This interview is a part of a sequence 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 Essential 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 present holds a brief lectureship in Worldwide Relations on the College of Edinburgh. Rabea has revealed with Essential Research on Terrorism,Essential Analysis on Faith and has additionally written a brief piece for The Essential Faith Affiliation. Her analysis pursuits are terrorism, faith, race, gender, post- and decolonial idea, feminist idea and demanding discourse evaluation. You’ll be able to observe Rabea on twitter at @RabeaMKhan for updates on her work.
What (or who) prompted probably 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 vastly impacted my very own work and the instructions my analysis has taken. This, after all, began with Essential Terrorism scholarship and Richard Jackson’s work extra usually which I first got here throughout throughout my undergraduate diploma. Afterward, it was additionally the work of Timothy Fitzgerald in Essential Faith. Nonetheless, I consider one of the vital foundational moments for me which triggered my curiosity within the class ‘spiritual terrorism’ was once I got here throughout William Cavanaugh’s guide The Fantasy of Spiritual Violence throughout my Grasp’s at St Andrews. It’s an excellent 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 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 spiritual terrorism offered as probably 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 taking a look at gender on the macro stage, i.e. taking a look at 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 vastly 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 fashionable class of faith, too, is feminised in that means. Feminisation is often accompanied by devalorisation and notions of hazard, dysfunction, and irrationality which signifies that the favored notion of faith as universally susceptible to violence additionally stems from the female gender identification inscribed on to the fashionable idea of faith. That is basically the argument I made in my first peer-reviewed article for Essential Analysis on Faith. This concept of the post-Westphalian, Enlightenment idea of faith as an basically feminised one additionally supplies a (partial) reply to the query that impressed my PhD undertaking: 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 an excellent inspiration.
Nonetheless, all through my PhD, I additionally subsequently encountered the bounds of feminist idea. 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 via a feminist framework as nicely, which is feasible however made me deeply uncomfortable. It didn’t sit nicely with me, it didn’t present all of the solutions, it appeared surprisingly disrespectful even. That is once I realised, I had to return a bit of and familiarise myself a bit of extra with all of the superb post- and decolonial work on the market. Right here, it was the invaluable steering and recommendation in addition to the nice inspiration I received from Jasmine Gani’s work in St Andrews. Her work and steering 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 educating at St Andrews impressed and facilitated my radical change and shift to decolonial thought and idea within the second half of my PhD the place I lastly felt like I discovered my turf. The principle argument I made in my PhD thesis is that the class ‘spiritual terrorism’ has colonial origins and serves a colonial operate. The gendering of it, then, serves that colonial operate and is a part of and considered one of many nodes of a coloniality which has produced and continues to provide the class ‘spiritual terrorism’ in modernity. I subsequently moved away from gender a bit of (however by no means fully) and will comfortably make coloniality the main focus with out having to concede it to a feminist strategy the place it could then be framed as just one facet or axis of oppression, coated below the framework of ‘intersectionality’, however primarily seen via a gender lens. Right here, I construct on Maria Lugones’ work which launched gender as a elementary element of coloniality. While Lugones’ work centres extra on the embodied facet of gender and coloniality with specific deal with ladies, I take a extra macro strategy. This macro strategy is impressed by post-structural feminist students like Anne Runyan and Spike Peterson (I like their work!). Connecting these concepts, I argue gender is all the time already a part of coloniality and one of many instruments via which colonial innovations and constructions are made practicable. That is what I confer with as a gendered coloniality in my thesis.
Different students who I’ve had the privilege to satisfy and speak 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 correct 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 Essential Faith and Essential Terrorism Research. What are the challenges and benefits of adopting such an interdisciplinary strategy?
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, nicely, virtually all the pieces. Different disciplines like Anthropology or Sociology have often completed 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 all the time profit from interdisciplinary strategies and approaches. There’s a whole lot of materials, approaches, frameworks, and concepts on the market in different disciplines which IR nonetheless wants to interact with and would profit from partaking with. Take Terrorism Research – there may be 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’s some nice work on the market, for instance by students inside Sociology, Cultural research, Anthropology, Psychology (e.g. Tarek Younis) but in addition Essential 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 obligatory, 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. The truth is, there may be a whole lot of terrorism analysis accessible on the class ‘spiritual 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 (often 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. Essential 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 rely as a faith. On condition that Essential Terrorism Research does a really related factor with ‘terrorism’, it’s shocking that it hasn’t engaged with Essential Faith but given that students from this self-discipline truly do focus on ‘terrorism’ which has been labelled as ‘spiritual’ 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 ‘spiritual terrorism’ extra usually.
As a part of a 2021 particular problem for Essential Terrorism Research, you focus on the hyperlink between the mainstream terrorism discourse after 9/11 and Islamophobia and Neo-Orientalism. Is it potential to dissociate these ideas from one another? If that’s the case, how?
That’s a great 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 spiritual terrorism) serves a colonial operate, it subsequently predates 9/11 and didn’t simply begin with it. As a substitute, it finds its origins in counterinsurgency apply and literature which has fairly unapologetically been used and practiced in colonial contexts, usually to suppress anti-colonial, indigenous resistance in colonised international locations.
The truth is, I might 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 usually. Nonetheless, 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 an extended historical past of getting used to prop up the West’s identification 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 present works on and which I hope to see revealed quickly.
What I additionally argued on this article is that Essential 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 subsequently 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 solely certain how this may be achieved on condition that the aim of CTS is to problem Terrorism Research which often 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 are impartial from and never a response to (mainstream) Terrorism Research.
