Volk Theory: Prejudice, Racism, and German Foreign Policy Before and Under Hitler

Abstract

Drawing on John Duckitt’s dual-process model of prejudice, we hypothesize that there are two primary types of racial prejudice, biological and symbolic-cultural, and that these are associated with particular ideological outlooks—dangerous and competitive world beliefs, respectively—that might substantially affect foreign policy. Biological racism is associated with a materialistic understanding of the world as a zero-sum struggle for scarce resources, symbolic-cultural racism with a conception of the world as filled with threats that must be dealt with through the creation of national cohesion and conformity. The dual-process framework makes sense of the differences between Wilhelmine and Nazi foreign policy and puts race at the heart of the contrast, most clearly seen in the treatment of the same conquered Eastern European territory during World War I and World War II. Our approach puts individual-level variation in the degree and type of prejudice front and center, something generally overlooked in critical approaches.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the participants and discussants at the Race and International Security Workshop hosted virtually at the University of Chicago in February 2022, as well as the editors of Security Studies and two anonymous reviewers.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 For an exception, see Zoltán I. Búzás, “The Color of Threat: Race, Threat Perception, and the Demise of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902–1923),” Security Studies 22, no. 4 (October–December 2013): 573–606.

2 Meera Sabaratnam, “Is IR Theory White? Racialised Subject-Positioning in Three Canonical Texts,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 49, no. 1 (September 2020): 3–31; Errol A. Henderson, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism in International Relations Theory,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26, no. 1 (2013): 71–92; Aaron Beers Sampson, “Tropical Anarchy: Waltz, Wendt, and the Way We Imagine International Politics,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 27, no. 4 (October–December 2002): 429–57; Randolph B. Persaud and R. B. J. Walker, “Apertura: Race in International Relations,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 26, no. 4 (October–December 2001): 373–76.

3 Bernadette Park and Charles M. Judd, “Rethinking the Link between Categorization and Prejudice within the Social Cognition Perspective,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 9, no. 2 (May 2005): 108–30; Joshua Correll et al., “Measuring Prejudice, Stereotypes and Discrimination,” in The SAGE Handbook of Prejudice, Stereotyping and Discrimination, ed. John F. Dovidio et al. (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2010), 45–62.

4 John Duckitt, “A Dual-Process Cognitive-Motivational Theory of Ideology and Prejudice,” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 33, ed. Mark P. Zanna (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2001), 41–113.

5 Tage S. Rai, Piercarlo Valdesolo, and Jesse Graham, “Dehumanization Increases Instrumental Violence, but Not Moral Violence,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 32 (8 August 2017): 8511–16.

6 Donald R. Kinder and David O. Sears, “Prejudice and Politics: Symbolic Racism versus Racial Threats to the Good Life,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 40, no. 3 (March 1981): 414.

7 The term “Volk” can be translated as “people,” but this does not do justice to its usage and connotations. Germans have another word, Leute, that captures the English conception of people. Volk is often translated as “folk,” which does a better job of capturing the term’s intention of defining a distinct people.

8 John Duckitt et al., “The Psychological Bases of Ideology and Prejudice: Testing a Dual Process Model,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83, no. 1 (July 2002): 75; John Duckitt, “Differential Effects of Right Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation on Outgroup Attitudes and Their Mediation by Threat from and Competitiveness to Outgroups,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 32, no. 5 (May 2006): 684–96.

9 Duckitt, “Dual-Process Cognitive-Motivational Theory of Ideology and Prejudice,” in Zanna, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 33:84.

10 Duckitt, “Dual-Process Cognitive-Motivational Theory of Ideology and Prejudice,” in Zanna, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 33:69–70.

11 Bob Altemeyer, “The Other ‘Authoritarian Personality,’” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 30, ed. Mark P. Zanna (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1998), 47–92.

12 Felicia Pratto et al., “Social Dominance Orientation: A Personality Variable Predicting Social and Political Attitudes,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67, no. 4 (October 1994): 741.

