivism that neutralise their political force.
We ask how post-2020 institutional reforms and discourses of abolition reconfigure moral responsibility within the border regime, and how anti-racist and migrant justice movements attempt to sustain abolitionist practices rooted in longer Black feminist and anti-colonial traditions. In doing so, the paper highlights the continuities linking liberal racial reckoning to imperial moral governance, and the ongoing struggle to interrupt and dismantle these regimes.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how the German state policy Staatsräson (reason of state), which ties the security of Israel to that of Germany, is used to suppress Palestinian life. It presents an example of political violence as well as tactics of resistance within the Palestinian community.
Paper long abstract
Since the start of the most recent Israeli genocide in Palestine in October 2023, different actors in Germany, including the federal government, public institutions, and average citizens, have rallied to show unwavering support to Israel. This paper presents an anthropological inquiry into the manifestation of the state policy Staatsräson (reason of state), which ties Israel's security to Germany's. Many scholars question whether the policy is the primary catalyst behind this growing support in the past few decades. The ethnographic examples here show how it is used to bend laws and suspend democratic values to suppress an anti-colonial struggle. As Palestinians and those who stand in solidarity take to the streets demanding justice and liberation, the German state deploys tactics of political and often literal violence, embedded within an apparatus of structural racism towards Palestinian and Arabs/Muslim populations.
Staatsräson is not a written law, nor does it come with instructions for its application. However, it operates as a fundamental norm and a mechanism of Symbolic Power (Bourdieu 1992). This paper engages with the topic of this panel as it exposes a moment in a rather continuous stream of structural racism in a liberal European democracy. Additionally, it theorises that community solidarity extends the same anti-colonial struggle for justice within historic Palestine. The material presented is collected during a 14-month fieldwork between 2025 and 2026. As part of a doctoral studies project, it examines the impact of socio-political conditions and the impossibility of home-ing among Palestinians living in Germany.