Introduction: The State of Race

Abstract

As the turn of the twenty-first century marked a significant shift in geopolitical frameworks, namely from communism to Islamism as the targeted enemy of the West, together with the advancement of neolib eralism on a global level, so the politics of racisms in Britain entered a new moment. Shortly following the 2001 riots in the northern towns of Bradford, Burnley and Oldham, the 9/11 attacks on the US came to denote a defining moment for the re-framing of race-relations policy in Britain. Just as the label ‘mugging’ came to symbolise, represent and thus mobilise a whole referential context of black ghettos, urban crime, drug addiction and related criminalisation, and a decline in ‘law and order’ in the 1960s and 1970s (Hall et al. 1978), so in 2001 the terms ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’ came into play on new levels to mobilise the cultural context of panic and fear of the suicide bomber, of endless war on our doorstop anytime, anyplace, and of a barbarian, backward, premodern, uncivilised culture threatening ‘our’ way of life. This phantasm, a threat imagined, has justified an associated escalation of state militarisation and securitisation for the purposes of retaining ‘law and order’. The shift from mugger to terrorist equated to a shift from the ‘criminal’ to the ‘unlawful enemy combatant’, a shift from an object whose crime could be dealt with within the law to an object that ultimately required suspension of the law (or its extension) in order to curtail legal rights and freedoms.