13 Pratto et al., “Social Dominance Orientation,” 741.

14 Duckitt, “Dual-Process Cognitive-Motivational Theory of Ideology and Prejudice,” in Zanna, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 33:59.

15 Duckitt, “Dual-Process Cognitive-Motivational Theory of Ideology and Prejudice,” in Zanna, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 33:86.

16 John Duckitt and Chris G. Sibley, “Right Wing Authoritarianism, Social Dominance Orientation and the Dimensions of Generalized Prejudice,” European Journal of Personality 21, no. 2 (March 2007): 120.

17 Duckitt and Sibley, “Right Wing Authoritarianism, Social Dominance Orientation and the Dimensions of Generalized Prejudice,” 120.

18 Bart Duriez and Alain Van Hiel, “The March of Modern Fascism: A Comparison of Social Dominance Orientation and Authoritarianism,” Personality and Individual Differences 32, no. 7 (May 2002): 1199–1213.

19 Srdjan Vucetic, The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 7.

20 Vucetic, Anglosphere, 7. See also Bianca Freeman, D. G. Kim, and David A. Lake, “Race in International Relations: Beyond the ‘Norm against Noticing,’” Annual Review of Political Science 25 (2022): 180; Henderson, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” 76.

21 Jerry Kang, “Trojan Horses of Race,” Harvard Law Review 118, no. 5 (March 2005): 1489–1593.

22 Alain Van Hiel and Ivan Mervielde, “Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation: Relationships with Various Forms of Racism,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 35, no. 11 (November 2005): 2326.

23 Duckitt, “Dual-Process Cognitive-Motivational Theory of Ideology and Prejudice,” in Zanna, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 33:70.

24 Duckitt and Sibley, “Right Wing Authoritarianism, Social Dominance Orientation and the Dimensions of Generalized Prejudice,” 120.

25 Kinder and Sears, “Prejudice and Politics,” 414.

26 Van Hiel and Mervielde, “Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation,” 2327.

27 Correll et al., “Measuring Prejudice, Stereotypes and Discrimination,” in Dovidio et al., SAGE Handbook of Prejudice, Stereotyping and Discrimination.

28 Eric J. Hamilton and Brian C. Rathbun, “Scarce Differences: Toward a Material and Systemic Foundation for Offensive and Defensive Realism,” Security Studies 22, no. 3 (July–September 2013): 436–65.

29 Richard W. Maass argues that racism, often of the biological kind, actually led American leaders to restrain their territorial ambitions due to a felt inability to absorb racially different populations. However, the endpoint of American “manifest destiny” was not modest, involving as it did one of the largest territorial expansions in world history at the expense, even the genocide, of Native American populations. Maass, The Picky Eagle: How Democracy and Xenophobia Limited U.S. Territorial Expansion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020).

30 Duckitt and Sibley, “Right Wing Authoritarianism, Social Dominance Orientation and the Dimensions of Generalized Prejudice,” 115.

31 Susan Opotow, “Moral Exclusion and Injustice: An Introduction,” Journal of Social Issues 46, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 1–20; Daniel Bar-Tal, Shared Beliefs in a Society: Social Psychological Analysis (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2000).

32 Nick Haslam, “Dehumanization: An Integrative Review,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 10, no. 3 (August 2006): 252.

33 Duckitt, “Dual-Process Cognitive-Motivational Theory of Ideology and Prejudice,” in Zanna, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 33.

34 Haslam, “Dehumanization,” 258.

35 Rai, Valdesolo, and Graham, “Dehumanization Increases Instrumental Violence, but Not Moral Violence,” 8511. See also Benjamin A. Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).

36 Albert Bandura et al., “Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement in the Exercise of Moral Agency,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71, no. 2 (August 1996): 364.

37 Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 509.

38 Altemeyer, “Other ‘Authoritarian Personality,’” in Zanna, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 30.

39 Rai, Valdesolo, and Graham, “Dehumanization Increases Instrumental Violence, but Not Moral Violence,” 8511. See also Alan Page Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai, Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

40 Peter Liberman, “An Eye for an Eye: Public Support for War against Evildoers,” International Organization 60, no. 3 (July 2006): 687–722; Brian C. Rathbun and Rachel Stein, “Greater Goods: Morality and Attitudes toward the Use of Nuclear Weapons,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 64, no. 5 (May 2020): 787–816.

