The United Kingdom: Intersectional perspectives

The construction of nation-states itself is a process establishing hierarchies based on some degree of centralization of power (Shantz and Williams 2013), in few nation-states is this more true than in the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom at its height in early 1939 included territories ranging from North America to Oceania, islands in the Pacific to Africa, and everywhere in between (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2020). Today, the United Kingdom includes England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, as well as territories in the Mediterranean and Caribbean, with most former colonies retaining ties to the United Kingdom through the Commonwealth system (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2020). On a fundamental level, the establishment of the British Empire could not have been established without the use of violence, the enforcement of English chauvanism, and the use of violent extraction to fund imperial and colonial ventures. It would not have been possible to maintain an empire centered in London with such a great extent without the use of violence, and the fact that the British empire engaged in genocidal acts in many of its territories is common knowledge. What is not common knowledge, however, is the ways in which English chauvanism, nationalism, and longing for empire continue to manifest and cause harm to minoritized peoples in the United Kingdom (Andreescu 2019; Breazu and McGarry 2023; Eby 2022; Rzepnikowska 2019; Swami et al. 2018).

The concept of the nation-state can be theorized as an institutionalized imagined community formed on the basis of the belief that the groups contained within share something in common (Marcussen et al. 1999). This integration of the idea of a ‘nation’ to the idea of a state would also require the acknowledgement of the legitimized use of power by institutions of that state as a means to maintain its continued existence and function (Weber 1922). While Weber’s (1922) notion of the state having a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence is useful to understand the actions of imperial nation-states from an institutional perspective, his work becomes problematic when analyzing coloniality and imperialism through an intersectional and critical lens. While the actions of the British Empire may have been acting within the rules established by the British Colonial system (Black 2018; Lange, Mahoney, and Vom Hau 2006; Marcussen et al. 1999) these structures were in no way legitimate to the people who were victims of the imperial system (Bhambra 2022; Black 2018). The institutions of British colonialism, both historic and contemporary neocolonialism, continue to have a role in funding British national programs (Bhambra 2022), which continues the legacy of British colonialism to the current day. Though this continuation of the effects of the British colonial system are invisibilized, it is necessary to examine and recenter the effects these systems have on racialized and minoritized communities through the lens of a Queer Sociology (Moussawi and Vidal‐Ortiz 2020) and an anti-authoritarian lens (Shantz and Williams 2013).

The structure of British academia itself was an active participant in colonial operations (Steinmetz 2013), acting as a force to not only administer colonial governments (Steinmetz 2013), but also to impose ontologies from the Global North regarding gender and sexuality (Banerjee and Connell 2018). Though this structure is debatably no longer directly involved in the administration of British Colonies, the continued longing for Empire identified by Virdee and McGeever (2020), as a driving cause for supporting the Leave Campaign during the ‘Brexit Referendum’, can be seen clearly in a 2006 paper by Lange et al. titled “Colonialism and Development: A comparative Analysis of Spanish and British Colonies” (Lange et al. 2006). This argues a number of times that the British system of colonialism had positive effects in colonies relative to the Spanish system, most clearly on page 1442: “British Rule also had positive legacies in several directly ruled colonies” (Lange et al. 2006:1442). While there are certainly other examples of British academic institutions publishing material that is favorable to colonial systems, this example highlights a desire to minimize the damage done by British colonialism, which gives an indication of a norm within the British academy that the member of the British academic in-group is one that has nostalgia for, or is in some way supportive of, the British Empire. While there is a discussion to be had on the role of British academic institutions in suppressing pro-Palestinian speech, and the pension investments at institutions investing in arms manufacturers such as BAE systems, but such a discussion is beyond the scope of this paper.

