Empire must keep reworking itself and can fail to secure racial regimes

Evidence

Fifth, empire must constantly reconfigure strategy and battle to win hearts and minds both domestically and internationally. Empire is not a cemented structure but a process; it relies on racism to reproduce itself. Moreover, empire does not automatically produce or secure exploitative and exclusionary racial regimes. This is what explains in large part why “race” is constantly shifting and evolving; why there are projects of race making, unmaking, and remaking. It is not enough therefore to simply state that empire is the crucible of anti-Muslim racism; it is necessary to explain why, how, and when. The imperial terrain on which races are made and unmade is unstable, and our task as scholars is to make sense of how various contingent factors come together at certain moments to produce races but to also to undo particular racial configurations. As scholar-activist A. Sivanandan put it, racism “does not stay still; it changes shape, size, contours, purpose, function—with changes in the economy, the social structure, the system and, above all, the challenges, the resistances to that system.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 105

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This is the book’s core mechanism-level claim for why the loop can break: empire is process-dependent, racial regimes are contingent outcomes that must be actively secured, and resistance is a causal input — the precise anti-coupling machinery the reader’s MOC gap calls for.
• XREF: connects to: Empire is a contingent process that reproduces itself through shifting racism. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 93; Empire is a mutable structure that keeps reconfiguring race.; Empire alone does not automatically generate racial regimes. (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Race is not fixed but is perpetually reinvented through historical conflict #corroborates (0.88) — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 9
• Racial formation is an unstable process transformed by political struggle #corroborates (0.85) — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1691
• Imperialism’s tactics return to undermine the imperial nation itself. #corroborates (0.82) — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 991
• A coherent imperial ideology need not produce effective rule #corroborates (0.80)
• Racial states destabilize the very order they seek to impose #corroborates (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1729
• Colonial racial superiority must be actively believed to be maintained #corroborates (0.78) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 102