This book identifies new formations of race, racism and ethnicity at the intersection of neoliberalism, security, urban governance and the law through a comparative, international analysis of police organizations and practices. It pushes analytical and theoretical boundaries by examining racialization and ethnicization in locations where the topic is politically taboo, such as in China, India and France, and where racial and ethnic hierarchies have supposedly been banished to the past, as in Bosnia and South Africa. This book also examines police and security services not as mere artefacts of state authority or the prerogatives of capitalist development, but as relatively autonomous and uniquely productive intersections of new kinds of state, social and cultural formations that are remaking race, embodiment, fear and control on their own terms. This book was published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

The chapters in this volume examine the racial and ethnic landscape of Britain in a contemporary era of neoliberalism and financial crisis. A key aspect of neoliberal thought is the belief that we live in a ‘post-racial’ in which the problems of racism and xenophobia have been overcome. However, cultural retrenchment and coded xenophobia have been sweeping the political terrain, accompanied by ‘new racisms’ and ‘new racial subjects’ that only close contextual analysis can unpick. The scholarship contained in this collection challenges those who suggest that we live in a post-racial time. By focusing on particular locations in Britain at a particular moment, the volume explores local stories of ‘race’ and racism across changing sociopolitical ground. This book is essential reading for scholars and students of race, racism, diaspora, multiculturalism, post-colonialism, transnationalism and post-race. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Police Unlimited is centred on the controversial idea that police forces are a focal point for conflict in modern society. Instead of emphasising the socially integrative function of police forces, the book links to a conflict model concerned with its socially divisive effects. Throughout the book, the consequences of this social division are discussed, using a detailed ethnographic study of the Dutch police as a starting point, and extending the analysis out to look at the global situation. The book is based on a five year ethnography exploring police discrimination in the Dutch police. It examines cases of conflict, both inside and outside the police station, thus covering interethnic tensions at work as well as hostility towards migrants observed while joining officers on patrol. The cases are discussed in light of the corroding public character of Dutch policing and the risks involved in terms of discrimination, and the arbitrary, or even privatized, use of power. Signalling an increased blurring of the private and public spheres in policing, the book warns of an "unlimited" police service that is no longer constrained by the public contours that delineate a legal bureaucracy. To develop a police anthropology, the ethnographic materials are consistently compared with other police ethnographies in the "global north" and "global south". This comparative analysis points out that the demise of bureaucracy makes it increasingly difficult for police organizations across the globe to exclude politics, particularism and populism from their operations. Police Unlimited addresses the curious position of police organizations in the 21st century through the lens of a police anthropology concerned with deep-seated police discrimination across the world. In an age in which bureaucracy is considered to be the social evil of our time, Police Unlimited offers a controversial message: it is exactly the dehumanized and impersonal nature of bureaucracy that transforms policing into a neutral and fair practice.

In Sexual States Jyoti Puri tracks the efforts to decriminalize homosexuality in India to show how the regulation of sexuality is fundamentally tied to the creation and enduring existence of the state. Since 2001 activists have attempted to rewrite Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which in addition to outlawing homosexual behavior is often used to prosecute a range of activities and groups that are considered perverse. Having interviewed activists and NGO workers throughout five metropolitan centers, investigated crime statistics and case law, visited various state institutions, and met with the police, Puri found that Section 377 is but one element of how homosexuality is regulated in India. This statute works alongside the large and complex system of laws, practices, policies, and discourses intended to mitigate sexuality's threat to the social order while upholding the state as inevitable, legitimate, and indispensable. By highlighting the various means through which the regulation of sexuality constitutes India's heterogeneous and fragmented "sexual state," Puri provides a conceptual framework to understand the links between sexuality and the state more broadly.

This book approaches the concept of cosmopolitan sociability as a cultural or territorial rootedness that facilitates a simultaneous openness to shared human emotions, experiences, and aspirations. Cosmopolitan Sociability critiques definitions of cosmopolitanism as a tolerance for cultural difference or a universalist morality that arise from contemporary experiences of mobility and globalization. Challenging these assumptions, the book explores the degree to which a 'cosmopolitan dimension' can be practised within particular religious communities, diasporic ties, or gendered migrant identities in different parts of the world. A wide variety of expert contributors offer rich ethnographic insights into the interplay of social interactions and cosmopolitan sociability. In this way the book contributes significantly to ethnic and migration studies, global anthropology, social theory, and religious and cultural studies. Cosmopolitan Sociability was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

As Europe goes astray, deeply conflicted about where it is within and with the world, it does not know what it wants to know about, or do, with the racial subject. In this situation, the Muslim becomes an intense source of anxiety, one that is at once terrifying and called to answer for Europe’s existential fear of relegation. Islamophobia thus represents both the racism constitutive of European modernity and is also symptomatic of contemporary transformations in racist power, knowledge, and governance, propelled by technologies and economies of endless wars on terror. But how might the Muslim speak about the world, its past, and unfolding terrors? Which questions must she answer, and which answers does Europe deem acceptable? Presenting a speculative theory of the post-racial subject of Islamophobia, Can Muslims Think? is an attempt to build a vocabulary for analyzing the complexities of racism today, its potential futurity, and techniques for its dismantling.

Ethnic and Racial Minorities in Asia explores the relationship between ethnic minority rights and citizenship in Asia. Occupying a prominent place on the global map of conflict, Asia is one of the most ethnically diverse and racially divided regions in the world. It is also the scene of some of the most contrasting state responses to ethnic and racial conflicts, ranging from violent military repression and coercion on the one hand, to offers of autonomy and other forms of self-rule aimed at granting minorities more equal and inclusive citizenship on the other. This volume combines conceptual debates about citizenship with case studies of ethnic minorities from across the Asian region, with a particular emphasis on Southeast Asia. The contributing authors question the nature of citizenship in the broader sense of identity, belonging, and the rights and responsibilities of ethnic minorities in relation to sovereign nation-states. They examine a wide range of key issues including minority rights claims, ethnic and racial conflict, citizenship, constructions and representations of identity, post-colonialism and human security. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Gender, Race and Religion brings together a selection of original papers published in Ethnic and Racial Studies that address the intersections between gender relations, race and religion in our contemporary environment. Chapters address both theoretical and empirical aspects of this phenomenon, and although written from the perspective of quite different national, social and political situations, they are linked by a common concern to analyze the interface between gender and other situated social relationships, from both a conceptual and a policy angle. These are issues that have been the subject of intense scholarly research and analysis in recent years, as well as forming part of public debates about the significance of gender, race and religion as sites of identity formation and mobilization in our changing global environment. The substantive chapters bring together insights from both theoretical reflection and empirical research in order to investigate particular facets of these questions. Gender, Race and Religion addresses issues that are at the heart of contemporary scholarly debates in the field of race and ethnic studies, and engages with important questions in policy and public debates. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

An exploration of how states address the often conflicting challenges of development, order, and inclusion.

This edited collection brings together original research papers that explore an important aspect of race and ethnic studies, namely the processes that are shaping the making of Latina and Latino identities in contemporary America. This is a question that has received much attention in the USA over the past decade, and these papers make an original contribution to these debates. Much of this attention towards Latino/a communities in the USA can be seen as the outcome of public debates about the growth of these communities over the past three decades, and the consequences of this growth for social and political change. The papers in this collection highlight some of the key facets of contemporary research in this field. As original pieces of research they are at the forefront of current debates about Latino/a identities in contemporary America, and they provide research based insights into the changing experiences of these communities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.