What Du Bois Can Teach Us about Far Right Violence and the Global Color Line

This event is taking place at the Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Seminar room 108, North House, Toronto, Ontario.

 

In 2015, the Sweden Democrats, a populist and anti-immigrant party, traveled to Lesbos to block the mobility of people fleeing war and seeking refuge further North. To explain these unconventional movements, we build on Du Boisian sociology to account for the structuring role of racialized violence at the border and to incorporate a more global perspective on far right scholarship. We argue that the far right’s repertoire of violence, including the hardviolence of white privilege, the soft violence of paternalism, and the extension of remote violence, infringe on the agency and self-determination of displaced people. Following Du Bois, we contend that this repertoire of violence is racially structured and racially motivated by factors rooted in domestic politics yet enacted in transnational space which enforces a global color line. We seek to extend sociological accounts of migration politics by taking seriously transnational social processes that cannot be contained within the nation-state and the effects of which are multi-scalar, individual, and collective.