Racism Without the Word — Somdeep Sen

1. 7. 2026

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.

Somdeep Sen

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.

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

Content

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