In this paper, I address the shock that a group of African students went through when they were intensely racialised and subjected to racist violence by Ukrainian authorities during their flight from Ukraine following the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022. While they had normalised the various forms of racialisation in their daily lives during the pre-war period, as they were seen by ordinary Ukrainian citizens as culturally other and sometimes as wealthy African students, it came as a shock to them that their racial identity suddenly made them expendable when they were violently prevented to flee the country. Using the concept of "shock racialisation," I analyse the abrupt changes in the intensity of racialisation that signal shifts in the established racialised order during "shock mobilities" and show that race still plays a crucial biopolitical role in contemporary nation-states.
Ziga Podgornik Jakil
Publsihed online 20 October 2023
