Scapegoat racism and the sacrificial politics of “security”

Abstract

This article draws on Girard’s general account of sacrificial violence to elucidate the race-thinking that structures contemporary discourses on security in Western security states, particularly in Canada and the United States. With attention to the relation between collective group formation (as we see, for example, in resurgent nationalisms of the era of “terror”) and to the structures and processes of inclusion/exclusion that define them, my discussion unfolds Girard’s figure and analysis of “the scapegoat” within and against contemporary theories of racial violence and group-based persecution. It profiles the specter of race in the assemblages of fear that imbue security discourse, to consider how security “works” to foster and consolidate communities against its “foreign” others, in ways that produce the very race distinctions that they are conditioned on. In doing so, it will elucidate how Girard’s work on sacrificial violence is productive for critically elucidating the affective politics of security discourse, including those that organize and inform the biopolitical formations of race distinctions and racial hierarchy in contemporary security states.