[Commlist] cfp: European­isa­tion as Vi­ol­ence: Ra­cial­izedMod­ern­it­ies in the Global South and East

https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/news/society-economy/europeanisation-as-violence-racialized-modernities-in-the-global-south-and-east

Call for contributions

Since the end of the Cold War, Europe’s engagements with the 
postcolonial and post-socialist worlds have been framed by a modernist 
teleology: the promotion of a supposedly desirable march towards liberal 
capitalism, democracy ad rights (Gille, 2010). Europeanization – the 
process of becoming “European” by adhering to specific standards in 
policies, economic relations and societal norms – has often been studied 
as a technical-juridical endeavor in the mainstream social sciences. Yet 
postcolonial and postsocialist studies have shown how “claims to proper 
whiteness” as a marker of Europeanness are central to these processes 
(Lewicki, 2020: 5; Krivonos, 2018), thus foregrounding the role of race 
and racialization. Recent contributions in critical migration, 
development and humanitarian studies, focusing on the relations between 
Europe and the Global South, confirm these insights. Violence – both the 
epistemic violence of development interventions and the very material, 
if ambivalent, violence of borders and military interventions – features 
prominently in these accounts (Lopez et al., 2015; Pallister-Wilkins, 
forthcoming; Rutazibwa, 2014; 2019; Weizman, 2011).

This edited volume advances these debates by theorizing Europeanization 
as violence. In doing so, we are interested not only in the “kinetic 
force or physical violence” (Lopez et al., 2015) of European politics, 
increasingly visible, for instance, in European Union (EU)-sanctioned 
border enforcement. We also foreground forms of structural and epistemic 
violence within the institutions, laws and technocratic apparatuses that 
make up the “moral technologies” of development and humanitarian aid, as 
promoted by European powers (Lopez et al. 2015: 2233). We thus 
contribute to a growing body of work that theorizes the violence of 
humanitarianism and liberal benevolence, by considering how imaginaries 
of Europe and Europeanness are at play in them (Lopez et al., 2015; 
Pallister-Wilkins, forthcoming; Rutazibwa, 2019; Weizman, 2011). In 
particular, drawing on postcolonial, post-socialist and decolonial 
approaches, we explore how these configurations of violence operate 
through conceptions of Europeanness that are racialized and gendered. We 
bring together contributions across disciplines including sociology, 
development, geography, anthropology and international studies.

Our endeavor moves from recent research that invites us to a radical 
re-thinking of the historical and imaginative geographies of Europe. In 
the dominant social scientific imaginary, “Europe” continues to feature 
as a homogenous geo-historical entity, an “unmarked category” (Boatcă, 
2020) with supposedly stable and coherent borders. This discourse of 
Europe-as-a-container leaves Europe’s internal geopolitics and 
hierarchies, as well as a geographical displacement of European borders 
undiscussed – or at least, like in the case of critical migration 
scholarship, the latter is often discussed as a recent phenomenon. But 
if post- and decolonial perspectives are taken seriously, Europe rather 
emerges as a historical anomaly, with unacknowledged borders spreading 
across the islands in the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, North Africa, 
as well as contested and contingent borders in the east of the continent 
(Boatcă, 2020). We thus observe a double dynamic: contemporary borders 
of Europe being spread across the globe through the project of European 
colonialism, with Global “post-socialist” East being placed in a 
perpetual catching-up position in relation to (western) Europe. And 
while in recent decades, a bourgeoning amount of scholarly work has 
started to explore the colonial project of Europe and its borders 
(Grovogui, 1996; Bhambra, 2007; Hansen & Jonsson, 2014; Picozza, 2021), 
this work has been uprooted from dialogues with the work on Eastern 
Europe and post-socialism, which explored the struggles over definitions 
of Europeanness in the East of the continent. Despite the land continuum 
with Eurasia, “Europe” is often discussed as a given continent 
(Dainotto, 2006). An imaginary of Europe as Western Europe is reproduced 
when locating the East of Europe in the slot of “area studies” and 
evacuating the East from the theoretical arguments on race, coloniality 
and Europeanness. This dominant vision of the world continues to 
reproduce the old “three worlds” meta-geography, which divides spaces 
into either “postsocialist” or “postcolonial”.

In Europeanization as Violence, we argue that both the Global South and 
the East, that is, both the post-colonial and post-socialist 
perspectives are needed to examine the workings of Europeanisation as 
violence beyond the typically imagined borders of Europe-as-container. 
Following sociologist Manuela Boatcă’s work, we understand the spaces 
beyond the imagined borders of Europe as “Forgotten Europes”. 
Europeanization as Violence questions Eurocentrism from the perspective 
of “forgotten Europes”. Drawing on scholarly work committed to 
decolonization, we question teleological narratives of Europeanisation 
as a gradual and steady process towards capitalism, freedom and 
democracy. A supposed linear temporal progression elides what might be 
better understood as an old space-time dynamic, in which non-Western 
Others are already and forever located in the past, always arriving “too 
late”, to borrow from Franz Fanon.

These constructions of humanity are inextricably racialised, that is, 
placed at various distances from liberal humanity. This is why we place 
race and racialisation at the centre of Europeanisation as violence. 
Considering Europeanization as racial offers “a contrast from an 
incessant focus on the logics of unqualifiedly racially repressive cases 
such as the US, or South Africa”, that allow the reproduction of a 
“European racial denial” that has made “ race in the wake of World War 
II categorically to implode, to erase itself” (Goldberg, 2006: 333-334).

