CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Jannack, Patricia |
|---|---|
| Title | How to Keep Your Institution White: Whiteness in the World Bank's Anti-Racism Rhetoric |
| Summary | Whiteness as the dominant racial identity remains the normality and creates racialized hierarchies in society and the international political system. International Organizations, like the World Bank with 187 member states and operations mainly in African states, have long been criticized for their Eurocentrism and internal racial discrimination. But how do racial hierarchies of power in institutions survive amid popular anti-racism uprisings? This thesis argues that the World Bank is a White institutional space in which Whiteness, a system of structural privileges, enables the World Bank to systematically subordinate Blacks, Indigenous and People of Color. Thus, the World Bank’s discourse on its recently implemented anti-racism efforts is analyzed through a reflexive Foucaultian thematic analysis. The results are six discursive mechanisms that function to reproduce the Bank as an exclusive White institutional space: Merging race in a broader discrimination frame, centering the state in measurements of diversity, claiming neutrality and objectivity through meritocracy, silencing the discussion of racism, relying on individual anti-racism measures, and depending on voluntarism and non-interference. These mechanisms help White institutions to make superficial, individual anti-racism measures sound reasonable while ignoring any structural causes of inequalities. |
| Supervisor | Merlingen, Michael |
| Department | International Relations MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/jannack_patricia.pdf |
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