In many countries, right-wing parties such as French National Front (FN) in France or Alternative for Germany (AFD) in Germany, racist movements, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant racism are on the rise. In the U.S. ongoing discussions about racist discrimination of Black people got stoked up with critical fatal shootings from White policemen against Blacks. The rejection of refugees and attacks on refugee accommodations in Europe henpeck the political discussions and media attention. Questions such as “who belongs to a nation, who is welcome and who is not?” are discussed with great commotion of the population, who controversially argues about “nation-state cultures” and people supposed to be “the others”. These developments take place simultaneously in different countries – and should be taken into account in their interweaving, e.g. if transnational networks exist between racist movements in different countries.
The coincidences of various racist discourses and attacks raise up the question how racial ideologies and practices spread, interact and transform across territorial borders and growing parts of society. At the same time, such developments encounter various resistance and protest of civil society and professionals engaged in anti-racist issues.
Race is a social construct, which distinguishes between people and groups on the basis of given or constructed differences. It ascribes difference to supposedly biological lineages of humans and/or perceived cultural varieties. Differences are maximized and essentialized creating positions of an “us” and a “them”. This binary group structure leads to a hierarchy that positions one group as superior over the inferior “other” group. Racism is not only limited to the individual level, but is institutionally and linguistically incorporated into societal structures. While mechanisms and categorization processes of racism are topics of interdisciplinary research, racism is only rarely discussed in its transnational dimensions.
This special issue on “Racism and Transnationality” aims to further pry this desideratum and to capture worldwide dynamics related to racism. It seeks to give an insight into trends and developments in different countries, and into forms of racism, which interact, transcend and transform across territorial borders. A transnational perspective on racism faces precisely on those translation processes, which emerge over time and space in different contexts.
We invite both empirical and theoretical papers, which focus on (but may not be limited to) one or more of the following questions:
Racism across borders: How do ideologies of racism spread worldwide, cross (national) borders and endure or even refine? How do processes of racialization interact with categories such as nationality, ethnicity, class, gender, disability, or religion?
Ambivalences in a transnationalized world: How is the resurgence of anti-immigrant nationalist and populist political movements in different countries related to an increasing globalization – with its free-flow of knowledge and capital on one side and the simultaneous limitation of people’s movements on the other side?
Forms of racism in transnational networks: Which forms of racism get promoted by racist movements and collectives? Where can we observe historical pathways and where and how does racism transform itself? Which kind of transnational networking exists between racist movements and how do these networks advance the upturn of racism as societal figure?
Anti-racist engagement: As a way out of racism, which different anti-racist-approaches exist and which requirements do they impose upon social work?