41 Daniel Philpott, Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

42 Altemeyer, “Other ‘Authoritarian Personality,’” in Zanna, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 30.

43 Duckitt, “Dual-Process Cognitive-Motivational Theory of Ideology and Prejudice,” in Zanna, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 33: 53.

44 Phia Salter and Glenn Adams, “Toward a Critical Race Psychology,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 7, no. 11 (November 2013): 785.

45 Persaud and Walker, “Apertura,” 374.

46 Glenn Adams and Phia S. Salter, “A Critical Race Psychology Is Not Yet Born,” Connecticut Law Review 43, no. 5 (July 2011): 1358.

47 Sabaratnam, “Is IR Theory White?,” 7.

48 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).

49 John M. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760–2010 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 5. See the discussion in the conclusion as well.

50 Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, eds., Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013).

51 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387–409.

52 Philip E. Tetlock, “Social Psychology and World Politics,” in Handbook of Social Psychology, vol. 1, 4th ed., ed. Daniel T. Gilbert, Susan T. Fiske, and Gardner Lindzey (New York, McGraw Hill, 1998), 870–82.

53 Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists.

54 Dale C. Copeland, The Origins of Major War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 119.

55 Copeland, Origins of Major War, 120.

56 Jeffrey W. Legro, Rethinking the World: Great Power Strategies and International Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 84.

57 Legro, Rethinking the World, 86.

58 Legro, Rethinking the World, 88.

59 Legro, Rethinking the World, 97.

60 Frederick C. Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 238; Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), xii. Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, trans. David Maisel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

61 George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grossett & Dunlap, 1964), xiii.

62 Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair, xiii; Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism, 235.

63 Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism, 287.

64 Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 287.

65 Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League (Boston: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), 234.

66 Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German, 234.

67 Richard Weikart, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 5.

68 “Tageskampf oder Schicksalkampf” [Daily struggle or fateful struggle], 3 March 1928, in Adolf Hitler, Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen [hereafter RSA]: Februar 1925 bis Januar 1933 [Speeches, writing, orders: February 1925 to January 1933] (Munich: Saur, 1992–2003), 346. Available online at https://www.degruyter.com/view/db/hitq. See also Adolf Hitler, Hitlers zweites Buch: Ein Dokument aus dem Jahr 1928 [Hitler’s second book: A document from 1928] (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1961), 47.

69 Hitler, Hitlers zweites Buch, 46.

70 “Appel an die deutsche Kraft” [Appeal to German power], 4 August 1929, in RSA, 346.

71 “Tageskampf oder Schicksalkampf,” in RSA, 728.

72 “Die soziale Sendung des Nationalsozialismus” [The social mission of National Socialism], 19 December 1925, in RSA, 258.

73 “Der Nationalsozialismus als Weltanschauung, der Marxismus ein Wahnsinn!” [National Socialism as worldview, Marxism insanity!], 2 April 1927, in RSA, 229.

74 “Was ist Nationalsozialismus?” [What is National Socialism?], 6 August 1927, in RSA, 440.

75 Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German, 234, 243.

76 Weikart, Hitler’s Ethic, 5.

77 James Joll and Gordon Martel, Origins of the First World War, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2007), 273–75. See also Stephen Van Evera, “The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War,” International Security 9, no. 1 (Summer 1984): 58–107.

78 Gretchen E. Schafft, From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).

79 Woodruff D. Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 153; Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German, 238.

80 Smith, Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism, 146.

81 Eley, Reshaping the German Right, 186–87.

82 Hitler, Hitlers zweites Buch, 65.

83 Hans Staudinger, The Inner Nazi: A Critical Analysis of Mein Kampf, ed. Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 47.

