This interview is a part of a sequence of interviews with teachers and practitioners at an early stage of their profession. The interviews focus on present analysis and initiatives, in addition to recommendation for different early profession students.
Rabea M. Khan is an early profession researcher who accomplished her PhD in 2021 on the College of St Andrews’ College of Worldwide Relations. Her PhD thesis was entitled “The Gendered Coloniality of the Spiritual Terrorism Thesis: A Crucial Discourse Evaluation of Spiritual Labels and their Selective Use in Terrorism Research”. Rabea additionally holds an M.Litt. in Worldwide Safety Research from the College of St Andrews in 2015 and previous to that graduated with a BA in Worldwide Relations and Legislation from Oxford Brookes College. She at the moment holds a short lived lectureship in Worldwide Relations on the College of Edinburgh. Rabea has printed with Critical Studies on Terrorism,Critical Research on Religion and has additionally written a brief piece for The Critical Religion Association. Her analysis pursuits are terrorism, faith, race, gender, post- and decolonial principle, feminist principle and important discourse evaluation. You possibly can comply with Rabea on twitter at @RabeaMKhan for updates on her work.
What (or who) prompted essentially the most vital shifts in your pondering or inspired you to pursue your space of analysis?
There are a few students whose work and/or recommendation has significantly impacted my very own work and the instructions my analysis has taken. This, in fact, began with Crucial Terrorism scholarship and Richard Jackson’s work extra typically which I first got here throughout throughout my undergraduate diploma. In a while, it was additionally the work of Timothy Fitzgerald in Crucial Faith. Nonetheless, I consider some of the foundational moments for me which triggered my curiosity within the class ‘non secular terrorism’ was after I got here throughout William Cavanaugh’s guide The Myth of Religious Violence throughout my Grasp’s at St Andrews. It’s a fantastic learn and stays one among my favorite scholarly books to this present day. It additionally made it clear to me that I needed to look exterior of IR literature to search out solutions to the query that impressed my PhD undertaking: Why, regardless of a scarcity of empirical proof, is non secular terrorism introduced as essentially the most harmful type of terrorism?
One reply to this query I discovered in feminist IR literature. Caron Gentry, who later grew to become my supervisor, was the primary one who impressed me to look into post-structural feminism, and feminisation as devalorisation, which to me is gender on the macro stage, i.e. how gender identities are inscribed on to states, ideas, phenomena and never simply particular person our bodies. Throughout my grasp’s at St Andrews I used to be significantly impressed by one visitor lecture she gave within the terrorism module I took. On this lecture she touched on how terrorism in itself is gendered as a type of violence which has been introduced and described with feminised language. That is when it clicked for me and I realised, maintain on, the fashionable class of faith, too, is feminised in that manner. Feminisation is normally accompanied by devalorisation and notions of hazard, dysfunction, and irrationality which signifies that the favored notion of faith as universally liable to violence additionally stems from the female gender id inscribed on to the fashionable idea of faith. That is basically the argument I made in my first peer-reviewed article for Critical Research on Religion. This concept of the post-Westphalian, Enlightenment idea of faith as an basically feminised one additionally offers a (partial) reply to the query that impressed my PhD undertaking: Spiritual Terrorism is a doubly feminised idea, due to this fact leading to perceptions of elevated hazard and irrationality. Caron Gentry was the primary one who instantly believed within the significance of this concept and inspired me to pursue this additional in a PhD. She and her work stay a fantastic inspiration.
