Gender, race and Orientalism: The governance of terrorism and violent extremism in global and local perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, we investigate two complementary elements of the Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) agenda. The first concerns the ways in which race and gender structure the logics of the multilateral counterterrorism landscape that has taken form since the adoption of UNSC Resolution 2178 in September 2014. The second traces how this global discourse in turn shapes local dynamics, specifically in relation to the reproduction of P/CVE discourse in Australian national P/CVE strategy. We argue that the ways in which the governance of terrorism and violent extremism can be imagined discursively, in practical, material form, is shaped by co-constitutive racialised and gendered assumptions, logics, and representations. We pay particular reference, at the global level, to the post-2014 landscape at the United Nations, and its implications for the reproduction of gendered, racialised and orientalist governance logics at the local level, in the Australian context. We demonstrate that race and gender together mould the governance of terrorism and violent extremism and its range of practices. We work, especially, to extend the knowledge base of critical research on race and gender in the governance of terrorism and violent extremism, and to contribute to decolonising neoliberal global governance.