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?

This Panel has 2 pending paper proposals.
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