Advancing Security and Identity: From Difference to Categories of Threat (CoT)

• In Event: Intersectionality and International Relations

Abstract

On January 27, 2016, the newly minted Trump Administration rolled out the 2016 Travel Ban or the Muslim ban. The ban was an identity-based immigration policy with national security and foreign policy implications. The religious, racial and ethnic identity makeup of the countries banned was quickly highlighted, fought in United States lower courts and resulted in the United States Supreme Court codifying the ban, while palpably sidelining glaring identity-bias. In 2020, the outgoing Administration banned mostly African countries, once again raising identity concerns in proximity to national security and foreign policy. Using the 2016 and 2020 bans as case studies, in this paper, I advance a new security concept, categories of threat (COT). COT sits at the intersections of International Relations (IR) and Race, Ethnicity and Politics (REP). Political Science writ large does not tackle identity beyond its value as a variable (Blatt, 2018). Nor does the field, namely Security Studies approach identity from the positionality of target-populations, but from the sole and privileged perspective of decision-makers. COT offers a thicker analysis of how identity interacts with ideology, policy and laws. By deploying a two-pronged approach of positive and negative effects, COT captures a). how ideology drives decision-making and b). how the identity of target-populations mutates into security threats once policy negatively interacts with categories of difference. Intersectionality as an epistemological tool and logical companion to constructivism and Security Studies, reveal how identity is more than a variable. Intersectionality traces how categories of difference, also read as identity positively and negatively interact with the power of the state (Sampaio, 2015). The categories of difference I engage with in this paper and eventual dissertation, theory chapter are race/ethnicity and religion. This is a theory-generation offering to Security Studies, arguably the most robust area for identity work. This project contributes to this growing literature in a time when there is no doubt that identity drives economic and political instability, which threatens domestic and global security.

Author

• Nola Haynes, University of Southern California