84 Hitler, Hitlers zweites Buch, 47; Weikart, Hitler’s Ethic.

85 Gerhard L. Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany: Starting World War II, 1937–1939 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980): 47; Hitler, Hitlers zweites Buch, 46; “Tageskampf oder Schicksalkampf,” in RSA, 723; also “Was ist Nationalsozialismus?,” in RSA, 439.

86 “Was ist Nationalsozialismus?,” in RSA, 441.

87 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971 [1927]).

88 Hitler, Hitlers zweites Buch, 70.

89 Hitler, Hitlers zweites Buch, 78.

90 “Die soziale Sendung,” in RSA, 258; also “Appel an die deutsche Kraft,” in RSA, 349; Hitler, Hitlers zweites Buch, 53.

91 Hitler, Hitlers zweites Buch, 46.

92 “Tageskampf oder Schicksal,” in RSA, 723; Hitler, Hitlers zweites Buch, 54; “Zukunft oder Untergang” [Future or ruin], 6 March 1927, in RSA, 166; “20 millionen Deutsche zu viel” [Twenty million Germans too many], 7 May 1927, in RSA, 291.

93 “Tageskampf oder Schicksalkampf,” in RSA, 729.

94 Hitler, Hitlers zweites Buch, 163.

95 Hitler, Hitlers zweites Buch, 102; also Hitler, Mein Kampf, 140.

96 See, for a translation: “Nazi Party Platform,” US Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-party-platform.

97 Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German, 124.

98 Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German, 123.

99 Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German, 85–86.

100 Dan Reiter, How Wars End (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

101 Hans W. Gatzke, Germany’s Drive to the West (Drang nach Westen): A Study of Germany’s Western War Aims during the First World War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 39–47, 54; Smith, Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism, 177; Gordon A. Craig, Germany, 1866–1945 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1978), 360–63.

102 Heinrich Class, Zum deutschen Kriegsziel [On German war aims] (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1917), 8.

103 See the collection of documents expressing support for annexation in S. Grumbach, Das annexionistische Deutschland [Annexationist Germany] (Lausanne: Verlag payot, 1917).

104 Robert P. Grathwol, Stresemann and the DNVP: Reconciliation or Revenge in German Foreign Policy, 1924–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1980); Jon Jacobson, Locarno Diplomacy: Germany and the West, 1925–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015 [1972]).

105 Brian C. Rathbun, Diplomacy’s Value: Creating Security in 1920s Europe and the Contemporary Middle East (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014).

106 Copeland, Origins of Major War; Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).

107 Copeland, Origins of Major War, 119.

108 Hitler, Hitlers zweites Buch, 153.

109 Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler’s World View: A Blueprint for Power, trans. Herbert Arnold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 38.

110 Weinberg, Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany, 13.

111 Ian Kershaw, Hitler (New York: Longman, 1991), 28

112 Hitler, Hitlers zweites Buch, 87.

113 Hitler, Hitlers zweites Buch, 78.

114 Hitler, Hitlers zweites Buch, 121–22; also Hitler, Mein Kampf, 648, 652; Weinberg, Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany, 6.

115 “The Programme of the German National Peoples’ Party (DNVP),” arplan.org, https://arplan.org/2021/03/24/program-german-national-peoples-party-dnvp/.

116 Hitler, Mein Kampf, 177–78; also “Der Nationalsozialismus als Weltanschauung,” in RSA, 229.

117 “Tageskampf oder Schicksalkampf,” in RSA, 726; also “Zukunft oder Untergang,” in RSA, 727.

118 “Was ist Nationalsozialismus,” in RSA, 440.

119 Weinberg, Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany, 4.

120 Smith, Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism, 151.

121 Smith, Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism, 91.

122 Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German.

123 Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 47.

124 Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 95; Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 1941–1944 (Octagon Books, 1981), 21.

125 Erich Ludendorff, My War Memories, 1914–1918, vol. 1 (London: Hutchinson, 1919), 178.

126 Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front, 140.

127 Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front, 141.

128 Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front, 57.

129 Ludendorff, My War Memories, 179.

130 Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 141.

131 Liulevicius, German Myth of the East.

132 Liulevicius, German Myth of the East, 138.

133 Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front, 105; Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction, 47.