The effects of the British colonial system are not felt homogeneously, and intersecting identities create varied experiences of these systems (Alexander-Floyd 2012; Collins 2019). In this context, applying Intersectionality as a form of critical inquiry though its use as a metaphor, described by Collins (2019), is useful here. Understanding the intersection between different identities within a colonial system is not possible when examining only, for example, race or gender (Collins 2019). Building upon the work of Crenshaw and Hall, Collins (2019) discusses the ways that the metaphor of the intersection clarifies abstract concepts like intersecting and interlinking matrixes of power that inflict harm based upon the ways that a subject’s identities intersect. It should be noted that this does not mean that the harms are caused by a subject’s identities, but rather they experience harms caused by institutions at the intersection of these identities. The harms, racism and sexism for example, are caused by institutions vilifying a given identity and using institutional power to inflict harm. Institutions within this model can then be understood as structures of hierarchies, which in turn manufacture nebulous relationships of domination, which themselves intersect and generate patterns of inequality that are experienced through the lens of a subject’s intersecting identities (Shantz and Williams 2013). The British colonial system has many examples of this, but of particular note now is the structural racism against Palestinians in the British Colonial System.

Prior to the end of the first world war, the British government formed an agreement with France to determine what the borders of the Arabian peninsula would look like following the fall of the Ottoman Empire (Fitzgerald 1994). The Sykes-Picot agreement, ratified in May of 1916, saw Britain gaining colonial territory in what is modern day Israel, Gaza, and The West Bank (Fitzgerald 1994). Following the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, in November of 1917 Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour issued a declaration in support of forming a “National Home for the Jewish People” (Page 2016:4) in Palestine. Both the Sykes-Picot agreement and the Balfour declaration serve as examples of the United Kingdom engaging in forms of imperialism in the Arabian Peninsula, most specifically in Palestine, with agreements to Palestinians being violated by the construction of the declaration to create a “National Home” in Palestine (Mathew 2013). More than one hundred years later, the colonial project of the State of Israel has seen countless human rights violations committed against Palestinians (Adhikary and Chatterjee 2022; Masudi 2022) with the support of western countries, including British partnerships with Israel (Government of the United Kingdom 2024). The partnership between Israel and the United Kingdom is an indication of a relationship of domination, with the United Kingdom party to the government of Israel which is undertaking the violence committed against Palestinians identified by Adhikary & Chatterjee (2022) and Masudi (2022). The colonized status of Palestinians is of note when looking at institutional action against Palestinians in the United Kingdom, with Palestinians facing censorship (English 2023; Louz 2023; Renton 2024) and increased policing (Hunter 2023). The construction of the Palestinian identity as a threat by British institutions intersects with other structures of Heteropatriarchy and racial capitalism, leaving many Palestinians in the United Kingdom at the intersection of many marginalized identities, and facing patterns of inequality in intensified ways as a result.

Within British discourses, there is a trend towards constructing a national identity in opposition to an out group, with heavy emphasis placed on proximity to whiteness (Leidig 2019). However, British Nationalism does not inherently require whiteness to be considered a member of the in-group, with Leidig (2019) identifying that a nationalist movement Indians in the United Kingdom supported the nationalist project of Brexit and found allies in far-right nationalist organizations such as the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and the English Defense League (EDL). This construction of British Identity as a combination of membership in a shared cultural identity, but also as membership in a nationalist project that opposes an otherized group constructed as dangerous (Leidig 2019). This can be seen in discourses that present Roma in the UK as dangerous (Breazu and McGarry 2023; Eby 2022; McGarry 2017), the presentation of eastern Europeans as dangerous to the British economy (Andreescu 2019; Rzepnikowska 2019), and the previously discussed discourses regarding Palestinians. Discursive institutions in the UK can be understood, then, to construct the identity of “British” as an ethno-pluralist group that seeks to maintain patterns of inequality within marginalized communities. This is done through the reinforcement of relationships of domination, for example institutional discourses regarding out-group identities, which in turn uphold structures of hierarchy, such as the institution of the state or the system of racial capitalism. Processes of xeno-racism, described by (Rzepnikowska 2019) as a form of racism that not only constructs out-group identities as lesser based on ‘race’ but also categorizes otherized peoples simultaneously as ‘lesser’ and a ‘threat, are structures that uphold relationships of domination that uphold the system of British Ethno-pluralist forms of nationalism. These structures and processes construct a notion that the ideal British Citizen has proximity to the structure of whiteness, while also engaging in hostilities towards a racialized other that is treated as the current, dominant threat by discursive institutions. At time of writing, this also includes support for the State of Israel, while engaging in racism against Palestinians.

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