We locate out contribution in dialogue with recent work on colonialism 
and social theory. This is the first volume to bring both the Global 
South and East under the framework of “Forgotten Europes”. The edited 
volume offers a critique of the epistemic hegemony of “core” European 
metropoles, from which rethinking of Europe has taken place. The authors 
of the edited volume speak from different positions in the context of 
global epistemic inequalities.

Violence is one of the central concepts of the edited volume, which is 
analytically paired with the notion of Europeanisation and European 
modernity. Post- and decolonial work has importantly and extensively 
argued that abstract promises of freedom obscure their embeddedness 
within colonial relations of exploitation, bordering and coerced labour. 
 This work reminds us that the classic Eurocentric theorizing of the 
state monopoly on the use of violence should be analytically understood 
with the perpetration of violence by modern European states in the 
colonies and in other non-European and non-Western settings at the same 
time that European societies were being gradually pacified. The popular 
and official narrative of the EU as a peaceful and benevolent project is 
based on the “colonial amnesia”, such as the fact that the Treaty of 
Rome was signed right in the middle of the Algerian War. If colonial 
histories of Europe as a project – rather than that of individual 
empires – are taken seriously, it becomes visible how violence is not an 
aberration to Europe but a prerequisite for European modernity.  The 
volume takes these histories as a starting point for the epistemic enquiry.

As we theorise Europeanisation as violence, we remain painfully aware of 
the growing challenge to critique the project of Europeanisation itself. 
Increasing nationalist mobilisations across Europe and the co-optation 
of “postcolonial thinking” by right-wing parties limit the space for 
non-right-wing critique of Europeanisation. The limited engagement with 
racism and violence at the core of the European modernity in the 
dominant social scientific narratives offer little to challenge 
right-wing racist discourses mimicking themselves as “anti-colonial”. 
This makes the critique of Europeanisation as violence even more urgent, 
as academic critique should not leave the space to rapid right-wing 
responses.

We anticipate the volume to include 11-12 essays of up to 8,000 words 
each, including references (following Chicago Style, in-text citation: 
https://www.scribbr.com/chicago-style/author-date/).

We are seeking further contributions focusing on the following themes:

    the EU, border violence and humanitarian violence in the Mediterranean
    the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa
    the role of the EU in perpetuating Israeli occupation and apartheid
    EU-promoted development interventions in the East of Europe

Perspective contributors are invited to submit an abstract of no more 
than 300 words and a short bio to the following addresses: 
(Daria.Krivonos /at/ helsinki.fi) and (Elisa.Pascucci /at/ helsinki.fi).



Tentative timeline for the book project:

25 October 2021: Deadline for submission of abstracts by perspective 
authors.

30 November 2021: Contributors notified about selected abstracts

31 January 2021: Editors circulate introduction + submission of book 
proposal to publisher (Duke University Press or Manchester University 
Press – preliminary inquiries to the potential publishers will be 
submitted earlier in the autumn).

28 March 2022: submission of first chapter drafts

30 May 2022: Editors’ comments on first drafts

30 October 2022: Authors submit revised chapters

30 December 2022: Editors’ comments on revised chapters

31 February 2023: Authors submit second revisions

28 March 2023: Final checks and comments by editors

30 June 2023: Final copy-edited chapter draft (after 3rd round of 
revisions if needed) and submission of manuscript to publisher.



References:

Bhambra, G. (2007) Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the 
Sociological Imagination. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Boatcă, M. (2020) Thinking Europe Otherwise: Lessons from the Caribbean. 
Current Sociology 69(3):389-414.

Dainotto, R. (2006) Europe (In Theory). Durham and London: Duke 
University Press.

Hansen, P. & Jonsson, S. (2014) Eurafrica: The Untold History of 
European Integration and Colonialism. London, NY: Bloomsbury.

Gille, Z. (2010) Is there a global postsocialist condition? Global 
Society, 24(1): 9–30.

Goldberg, D.T. (2006) Racial Europeanization. Ethnic and Racial Studies 
29(2): 331-364.

Grovogui, S. (1996) Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and 
Self-Determination in International Law. Minneapolis: University of 
Minnesota Press.

Krivonos, D. (2018) Claims to whiteness: Young unemployed 
Russian-speakers’ declassificatory struggles in Finland. The 
Sociological Review, 66(6): 1145-1160.

Lewicki, P. (2020) Struggles over Europe: Postcolonial East/West 
Dynamics of Race, Sexuality, and Gender Intersections EEJSP 6(3): 4–12. 
DOI: 10.17356/ieejsp.v6i3.771

Lopez, P.J.; Bhungalia, L. and Newhouse, L. (2015) Introduction: 
Geographies of Humanitarian Violence. Environment and Planning A: 
Economy and Space 47, pp. 2232-2239.

Pallister-Wilkins, P. (forthcoming) Humanitarian Geographies of 
Whiteness: Entanglements of Race, Immobility and Care. European Journal 
of International Relations.

Picozza, F. (2021) The Coloniality of Asylum: Mobility, Autonomy and 
Solidarity in the Wake of Europe’s Refugee Crisis. Rowman & Littlefield.

Rutazibwa, O. (2014) In the name of human rights: the problematics of EU 
ethical foreign policy in Africa and elsewhere Afrika Focus 27, 1, p. 96-101

Rutazibwa, O. (2019) What’s there to mourn? Decolonial reflections on 
(the end of) liberal humanitarianism Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 1, 
1, p. 65-67

Weizman E, 2011, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence 
from Arendt to Gaza (Verso, London; New York)

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