Racism Without the Word — Somdeep Sen

After 9/11, the word "terrorism" replaced older colonial vocabularies — but the racial logic underneath stayed intact. Dr Somdeep Sen of Roskilde University joins The IR thinker to show how concepts such as development, security, and the War on Terror continue to sort the world along racial lines, even when race itself goes unnamed. From NATO's global colour line to China's reproduction of Western hierarchies within the Global South, this conversation maps the hidden architecture of race in contemporary IR.Somdeep SenDr Sen is Associate Professor in International Development Studies at Roskilde University, whose research explores race and racism in international relations, settler colonialism, liberation movements, and postcolonial theory.PublicationsRace (Chapter 9)NATO and the global colour lineDecolonising to Reimagine International RelationsA Postcolonial Critique of EU-Middle East RelationsRace, Racism, and the Teaching of International RelationsContent00:00 - Introduction02:34 - How IR Erased Race — Deliberately and Systematically07:09 - Why "sanitised" Language Still Encodes Racial Hierarchy10:11 - Race Beyond the North–South Divide15:15 - How Racial Logic Travels Across Regions and Contexts19:02 - Terrorism, Security, and the Racialisation of Threat28:15 - Western Imagination of the Middle East Before and After 9/1134:21 - Why Race Scholarship From the Middle East Gets Overlooked40:00 - Brexit, English Nationalism, and the Return of Racial Politics45:32 - What Decolonising IR Actually Requires47:59 - China as a Non-Western Power Reproducing Racial Hierarchies51:10 - Intra-Southern Hierarchies and Who Gets to Speak for the Global South53:41 - How to Research Race When Race Goes Unspoken58:21 - Underresearched Areas and Future DirectionsFollow & Further ResourcesSubstack: https://theirthinker.substack.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ir-thinker/X: https://x.com/irthinker_Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theirthinker/Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/theirthinker.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/irthinkerfb Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.