Description
In 2016, the Chilcot Inquiry into the UK’s involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq concluded that one of the factors contributing to the ill-fated decision to join the US-led war was a culture of ‘groupthink’ inside the UK national security policymaking community. In response, the government adopted a newly invigorated ‘diversity and inclusion’ agenda that sought to increase ‘diversity of thought’ within the national security policymaking by increasing the representation and inclusion of women, ethnic minorities and other under-represented groups, and promoting a culture that encourages challenge to prevailing ways of thinking. This paper – part of a wider study on how processes of gendering and racialisation (re)produce militarism and coloniality in UK national security policymaking discussions – explores this ‘diversity and inclusion’ discourse, based on participant observation and interviews with UK civil servants working in national security policymaking (2017-18). The paper argues that while this discourse begins to disturb the construction of the securocrat as a neutral, disembodied producer of knowledge – a construction that conceals the operation of gender, ‘race’ and other axes of power – it nonetheless fails to interrogate the role of power in knowledge production. Because it frames gender and ‘race’ as markers of identity and not as systems of power, the ‘diversity and inclusion’ discourse fails to uncover how organisational cultures constituted by whiteness and upper/middle class bureaucratic masculinities serve to marginalise knowledges that could challenge coloniality and militarism in UK national security policymaking.
