Description
Frontier wars and recurrent coalition intervention rendered racialised military superiority affectively co-constitutive of the ‘old Anglosphere coalition’, now AUKUS. Yet, mainstream International Relations theories are either wilfully blind, or actively hostile, to the inclusion of race as a formative influence on world order building (Acharya 2022). This is compounded by the silence of AUKUS’ political elites, quiet on the formative role of racialised military superiority for alliance cohesion, despite AUKUS aiming to extend that superiority. The ties that bind remain unspoken: Anglosphere aphasia pervades. To counter a troubling ‘silent whiteness’ (Crenshaw 1997), this article theorises the affective politics of racialised military superiority, and the productive role played by Anglosphere aphasia to conceptualise the ‘Anglobal security ontology’ of AUKUS. To do so, it combines narratological analysis of racialised violence with constructivist analysis of contemporary security silences. The article draws on 35 elite interviews and a multi-stage, comparative computer-aided narrative analysis. The article’s normative implications extend beyond the need to critique a security partnership premised upon the unspoken formative ontology of recurrent, racialised, and imbalanced conflict – we must do the same for the discipline of International Relations.
