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This interview is a part of a collection of interviews with lecturers 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’ Faculty 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 Regulation from Oxford Brookes College. She presently holds a brief lectureship in Worldwide Relations on the College of Edinburgh. Rabea has printed with Crucial Research on Terrorism,Crucial Analysis on Faith and has additionally written a brief piece for The Crucial Faith Affiliation. Her analysis pursuits are terrorism, faith, race, gender, post- and decolonial concept, feminist concept and significant discourse evaluation. You may comply with Rabea on twitter at @RabeaMKhan for updates on her work.
What (or who) prompted essentially the most important shifts in your considering or inspired you to pursue your space of analysis?
There are a few students whose work and/or recommendation has drastically impacted my very own work and the instructions my analysis has taken. This, after all, 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. Nevertheless, I imagine one of the vital foundational moments for me which triggered my curiosity within the class ‘non secular terrorism’ was after I got here throughout William Cavanaugh’s ebook The Fable of Spiritual Violence throughout my Grasp’s at St Andrews. It’s a terrific learn and stays considered one of my favorite scholarly books to this present day. It additionally made it clear to me that I needed to look outdoors of IR literature to search out solutions to the query that impressed my PhD venture: Why, regardless of a scarcity of empirical proof, is non secular terrorism offered as essentially the most harmful type of terrorism?
One reply to this query I discovered in feminist IR literature. Caron Gentry, who later turned my supervisor, was the primary one that 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 drastically 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 offered and described with feminised language. That is when it clicked for me and I realised, maintain on, the trendy class of faith, too, is feminised in that approach. Feminisation is normally accompanied by devalorisation and notions of hazard, dysfunction, and irrationality which implies that the favored notion of faith as universally vulnerable to violence additionally stems from the female gender id inscribed on to the trendy idea of faith. That is basically the argument I made in my first peer-reviewed article for Crucial Analysis on Faith. This concept of the post-Westphalian, Enlightenment idea of faith as an basically feminised one additionally gives a (partial) reply to the query that impressed my PhD venture: Spiritual Terrorism is a doubly feminised idea, subsequently leading to perceptions of elevated hazard and irrationality. Caron Gentry was the primary one that instantly believed within the significance of this concept and inspired me to pursue this additional in a PhD. She and her work stay a terrific inspiration.
Nevertheless, all through my PhD, I additionally subsequently encountered the boundaries of feminist concept. There was one thing deeper at play right here on prime of the overall feminisation of spiritual terrorism. This different (and deeper) layer – race, colonialism, and coloniality – I first tried to theorise by 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 unusually disrespectful even. That is after I realised, I had to return a little bit and familiarise myself a little 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 good 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 strategy in her personal work and instructing at St Andrews impressed and facilitated my radical change and shift to decolonial thought and concept 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 considered one of many nodes of a coloniality which has produced and continues to supply the class ‘non secular terrorism’ in modernity. I subsequently moved away from gender a little bit (however by no means fully) and will comfortably make coloniality the main target with out having to concede it to a feminist strategy the place it will then be framed as just one facet or axis of oppression, coated beneath the framework of ‘intersectionality’, however primarily seen by 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 facet of gender and coloniality with specific deal with girls, I take a extra macro strategy. This macro strategy 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 which colonial innovations and constructions are made practicable. That is what I seek advice from as a gendered coloniality in my thesis.
Different students who I’ve had the privilege to fulfill and discuss to about my analysis embody 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 fitting 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 Worldwide 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 strategy?
I believe with regards to IR there are various extra benefits right here than challenges. IR is infamous for being late to the social gathering with, properly, virtually every thing. Different disciplines like Anthropology or Sociology have normally achieved it earlier than when IR claims to do or uncover something new or unique. I actually suppose that’s a part of the explanation why IR will at all times profit from interdisciplinary strategies and approaches. There’s a number of materials, approaches, frameworks, and concepts on the market in different disciplines which IR nonetheless wants to have interaction with and would profit from partaking with. Take Terrorism Research – there’s so little work inside Terrorism Research on race. Nevertheless, 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’s some nice work on the market, for instance by students inside Sociology, Cultural research, Anthropology, Psychology (e.g. Tarek Younis) but in addition Crucial Regulation and Criminology (e.g. Vicki Sentas). Nevertheless, 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 truth, there’s a number of 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. This can be a important deficit inside IR and Terrorism Research. Crucial Faith, then, which is a somewhat younger sub-discipline that emerged out of Spiritual Research, is extra within the productions and constructions of ‘faith’ somewhat than figuring out what ‘faith’ is or what does and what doesn’t rely as a faith. Provided that Crucial Terrorism Research does a really related factor with ‘terrorism’, it’s stunning that it hasn’t engaged with Crucial Faith but given that students from this self-discipline really 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 particular situation 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 a very good 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’s 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 subsequently predates 9/11 and didn’t simply begin with it. As an alternative, 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 nations.
