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 military supremacy through advanced technology. 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 thirty-five elite interviews and a multi-stage, comparative computer-aided narrative analysis. The article calls for a research agenda and open public/policy debate on the problematic underpinnings of AUKUS – an unspoken formative ontology of recurrent, imbalanced, and racialised conflict.
