Imperial Realism

This open issue of Critical Ethnic Studies (CES) arrives in the midst of both spectacular displays of US imperial violence and highly public attacks against university ethnic and gender studies departments and programs. Although extralegal assassinations and unprovoked bombing campaigns remain commonplace in the long history of US militarist empire, an aura of exceptionality surrounds them in the current conjuncture. In the United States’ collusion with Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and broader quest to secure a regional monopoly on violence, the deep affinities between late liberalism and late fascism have both become fully unmasked. “Imperial realism” has dissolved all inhibitions. In quick succession, the United States conducted military strikes on fishing boats in the Caribbean; bombed Venezuela and kidnapped its president; threatened to conquer Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal; and launched a war on Iran and Lebanon with Israel, killing the Iranian leader and displacing an estimated one million people in Lebanon.1 The violence appears all the more sadistic because it is undertaken without appeal to the liberal common sense of “peaceful violence.”2 If the “realpolitik” of US Cold War interventionism seems consistent with the ideological justifications of the present militarism, the open racism of today’s US foreign policy is less so. The vile language used by Donald Trump to characterize African countries as premodern and to construct South Africa as persecuting Afrikaners as a white minority departs considerably from earlier US diplomatic claims about the supposed humanitarian or democratic norms observed in the West.3 Whether the current escalation of naked aggression is symbolic of US imperial decline or a segue into world war, the mission of CES to address the transnational continuities between racism and militarist state violence has never felt so urgent and yet so under threat.

If the Cold War version of US imperial realism involved an aggressive nationalism that claimed to pragmatically (i.e., nonmoralistically) defend the democratic dispensation at home, perhaps one of the most significant developments of the Trump era has been to thoroughly subject domestic institutions to the same logic of rule by force. On the domestic front, Trump deployed masked ICE agents to US cities to terrorize and abduct undocumented residents and kill protesters.4 Intensified levels of ideological repression have descended onto university campuses, resulting in the termination of noncompliant faculty and departments alike.5 Trans and gender-nonconforming people have been the target of merciless attacks and health-care denial, while DEI has been weaponized to sanction and punish critical speech on Israel or Zionism.6 Under imperial realism, the state has been reduced to its coercive function. As Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told reporters after the United States’ attack on Venezuela, “We live in a world, in the real world . . . that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”7 To rationalize, defend, or apologize is to exhibit weakness, wokeness.

The invocation of terrorism and state enemies discourses reflects the ongoing racialization of dissent that opens critical ethnic studies to a broader global horizon for thinking about relations of power and struggles for liberation. The compulsory loyalty to the United States and Israel in wars on Iran and Lebanon are connected to attacks on DEI, critical race studies, and “wokeism” more broadly. These follow longer histories in which the use of abstract antidiscrimination discourse—divorced from any structural interpretation of the relations of power—has targeted even modest legal and institutional gains. The logic of white injury has animated attacks on critical race theory, ethnic studies, and DEI in the United States, both in national discussions of universities and in state-level debates over the teaching of ethnic studies in primary and secondary schools in California and Arizona.8 In turn, state politicians moved to establish stronger statewide standards and control over content, especially in the name of Jewish students constructed as threatened by knowledge of Palestinian liberation struggles. In more recent US national struggles, we see the destructive effects of using such abstracted notions of discrimination to diminish place-based knowledge production and local organization of curricula in order to conform to the federal attack on ethnic studies and ultimately justify federal and state intervention into education writ large.9

Liberal political organizations have in some cases contributed to these attacks. Prior to Trump’s election, US-based Zionist organizations successfully pushed universities, including in states with Democratic elected leadership, to reverse campus free speech guidelines. As a basis of their campaign, Zionists mobilized Title VI civil rights complaints as a justification for silencing even minor criticisms of Israel, now characterized as discrimination against Jewish students.10 Following this playbook, in Seattle and California, South Asian diasporic groups aligned with Hindu nationalism have challenged the inclusion of caste as both a keyword in ethnic studies and as a protected category in workplace and university civil rights guidelines, arguing it reflects an emerging “Hinduphobia” akin to antisemitism.11 Since Trump’s reelection, the strategic redeployment of antidiscrimination has intensified, captured in the “Dear Colleague” letter issued to school administrators by the acting assistant secretary of the US Office for Civil Rights in 2024.12 The letter admonished universities for engaging in “pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences” and for “toxically indoctrinat[ing] students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’ and advanced discriminatory policies and practices.” Many universities preemptively complied, quickly erasing DEI programs and activating new forms of campus policing.

There is also the notorious case of Columbia University, which, as part of an effort to address allegations of antisemitism on campus, placed the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Program in what functionally amounts to receivership in the interest of supposedly balancing political speech.13 The notion that universities are “woke” spaces replete with areas of study that produce inequality, inefficiency, and discrimination fueled portrayals of an out-of-control sector unable to self-govern—one that required outside intervention. As of early 2026, the Department of Education has announced its intent to promulgate new rules on university accreditation that will require universities to end diversity fellowships, scrutinize race-related curricula, and otherwise exert control over university operations.14

This approach not only attempts to tear down universities as quasi-independent institutions but also uses universities to justify hardline immigration policy. The disturbing examples of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s targeting of student activists, echoing earlier uses of extrajudicial detention to quell speech such as Japanese internment and the post-9/11 USA Patriot Act, have been key coercive means for stifling dissent. Following the existing use of social media monitoring by the Israeli government to politically target Palestinians and Palestinian solidarity activists at its borders, the US government began deporting international students for speaking out about the genocide or having ties to Islam. In retaliation, the repression has been swift and brutal: As many as 1,700 student visas have been revoked, international students and faculty have been disappeared and placed in deportation proceedings, and some US-born faculty have been suspended, fired, or publicly blacklisted for any expression of solidarity with Palestinians.15