134 Ludendorff, My War Memories, 206.

135 Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction, 48.

136 Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front, 127.

137 Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction, 47.

138 Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction, 49.

139 Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction, 61.

140 Ludendorff, My War Memories, 203.

141 Ludendorff, My War Memories, 189.

142 Ludendorff, My War Memories, 206.

143 Ludendorff, My War Memories, 203–4.

144 Ludendorff, My War Memories, 122.

145 Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front, 119.

146 Hitler, Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 478.

147 Hitler, Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 57.

148 Hitler, Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 20.

149 Hitler, Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 39.

150 Liulevicius, German Myth of the East, 188.

151 Hitler, Hitlers zweites Buch, 78.

152 Hitler, Hitlers zweites Buch, 81.

153 Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front, 268.

154 Hitler, Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 57; see also 21.

155 See “Bericht über die Sitzung am 4.2.1942 bei Dr. Kleist über die Fragen der Eindeutschung” [Report on the meeting with Dr. Kleist on the question of Germanization on February 4, 1942], 293–96; and “Stellungnahme und Gedanken zum Generalplan Ost des Reichsführers SS” [Comments and thoughts on the General Plan for the East of the Reichsführers SS], 297–324; both in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 6, no. 3 (1958).

156 Liulevicius, German Myth of the East, 269.

157 “Dokument Nr. 3 (NO-2255),” in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 6, no. 3 (1958): 325.

158 Hitler, Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 57; also 384.

159 Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front, 268.

160 Liulevicius, German Myth of the East, 269.

161 “Denkschrift Himmlers über die Behandlung der Fremdvölkischen im Osten (Mai 1940),” [Himmler’s memo on the handling of foreign populations in the east] Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 5, no. 2 (1957): 194–98.

162 Hitler, Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 384.

163 Hitler, Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 57.

164 Hitler, Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 501.

165 Hitler, Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 478.

166 “Denkschrift Himmlers,” 197.

167 Hitler, Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 501.

168 Hitler, Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 57.

169 Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.”

170 John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993).

171 Hobson, Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, 5.

172 Hobson, Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, 12.

173 See, for instance, Persaud and Walker, “Apertura,” 374; Vucetic, Anglosphere, 7; Freeman, Kim, and Lake, “Race in International Relations,” 8; Henderson, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” 72; Zoltán I. Búzás conflates these into the first “racial diversity regime.” See Búzás, “Racism and Antiracism in the Liberal International Order,” International Organization 75, no. 2 (Spring 2021): 440–63, esp. 447. Sabaratnam refers only to “hierarchies of the human,” which can be based on numerous criteria. Sabaratnam, “Is IR Theory White?,” 5.

174 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (New York: Verso, 2002).

175 Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (London: Penguin UK, 2018).

176 Maass, Picky Eagle.

177 For a review, see Klaus Bachmann, Genocidal Empires: German Colonialism in Africa and the Third Reich (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018).

178 For descriptions of events, see Helmut Bley, South-West Africa under German Rule, 1894–1914, trans. and ed. Hugh Ridley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971); Jan-Bart Gewald, Herero Heroes: A Socio-political History of the Herero of Namibia, 1890–1923 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999).

179 Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 33.

180 Bley, South-West Africa under German Rule, 166.

181 Hull, Absolute Destruction, 64.

182 Gewald, Herero Heroes, 169; Hull, Absolute Destruction, 19, 64–65.

183 Hull, Absolute Destruction, chap. 1; Gewald, Herero Heroes; Bley, South-West Africa under German Rule; Bachmann, Genocidal Empires.

184 Von Trotha dismissed their pragmatic concerns about preserving the African population as a future workforce on German farms as sentimental. Bachmann, Genocidal Empires, 62–63; Gewald, Herero Heroes, 173–74. See also Hull, Absolute Destruction, 30, 59.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brian Rathbun

Brian Rathbun is a professor of political science and international relations at the University of Southern California.

Nina Srinivasan Rathbun

Nina Srinivasan Rathbun is a professor (teaching) of international relations at the University of Southern California.