Children of War and Prejudice: Security as Pacification South of the Arctic

This article argues that Iceland's wartime 'Situation' (Ástandið), the expansive moral and administrative apparatus erected to govern relationships between Icelandic women and Allied soldiers during and after the Second World War, was a foundational project of pacification through which Iceland consolidated itself as a white security state. Approaching security as social war (Neocleous, 2025) alongside Veblen's analysis of pecuniary culture and trained incapacity (Veblen, 2008), the article demonstrates how eugenic anxieties about a fragile Icelandic 'racial stock' (kynstofn) underpinned gendered surveillance, emergency legislation, forced medical examination, and carceral confinement targeting working-class young women. A state-negotiated colour bar, rooted in Prime Minister Jónasson's 1941 demand for 'white troops only' and institutionalised in secret provisions of the 1951 US–Iceland Defence Agreement, inserted Iceland into a militarised global apartheid (Besteman, 2019; 2020). Children born of these relationships, ástandsbörn, were marked as racially liminal through naming practices and community ostracism, extending pacification across generations as a form of necropolitical governance over kinship and futurity (Mbembe, 2003). Connecting these histories to contemporary moral panics over 'migrant predators', DNA collection proposals targeting non-EEA residents, and violent protest policing, the article argues that governing rationalities forged during Ástandið persist in a spectral pacification of racialised migrants and dissenting citizens. Mobilising critical conversations on culture, security, and white supremacy, the article positions Iceland as a formative site for critical race inquiry.