Nonetheless, all through my PhD, I additionally subsequently encountered the bounds of feminist principle. There was one thing deeper at play right here on high of the final feminisation of spiritual terrorism. This different (and deeper) layer – race, colonialism, and coloniality – I first tried to theorise by means of a feminist framework as properly, which is feasible however made me deeply uncomfortable. It didn’t sit properly with me, it didn’t present all of the solutions, it appeared surprisingly disrespectful even. That is after I realised, I had to return a bit and familiarise myself a bit extra with all of the wonderful post- and decolonial work on the market. Right here, it was the invaluable steerage and recommendation in addition to the nice inspiration I obtained from Jasmine Gani’s work in St Andrews. Her work and steerage helped me bridge one of many largest mental struggles I had throughout my PhD. At this level, I already knew one thing was lacking and that feminist frameworks alone simply weren’t offering all of the solutions. Jasmine’s decolonial method in her personal work and instructing at St Andrews impressed and facilitated my radical change and shift to decolonial thought and principle within the second half of my PhD the place I lastly felt like I discovered my turf. The primary argument I made in my PhD thesis is that the class ‘non secular terrorism’ has colonial origins and serves a colonial perform. The gendering of it, then, serves that colonial perform and is a part of and one among many nodes of a coloniality which has produced and continues to provide the class ‘non secular terrorism’ in modernity. I due to this fact moved away from gender a bit (however by no means utterly) and will comfortably make coloniality the main target with out having to concede it to a feminist method the place it might then be framed as just one side or axis of oppression, lined beneath the framework of ‘intersectionality’, however primarily seen by means of a gender lens. Right here, I construct on Maria Lugones’ work which launched gender as a elementary part of coloniality. While Lugones’ work centres extra on the embodied side of gender and coloniality with explicit deal with girls, I take a extra macro method. This macro method is impressed by post-structural feminist students like Anne Runyan and Spike Peterson (I really like their work!). Connecting these concepts, I argue gender is at all times already a part of coloniality and one of many instruments by means of which colonial innovations and constructions are made practicable. That is what I discuss with as a gendered coloniality in my thesis.
Different students who I’ve had the privilege to fulfill and discuss to about my analysis embrace Robbie Shilliam and Siba Grovogui. Speaking to them about my analysis was extraordinarily reassuring and gave me the sensation that I used to be onto one thing and on the appropriate path. This was after I had made the shift from a extra feminist-focused to a extra decolonial-focused framework; and after I had learn Race and Racism in International Relations by Robbie Shilliam, Nivi Manchanda and Alexander Anievas.
Your present analysis is located throughout the fields of Crucial Faith and Crucial Terrorism Research. What are the challenges and benefits of adopting such an interdisciplinary method?
I believe in the case of IR there are numerous extra benefits right here than challenges. IR is infamous for being late to the social gathering with, properly, virtually every part. Different disciplines like Anthropology or Sociology have normally executed it earlier than when IR claims to do or uncover something new or authentic. I truthfully assume that’s a part of the explanation why IR will at all times profit from interdisciplinary strategies and approaches. There may be numerous materials, approaches, frameworks, and concepts on the market in different disciplines which IR nonetheless wants to have interaction with and would profit from participating with. Take Terrorism Research – there’s so little work inside Terrorism Research on race. Nonetheless, this isn’t as a result of it doesn’t exist – it does! Students have written on it – simply not inside IR and Terrorism Research. There may be some nice work on the market, for instance by students inside Sociology, Cultural research, Anthropology, Psychology (e.g. Tarek Younis) but in addition Crucial Legislation and Criminology (e.g. Vicki Sentas). Nonetheless, inside IR and Terrorism Research that is very new and solely now starting to take off.
What made my very own tour into Spiritual Research mandatory, then, was the truth that there was a lot materials on the market on the colonial origins of ‘faith’ in modernity – simply not inside IR and Terrorism Research. In reality, there’s numerous terrorism analysis accessible on the class ‘non secular terrorism’, however virtually none of it spends any time defining not to mention critically analysing ‘faith’. The few terrorism specialists who’ve tried to outline faith (normally in not more than a sentence) have adopted a really colonial, essentialist understanding and definition of faith deriving from a Christian- and European-centric understanding and creativeness. It is a vital deficit inside IR and Terrorism Research. Crucial Faith, then, which is a slightly younger sub-discipline that emerged out of Spiritual Research, is extra within the productions and constructions of ‘faith’ slightly than figuring out what ‘faith’ is or what does and what doesn’t depend as a faith. On condition that Crucial Terrorism Research does a really comparable factor with ‘terrorism’, it’s stunning that it hasn’t engaged with Crucial Faith but given that students from this self-discipline truly do focus on ‘terrorism’ which has been labelled as ‘non secular’ on many events. That is an oversight I addressed with my PhD thesis the place I dug deeper into the colonial-gendered origins of faith which I argue have additionally subsequently produced the colonial discourse on ‘non secular terrorism’ extra typically.
