Racism Without the Word — Somdeep Sen
· 1 h 01 min · S4 E19
Episode Racism Without the Word — Somdeep Sen
After 9/11, the word "terrorism" replaced older colonial vocabularies — but the racial logic underneath stayed intact. Dr Somdeep Sen of Roskilde University joins The IR thinker to show how concepts such as development, security, and the War on Terror continue to sort the world along racial lines, even when race itself goes unnamed. From NATO's global colour line to China's reproduction of Western hierarchies within the Global South, this conversation maps the hidden architecture of race in contemporary IR.
Dr Sen is Associate Professor in International Development Studies at Roskilde University, whose research explores race and racism in international relations, settler colonialism, liberation movements, and postcolonial theory.
Selected Publications
• Race (Chapter 9) • NATO and the global colour line • Decolonising to Reimagine International Relations • A Postcolonial Critique of EU-Middle East Relations • Race, Racism, and the Teaching of International Relations
Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
02:34 - How IR Erased Race — Deliberately and Systematically
07:09 - Why "sanitised" Language Still Encodes Racial Hierarchy
10:11 - Race Beyond the North–South Divide
15:15 - How Racial Logic Travels Across Regions and Contexts
19:02 - Terrorism, Security, and the Racialisation of Threat
28:15 - Western Imagination of the Middle East Before and After 9/11
34:21 - Why Race Scholarship From the Middle East Gets Overlooked
40:00 - Brexit, English Nationalism, and the Return of Racial Politics
45:32 - What Decolonising IR Actually Requires
47:59 - China as a Non-Western Power Reproducing Racial Hierarchies
51:10 - Intra-Southern Hierarchies and Who Gets to Speak for the Global South
53:41 - How to Research Race When Race Goes Unspoken
58:21 - Underresearched Areas and Future Directions
Follow & Further Resources
Substack: https://theirthinker.substack.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/theirthinker/
X: https://x.com/theirthinker
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theirthinker/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/theirthinker.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theirthinker/
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Links in the notes 13
- https://forskning.ruc.dk/en/persons/sens/
- https://collegepublishing.sagepub.com/products/concepts-in-international-relations-1-286627
- https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiae012
- https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-international-studies/issue/9118BE400C1A6155559A09B47F9C8EDE
- https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429317873-6
- https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.666
- https://theirthinker.substack.com/
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/theirthinker/
- https://x.com/theirthinker
- https://www.instagram.com/theirthinker/
- https://bsky.app/profile/theirthinker.bsky.social
- https://www.facebook.com/theirthinker/
- https://acast.com/privacy
Shows are listed from Apple Podcasts' charts and directory, and Podcast Index where it is used. Every show and episode belongs to its publisher and plays from the publisher's own feed; this site hosts none of them. Explicit shows are for adult profiles only, and children’s profiles hear only children’s shows. More about this list.