In truth, I’d argue the explanation why it turned 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. Nevertheless, it is usually rooted on this phenomenon which Jasmine Gani discusses in a current article on racial militarism with Safety 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 presently works on and which I hope 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’d subsequently prefer to see in the way forward for CTS is a extra radical problem to TS which might certainly purpose 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 hope that the way forward for CTS will contain the carving out of latest discourses which can be unbiased from and never a response to (mainstream) Terrorism Research.
In a 2021 weblog submit you argued that in Western modernity, faith is a “feminised class”. Are you able to inform us extra in regards to the impression this has on the way in which we take into consideration faith?
I wrote this weblog submit to function a shorter, extremely condensed, extra simply accessible, and readable model of the article I wrote for Crucial Analysis on Faith in 2021. In it I exhibit how a female gender id is inscribed into the trendy class ‘faith’. What illustrates this feminisation of faith particularly properly is the favored ‘good faith’/‘dangerous faith’ narrative, which is especially distinguished 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 guts and salvation. Good faith stays within the personal sphere (it is usually the faith largely related to Protestant Christianity). ‘Dangerous faith’ alternatively is the sort of faith that has grow to be ‘political’ somewhat 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 frequently 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 subsequently the reason for chaos, violence, and dysfunction. A really related line of argument has been put ahead by earlier theorists, similar to Rousseau, Hegel and Freud, about girls’s innate deficiency and menace to civilisation, rationality and public order if not saved in examine and confined to the personal sphere (see Pateman 1980). Primarily, then, ‘dangerous faith’ is mentioned and offered in related phrases as gendered our bodies which can be seen to behave in opposition to their ‘pure’ gender identities.
There’s a important racial dimension to this, after all. ‘Dangerous faith’ is extra prone 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 approach, then, has an impression on how we speak about 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 methods or traditions outdoors 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 in regards to the limits of feminist concept earlier; are you able to clarify what you imply by this?
Sure, it is a barely uncomfortable subject for me to be fairly trustworthy. I’ve discovered my approach into my PhD by feminist concept and I contemplate myself a feminist scholar, nevertheless, I additionally am very vital 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 achieved essentially the most hurt to girls of color, visibly Muslim girls and even simply non secular girls extra typically. I communicate 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 have been typically alienating and exclusionary. And even supposing I contemplate myself a feminist and I do know that feminism may 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 an educational context, considered one of my private pet peeves is the overuse, abuse and cooptation of ‘intersectionality’ which appears to have grow to be the newest buzzword inside feminist literature in addition to outdoors of it. This can be a idea with origins in Black feminist concept, developed by Black feminists to deal with 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 finally have the impact of sidelining Black girls but once more. As a lady of color, I encountered a number of experiences all through my PhD journey which made me very cautious of the universalism which a number of feminist concept appears to assert for itself both explicitly or extra implicitly. It was urged 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 all types of different phenomena, that don’t centre Black girls anymore, waters down, and infrequently erases the unique objective intersectionality was meant to serve (see Nash 2019; see additionally Sara Salem and Rekia Jibrin 2015).
As an alternative, what I see a number of students who declare to be ‘intersectional’ or use ‘intersectionality’ do is just not really 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 protect as a substitute of the unconventional problem to dominant feminist concept it was initially developed for. Intersectionality, to me, was initially developed to certainly level to the boundaries of feminist concept. I don’t need to perpetuate the misappropriation of intersectionality and see my work as constructing on Maria Lugones’ and Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí’s strategy to gender as a colonial invention and power.
What are you presently engaged on?
I’ve a few initiatives in the meanwhile and am hoping that the busy and precarious lifetime of an ECR scholar on this area will really permit me to work on these in good time. My essential precedence in the meanwhile is to complete my ebook 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 meanwhile, considered one of which I’m co-authoring with my mentor and good friend, Jasmine Gani and which we hope to see printed quickly. This text discusses the customarily dangerous and racist penalties of declaring positionality. This text may be very a lot primarily based on our lived experiences as Muslim girls of color in academia. The paper was each extraordinarily straightforward and on the identical time troublesome to put in writing. We first offered 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 presently engaged on a venture led by Lisa Stampnitzky and Michael Livesey on the “Roots of ‘Terrorism’ in Time and Area”, for which I will likely be contributing a bit on the colonial foundations of latest 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 stay up for growing as a wider analysis agenda.
What’s a very powerful recommendation you could possibly give to different early profession or younger students?
1) Hold a PhD diary 2) Take all the recommendation you may get but in addition be happy 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 selections. You’ll get a number of recommendation on what you must do and what would look good in your CV or will serve job prospects, nevertheless, it’s not possible to do all of it and generally it’s extra essential to only 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 helpful recommendation which I obtained from my good friend and mentor at St Andrews, Faye Donnelly, after I had handed my viva final 12 months was to mirror on the seeds I wished 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 need to perform my subsequent steps, and what impression 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 neighborhood. I need to make data accessible and to problem dominant and dangerous discourses that are normalised and made to look like frequent sense. If that’s by my college students who profit from my instructing or anybody else who can take any sort 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.
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