As a part of a 2021 special issue for Crucial Terrorism Research, you focus on the hyperlink between the mainstream terrorism discourse after 9/11 and Islamophobia and Neo-Orientalism. Is it doable to dissociate these ideas from one another? In that case, how?
That’s query. I argue on this reflection piece that the Islamophobia and Neo-Orientalism inherent to a lot terrorism analysis is definitely rooted in pre-9/11 discourse as a lot as it’s mirrored in post-9/11 discourse. There may be extra continuity than rupture right here between pre- and post-9/11 discourse. As my PhD analysis has proven, the dominant discourse on terrorism (and particularly non secular terrorism) serves a colonial perform, it due to this fact predates 9/11 and didn’t simply begin with it. As a substitute, it finds its origins in counterinsurgency follow and literature which has fairly unapologetically been used and practiced in colonial contexts, typically to suppress anti-colonial, indigenous resistance in colonised international locations.
In reality, I might argue the explanation why it grew to become really easy to affiliate terrorism with Islam in dominant discourse and creativeness after 9/11 is as a result of the groundwork had already been laid – this groundwork is the colonial and gendered origins of terrorism analysis extra typically. Nonetheless, it is usually rooted on this phenomenon which Jasmine Gani discusses in a latest article on racial militarism with Security Dialogue. In it she factors to how Islam has a protracted historical past of getting used to prop up the West’s id and reinstate its superiority exactly as a result of Islam/Muslims have been constructed as nearer to the European man on the colonial, racial hierarchy than different races or religions. In different phrases, it’s due to the perceived (historic and geographical) Muslim proximity to Europe that othering Muslims and Islam was extra highly effective and environment friendly in signalling European superiority than for instance the othering of a society/race/faith which was written off as positioned on the very backside of the colonial civilisational hierarchy. These nuances in theorising about coloniality and Islam extra particularly is one thing that Shehla Khan (Keele College) additionally at the moment works on and which I’m hoping to see printed quickly.
What I additionally argued on this article is that Crucial Terrorism Research (involuntarily) reproduces a discourse, led and dictated by mainstream Terrorism Research, which has made Islam and terrorism stick to one another in dominant creativeness, discourse, in addition to scholarly work. What I might due to this fact wish to see in the way forward for CTS is a extra radical problem to TS which might certainly intention to dissociate these two phrases from one another. I’m not completely positive how this may be achieved provided that the aim of CTS is to problem Terrorism Research which normally necessitates responding to (and thereby involuntarily additional normalising) the dominant discourse dictated by Terrorism Research. With my present work I’m simply as responsible of this as different CTS students, however I’m hoping that the way forward for CTS will contain the carving out of latest discourses which can be impartial from and never a response to (mainstream) Terrorism Research.
In a 2021 blog post you argued that in Western modernity, faith is a “feminised class”. Are you able to inform us extra concerning the influence this has on the best way we take into consideration faith?