We note with particular concern recent efforts to abolish ethnic studies and gender studies in the state of Texas. In October 2025, Texas Christian University announced that the Women’s and Gender Studies Department and the Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies Department would be abolished and faculty moved to other departments.16 Major actions at the public universities soon followed. Campuses began to implement wide-ranging restrictions based on a new systemwide policy barring courses that “advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.”17 In January 2025, in a move that attracted national attention, Texas A&M University not only ended its curriculum in women and gender studies but also censored the syllabi of hundreds of courses that included content on race.18 By February 2025, the University of Texas at Austin announced that American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Mexican American and Latino Studies, and African and African Diaspora Studies would be merged into a single Department of Social and Cultural Analysis.19

While the restrictions and departmental closures in states like Texas and Florida have attracted particular notoriety, interinstitutional conversations within ethnic studies and women’s studies have also had to grapple with how attacks on our fields have been shaped by federal education policy, our own administrations’ anticipatory obedience to such policy, and a feeling that the end of ethnic and gender studies is a fait accompli. Many well-intentioned colleagues and critics of the fascistic attacks on ethnic studies and gender studies have reached out to our departments to note that faculty would be welcome to join English, history, sociology, or other departments in the event of forced closure of interdisciplinary units, which have often been more recently established or established after prolonged student activist campaigns. Such suggestions reflect the broader logic of preemptive compliance. Instead of a broad-based front against the current changes, such disciplines, should they themselves survive, may experience at least short-term gains from the Trump assault on ethnic studies and gender studies. This is not only because some tenure lines could, theoretically, be moved back to the disciplines but also because some disciplinary departments like English tend to cannibalize interdisciplinary studies without insisting on the concomitant political education and interdisciplinary or antidisciplinary methods that the fields require. This has raised important concerns about the fate of interdisciplinarity that are distinct from broader concerns about threats to disciplinary-based humanistic study posed by calls to determine the value of education by return on investment or other entrepreneurial logics.

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As editors we are committed to carrying forward the work of CES as a collective critical project devoted to socially engaged scholarship, political education, and timely discussions of social, political, and economic crises on a global scale. As such, several articles in this open issue of CES attempt to capture the varied scales, geographies, and institutional sites in which local and global communities have been grappling with the various assaults of the second Trump presidency. At the same time, the issue avoids exceptionalizing the attacks of the Trump administration or of other autocratic leaders like Narendra Modi or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan against knowledge and activism that challenges social power, militarism, and environmental destruction.

Even as world leaders now characterize “the international rules-based order” as “partially false,” as a system “that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient,” the regime of imperial dependency that this order cultivated has left a trail of corruption and immiseration.20 In particular, the opportunistic terms on which Trump’s administration defunded foreign humanitarian aid require careful interrogation. We highlight a new “Dispatches” segment in this open issue, which offers precisely this kind of nimble, timely assessment on the dissolution of USAID in Afghanistan, Colombia, and India. Together these authors clarify how the violence of humanitarian intervention is exercised through the accountability vacuum it manipulates. As Faisal Devji reminds us, “Humanitarianism is accountable only upward, to an organization’s donors and stakeholders or a foreign government, instead of downward to its beneficiaries.”21 In their dispatches, Wesley Attewell, Maria Ximena Abello-Hurtado, and Sayan Bhattacharya underscore how the dismantling of USAID neither remedies the vulnerability it exploited and profited from nor undoes the dirty work of empire carried out under the cover of humanitarianism or securitization. Rather than echo liberal pleas to restore USAID, these authors amplify the need to engage in dialectical rather than binaristic assessments of imperial institutions and their demise.

Essays in this issue also reflect on the politics of archival memory in Arab American studies (Sarah M. A. Gualtieri); the critical potential of “brownness” in Palestinian American Mo Amer’s comedy (Rebecca Kumar and Fernando Esquivel-Suarez); regimes of racialized and gendered disablement in the construction of the Panama Canal (Danielle LaPlace); the mobilization of ethnonationalist and racist diasporas to curtail academic freedom on the subject of Palestine (Sherene H. Razack); and the complex intersectional challenges that emerge in the institutionalization of ethnic study across fields and areas of study at the university (Kathryn Bond Stockton and Eng-Beng Lim). The “Political Education Document” section, curated by Divana Olivas, centers on 450 Years of Chicano History in Pictures, a volume that provides an account of racism within a broader imperial history of the United States, reflecting the type of historical approaches to ethnic studies that have faced censorship in attacks on public school ethnic studies curricula.22 This section also includes an interview with Joaquín Luján of the Chicano Communications Center.

In the difficult political and institutional contexts we face, it is vital to nurture scholarship on racism’s connections to topics including empire, militarism, policing, and capitalism in ways that nurture a breadth of critical approaches. This means cultivating work that is engaged with efforts toward social change inside and beyond the academy and grapples with difficult transnational and cross-community questions about the obstacles to and futures of antiracist solidarity. In our efforts to defend our field, it is vital to not lose the critical edge of Critical Ethnic Studies, insisting as we do on the ability of scholarship to enable the reflection necessary for social change.