Beyond the Imperial Episteme: Tracing Transnational Entanglements in the Context of Denmark’s ‘War on Terror’.

Sociological approaches to the study of borders have largely been divorced from notions of race and empire. In this vein, mainstream studies of Danish bordering practices center paradigms of ‘integration and immigration’ rather than racial regimes of power, and bifurcate internal and external securitized and militarized regimes of power. Such accounts reinscribe dominant epistemologies of ‘Danish innocence’, its mythologies of social welfare egalitarianism and democracy, and invisibilize past and present forms of empire. This tendency can be seen as symptomatic of what Julian Go (2016) calls the ‘analytic bifurcations’ of social theory, which conceptually divide of ‘metropole’ and ‘colony’, ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’, ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘then’ and ‘now’. Within this ‘imperial episteme,’ the development of European phenomena are conceived separately from their colonial entanglements (Go, 2016). Methodologically nationalist approaches conceptually sever foreign and domestic forms of policing and state violence. Instead, transnational feminist approaches to the study of security regimes offer a methodology of overcome such methodological nationalism by tracing to infrastructures of power across space and time. The paper shows how attention the lives and struggles of subjectivist populations implicated in the Danish ‘War on Terror’ reveals imperial entanglements and continuities. Drawing on anti-colonial thinkers like W.E. Du Bois and Aime Cesaire, who theorize the colony and metropole together, the paper explores possibilities for moving beyond the imperial episteme in sociological inquiry.