I wrote this weblog publish to function a shorter, extremely condensed, extra simply accessible, and readable model of the article I wrote for Critical Research on Religion in 2021. In it I show how a female gender id is inscribed into the fashionable class ‘faith’. What illustrates this feminisation of faith particularly properly is the favored ‘good faith’/‘dangerous faith’ narrative, which is especially outstanding within the self-discipline of IR and by extension, naturally, Terrorism Research. This narrative entails a gendered logic which imagines ‘good faith’ because the ‘angel of the home’ solely involved with interior spirituality, emotion, affairs of the center and salvation. Good faith stays within the personal sphere (it is usually the faith largely related to Protestant Christianity). ‘Dangerous faith’ however is the form of faith that has change into ‘political’ slightly than staying within the personal sphere. It acts because the ‘irrational maniac’ threatening to destroy public order and the rational politics of the nation state. It’s often described as violent, irrational, and its actors as ‘fanatic’, ‘extremist’, and ‘radical’. ‘Political’ faith, it appears, is performing in opposition to its ‘true’ nature. In different phrases, it’s performing in opposition to its female, peace-loving, personal nature and as gender non-conforming by inserting itself into the masculinist, public sphere the place it doesn’t belong and the place it’s due to this fact the reason for chaos, violence, and dysfunction. A really comparable line of argument has been put ahead by earlier theorists, akin to Rousseau, Hegel and Freud, about girls’s innate deficiency and risk to civilisation, rationality and public order if not stored in verify and confined to the personal sphere (see Pateman 1980). Basically, then, ‘dangerous faith’ is mentioned and introduced in comparable phrases as gendered our bodies which can be seen to behave in opposition to their ‘pure’ gender identities.
There’s a vital racial dimension to this, in fact. ‘Dangerous faith’ is extra more likely to be assigned to and related to non-Christian religions and religions that are seen as furthest faraway from the Christian- and Eurocentric mannequin of ‘faith’ which Europe, in modernity, has invented. The truth that the modern-colonial idea of faith is feminised on this manner, then, has an influence on how we discuss it, what insurance policies we facilitate and limit, but in addition which religions (and by extension races we affiliate with these religions) we discriminate in opposition to greater than others. It’s a fascinating phenomenon we are able to observe right here which has feminised ‘faith’ extra typically because the idea which was invented in Enlightenment, post-Westphalian Europe and which initially was a synonym for Christianity earlier than it was then ‘stretched’ to additionally apply to different cultures, perception techniques or traditions exterior of Europe. This ‘stretching’ or re-invention of faith as a common and never simply Christian idea, then, had a colonial objective and served a specific perform: assigning ‘faith’ (the implication right here being ‘dangerous faith’) to non-Western cultures, peoples, and societies served to feminise them and sign their inferiority and backwardness.
You’ve talked concerning the limits of feminist principle earlier; are you able to clarify what you imply by this?
Sure, this can be a barely uncomfortable matter for me to be fairly sincere. I’ve discovered my manner into my PhD by means of feminist principle and I think about myself a feminist scholar, nevertheless, I additionally am very important of the universalism that dominant (mainstream) feminism typically claims for itself. Additionally it is the language of feminism and self-proclaimed feminists which have typically executed essentially the most hurt to girls of color, visibly Muslim girls and even simply non secular girls extra typically. I converse right here as somebody who was introduced up in a German context and somebody who had their earliest encounters with feminists in Germany, experiences which had been typically alienating and exclusionary. And even if I think about myself a feminist and I do know that feminism will be what I would like it to be, it’s typically a (very tiring) battle to have to elucidate, justify and distance your feminism from the dominant, possessive, and appropriating model of white feminism.
In a tutorial context, one among my private pet peeves is the overuse, abuse and cooptation of ‘intersectionality’ which appears to have change into the newest buzzword inside feminist literature in addition to exterior of it. It is a idea with origins in Black feminist principle, developed by Black feminists to handle the very particular and distinctive types of discrimination and racism that Black girls face, but it’s now used and co-opted by feminists throughout disciplines, by theorists in addition to activists, typically in ways in which ultimately have the impact of sidelining Black girls but once more. As a girl of color, I encountered a number of experiences all through my PhD journey which made me very cautious of the universalism which numerous feminist principle appears to assert for itself both explicitly or extra implicitly. It was instructed to me on quite a few events, that I take advantage of the language and/or framework of intersectionality for my work provided that I theorise about each race/coloniality and gender in relation to terrorism. I selected to not. It doesn’t appropriately describe my work and as I discussed earlier it appears disrespectful to the unique objective intersectionality was developed for. Stretching it in ways in which make it apply to every kind of different phenomena, that don’t centre Black girls anymore, waters down, and sometimes erases the unique objective intersectionality was meant to serve (see Nash 2019; see additionally Sara Salem and Rekia Jibrin 2015).
