Western collective consciousness has long been socialised with the assumption that the non-West is naturally a place of unrest, deprivation, violence and, all in all, of inescapable backwardness. This thinking was proliferated in the earliest writings by the “founding fathers” of various disciplines as a matter of scientific fact.
Take the case of my own discipline: international relations. It is meant to educate the future politician, diplomat, public intellectual or policymaker on how states interact in the international political system. Yet, its first textbooks are rooted in “Darwinist ideas”, that imagined a racially hierarchical global order and placed white Europeans at the top and all the darker peoples of the world at the bottom. This hierarchy, they insisted, was justified due to white people’s natural intellectual and cultural superiority. Over the years, the ways in which these hierarchies are perpetuated have changed and we started to use different lingo. But be it fragile or failed state indexes, political stability rankings or development-sector devised growth and socioeconomic progress indicators – they often work to establish white superiority and the victimhood of the racial other.
So, whether there is a genocide in Gaza or Darfur, those in the West often remain content with idly watching the atrocities and suffering from afar. They feel comfortable to do so because it confirms their premonition that those being subjected to genocide – whether in Africa or in the Middle East – are savage victims who cannot help but languish in a state of permanent unrest and destitution. Equally, when these victims inevitably look to the all powerful West for help, it reaffirms the West’s self-perception as superior and deserving guardians of the global order.
—Somdeep Sen, Associate Professor of International Development Studies at Roskilde University in Denmark, 11 January 2024
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