In a 2021 weblog publish 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 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 Essential Analysis on Faith in 2021. In it I show how a female gender identification is inscribed into the fashionable class ‘faith’. What illustrates this feminisation of faith particularly nicely is the favored ‘good faith’/‘unhealthy 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 inside 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). ‘Unhealthy faith’ then again is the type of faith that has turn 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 usually 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, resembling Rousseau, Hegel and Freud, about ladies’s innate deficiency and menace to civilisation, rationality and public order if not saved in verify and confined to the personal sphere (see Pateman 1980). Basically, then, ‘unhealthy faith’ is mentioned and offered in related phrases as gendered our bodies which are seen to behave in opposition to their ‘pure’ gender identities.
There’s a vital racial dimension to this, after all. ‘Unhealthy 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 means, then, has an impression on how we discuss it, what insurance policies we facilitate and prohibit, 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 will observe right here which has feminised ‘faith’ extra usually 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 exterior of Europe. This ‘stretching’ or re-invention of faith as a common and never simply Christian idea, then, had a colonial function and served a specific operate: assigning ‘faith’ (the implication right here being ‘unhealthy 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 idea earlier; are you able to clarify what you imply by this?
Sure, it is a barely uncomfortable subject for me to be fairly sincere. I’ve discovered my means into my PhD via feminist idea and I contemplate myself a feminist scholar, nevertheless, I additionally am very essential of the universalism that dominant (mainstream) feminism usually claims for itself. It’s also the language of feminism and self-proclaimed feminists which have usually completed probably the most hurt to ladies of color, visibly Muslim ladies and even simply spiritual ladies extra usually. 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 usually alienating and exclusionary. And even supposing I contemplate myself a feminist and I do know that feminism might be what I need it to be, it’s usually a (very tiring) battle to have to clarify, justify and distance your feminism from the dominant, possessive, and appropriating model of white feminism.
In a tutorial context, considered one of my private pet peeves is the overuse, abuse and cooptation of ‘intersectionality’ which appears to have turn into the newest buzzword inside feminist literature in addition to exterior of it. It is a idea with origins in Black feminist idea, developed by Black feminists to deal with the very particular and distinctive types of discrimination and racism that Black ladies face, but it’s now used and co-opted by feminists throughout disciplines, by theorists in addition to activists, usually in ways in which finally have the impact of sidelining Black ladies 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 whole lot of feminist idea appears to say for itself both explicitly or extra implicitly. It was advised to me on quite a few events, that I exploit the language and/or framework of intersectionality for my work on condition 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 function intersectionality was developed for. Stretching it in ways in which make it apply to every kind of different phenomena, that don’t centre Black ladies anymore, waters down, and infrequently erases the unique function intersectionality was meant to serve (see Nash 2019; see additionally Sara Salem and Rekia Jibrin 2015).
As a substitute, what I see a whole lot of students who declare to be ‘intersectional’ or use ‘intersectionality’ do shouldn’t be truly giving different classes like race or faith its due scholarly consideration and scrutiny however declare that it’s mechanically accounted for as a result of their framework is an intersectional one. This implies it’s usually used as a protect as a substitute of the unconventional problem to dominant feminist idea it was initially developed for. Intersectionality, to me, was initially developed to certainly level to the bounds of feminist idea. 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 at present engaged on?
I’ve a few initiatives in the intervening time and am hoping that the busy and precarious lifetime of an ECR scholar on this subject will truly enable me to work on these in good time. My predominant precedence in the intervening time is to complete my guide proposal for my first manuscript, based mostly on my PhD thesis (“The Gendered Coloniality of the Spiritual Terrorism Thesis’). I’m additionally engaged on a few articles in the intervening time, considered one of which I’m co-authoring with my mentor and pal, Jasmine Gani and which we hope to see revealed quickly. This text discusses the usually dangerous and racist penalties of declaring positionality. This text may be very a lot based mostly on our lived experiences as Muslim ladies of color in academia. The paper was each extraordinarily simple and on the similar time tough to write down. We first offered this paper on the 2019 Millennium convention and located the assist and validation from so many ladies of color within the room extremely motivating, reassuring, and therapeutic.
I’m additionally at present engaged on a undertaking led by Lisa Stampnitzky and Michael Livesey on the “Roots of ‘Terrorism’ in Time and House”, 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 Essential Faith and IR in my work, and that is one thing I look ahead to creating as a wider analysis agenda.
What’s an important recommendation you might give to different early profession or younger students?
1) Maintain a PhD diary 2) Take all the recommendation you will get but in addition be happy to disregard any recommendation you get, particularly when it places you below extra strain! 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 must observe all recommendation I get. You study and develop a reasonably good intestine feeling down the road and must study to belief your self in your selections. You’ll get a whole lot of recommendation on what it’s best to do and what would look good in your CV or will serve job prospects, nevertheless, it’s inconceivable to do all of it and generally it’s extra essential to simply go at your personal tempo and keep inside your consolation zone. You don’t must attend each convention, go to each speak, or end your PhD in three years.
One other piece of beneficial recommendation which I received from my pal and mentor at St Andrews, Faye Donnelly, after I had handed my viva final 12 months was to replicate on the seeds I needed to plant transferring 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 group. I need to make data accessible and to problem dominant and dangerous discourses that are normalised and made to look like widespread sense. If that’s via my college students who profit from my educating or anybody else who can take any type 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’re doing what you’re doing, discover function, re-align your function the place obligatory, and study to disregard recommendation that doesn’t really feel helpful to you on the time.