Abstract

This chapter analyses the security implications of nationalism, racism, and xenophobia. Nationalism can foreground common identity and social cohesion but also exclusion and rejection. Nationalism then constitutes and legitimizes hierarchies as racism and xenophobia do. While racism as personal prejudice is easy to identify and critique, racism as a bigger and more pervasive social system is more resilient and adaptive—it also has deep impacts on institutions that affect who is secure and who is not secure. Xenophobia is related to racism but centres more obviously on negative views of human differences, whether it is those with another citizenship, culture, or religion. The chapter then considers three themes: nationalism and its transnational facets in an era of resurgent populism; racism as a structure of global politics with impacts on insecurity at a range of levels; and finally citizenship and the risks posed to it—and rights more broadly—by xenophobia.