As a substitute, what I see numerous students who declare to be ‘intersectional’ or use ‘intersectionality’ do just isn’t truly giving different classes like race or faith its due scholarly consideration and scrutiny however declare that it’s routinely accounted for as a result of their framework is an intersectional one. This implies it’s typically used as a defend as an alternative of the unconventional problem to dominant feminist principle it was initially developed for. Intersectionality, to me, was initially developed to certainly level to the bounds of feminist principle. I don’t wish to perpetuate the misappropriation of intersectionality and see my work as constructing on Maria Lugones’ and Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí’s method to gender as a colonial invention and gear.
What are you at the moment engaged on?
I’ve a few initiatives in the mean time and am hoping that the busy and precarious lifetime of an ECR scholar on this discipline will truly enable me to work on these in good time. My important precedence in the mean time is to complete my guide proposal for my first manuscript, primarily based on my PhD thesis (“The Gendered Coloniality of the Spiritual Terrorism Thesis’). I’m additionally engaged on a few articles in the mean time, one among which I’m co-authoring with my mentor and buddy, Jasmine Gani and which we hope to see printed quickly. This text discusses the customarily dangerous and racist penalties of declaring positionality. This text could be very a lot primarily based on our lived experiences as Muslim girls of color in academia. The paper was each extraordinarily simple and on the similar time troublesome to put in writing. We first introduced this paper on the 2019 Millennium convention and located the help and validation from so many ladies of color within the room extremely motivating, reassuring, and therapeutic.
I’m additionally at the moment engaged on a undertaking led by Lisa Stampnitzky and Michael Livesey on the “Roots of ‘Terrorism’ in Time and Area”, for which I can be contributing a chunk on the colonial foundations of up to date counter-terrorism methods. Lastly, I’ve already pointed to the hole between Crucial Faith and IR in my work, and that is one thing I look ahead to creating as a wider analysis agenda.
What’s a very powerful recommendation you possibly can give to different early profession or younger students?
1) Preserve a PhD diary 2) Take all the recommendation you will get but in addition be at liberty to disregard any recommendation you get, particularly when it places you beneath extra stress! And naturally: belief your self! I used to be very fortunate to get good recommendation all through my PhD journey but in addition needed to study to not really feel like I have to comply with all recommendation I get. You study and develop a fairly good intestine feeling down the road and have to study to belief your self in your choices. You’re going to get numerous recommendation on what it’s best to do and what would look good in your CV or will serve job prospects, nevertheless, it’s unimaginable to do all of it and typically it’s extra essential to simply go at your personal tempo and keep inside your consolation zone. You don’t have to attend each convention, go to each discuss, or end your PhD in three years.
One other piece of priceless recommendation which I obtained from my buddy and mentor at St Andrews, Faye Donnelly, after I had handed my viva final 12 months was to mirror on the seeds I needed to plant shifting ahead, each professionally and personally. It helped to sit down down after my viva, open up my PhD diary and jot down a few sentences on how I wish to perform my subsequent steps, and what influence I hope to make, nevertheless small.
I’m very a lot guided by my religion with my work in academia – to make a contribution that’s helpful to others in addition to my group. I wish to make information accessible and to problem dominant and dangerous discourses that are normalised and made to seem like widespread sense. If that’s by means of my college students who profit from my instructing or anybody else who can take any form of perception from my work, then I’ve achieved my mission – as a result of that is what I’m on – a mission.
So, to sum this up – belief your intestine feeling, don’t lose sight of why you might be doing what you’re doing, discover objective, re-align your objective the place mandatory, and study to disregard recommendation that doesn’t really feel helpful to you on the time.
Additional Studying on E-Worldwide Relations
