International Security and Black Politics: A Biographical Note Toward an Institutional Critique

Abstract

In this afterword, I claim that the distance that sets apart the study of black politics and international security is neither neutral nor natural but crafted through racism. Using the biography of John Herz, alongside other scholars, I shed light on an intellectual tradition that treats black politics and international security as mutually constitutive phenomena. I demonstrate, however, that during the Cold War their study was fractured into two discrete institutional configurations. I claim that academic institutions are entangled in the curtailment of the black freedom struggle in the US. To orient security studies towards the challenge posed by Black Lives Matter might require no less than an institutional reconfiguration of the field.

Notes

1 Clifford L. Muse, “Howard University and U.S. Foreign Affairs During the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration, 1933-1945,” The Journal of African American History 87, no. 4 (2002): 409; Andrew Lawrence, “Interview with John Herz (1908-2005),” in The Return of the Theorists, ed. Richard Ned Lebow, Peter Schouten, and Hidemi Suganami (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 257.

2 “The Security Dilemma in International Relations: Background and Present Problems,” International Relations 17, no. 4 (December 1, 2003): 412.

3 See for example Sarah Samuels, “‘An Outstanding and Unusual Contribution’: The Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars,” Penn History Review 24, no. 2 (2019): 76.

4 Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb, From Swastika to Jim Crow: Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges (Malabar: Krieger Publishing, 1993), 77.

5 Lawrence, “Interview,” 257.

6 Muse, “Howard University and U.S. Foreign Affairs,” 403.

7 Muse, 409.

8 John H. Herz, Oral History, 1985, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn513666.

9 Lawrence, “Interview,” 258.

10 “The Security Dilemma in International Relations,” 413.

11 John H. Herz, “Power Politics and World Organization,” American Political Science Review 36, no. 6 (December 1942): 1050.

12 Muse, “Howard University and U.S. Foreign Affairs,” 407.

13 Edgcomb, From Swastika to Jim Crow, 80.

14 Herz, Oral History.

15 Lawrence, “Interview,” 258.

16 Lawrence, 257.

17 Charles E. Merriam, “The Meaning of Democracy,” The Journal of Negro Education 10, no. 3 (1941): 310.

18 Ralph J. Bunche, “The Negro in the Political Life of the United States,” The Journal of Negro Education 10, no. 3 (1941): 567.

19 Rayford W. Logan, “The Crisis of Democracy in the Western Hemisphere,” The Journal of Negro Education 10, no. 3 (1941): 344.

20 Bunche, “The Negro in Political Life,” 569.

21 Bunche, 569, 577.

22 Bunche, 578.

23 583.

24 Logan, “The Crisis of Democracy,” 351.

25 Bunche, “The Negro in Political Life,” 584.

26 Bunche, 583.

27 Merze Tate, “The War Aims of World War I and World War II and Their Relation to the Darker Peoples of the World,” The Journal of Negro Education 12, no. 3 (1943): 521–32.

28 John H. Herz, “Alternative Proposals to Democracy: Naziism,” The Journal of Negro Education 10, no. 3 (1941): 354.

29 357, 359.

30 365–66.

31 Douglass C. North, “Institutions,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 5, no. 1 (1991): 97–112.

32 See John H. Gunnell, Imagining the American Polity: Political Science and the Discourse of Democracy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).

33 Herz, “The Security Dilemma in International Relations,” 412; see also John H. Herz, “The National Socialist Doctrine of International Law and the Problems of International Organization,” Political Science Quarterly 54, no. 4 (1939): 412.

34 See Jessica Blatt, Race and the Making of American Political Science, 2018.

35 John H. Herz, “Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma,” World Politics 2, no. 2 (January 1950): 157–80.

36 John H. Herz, Political Realism and Political Idealism: A Study in Theories and Realities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 189.

37 190.

38 Herz’s engagement with Black politics preempts later work that applies the security dilemma to the domestic politics of post-colonial and post-imperial states. See e.g. Brian Job, ed., The Insecurity Dilemma: National Security of Third World States (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1992); Barry R. Posen, “The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict,” Survival: Global Politics and Strategy 35, no. 1 (1993): 27–47. I thank Errol Henderson for making this connection to me.

39 Herz, Oral History.

40 See in general Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011).

41 Charles King, “The Fullbright Paradox: Race and the Road to a New American Internationalism Essays,” Foreign Affairs 100, no. 4 (2021): 101.

42 Richard Seymour, “The Cold War, American Anticommunism and the Global ‘Colour Line,’” in Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line, ed. A. Anievas, N. Manchanda, and R. Shilliam (Abindgon: Routledge, 2015), 157–74; Charisse Burden-Stelly, “Constructing Deportable Subjectivity: Antiforeignness, Antiradicalism, and Antiblackness during the McCarthyist Structure of Feeling,” Souls 19, no. 3 (July 3, 2017): 342–58.

43 See Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

44 Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 159.

45 See Kathleen Cleaver, “Racism, Fascism, and Political Murder,” The Black Panther 2, no. 6 (1968): 8.

46 The term is taken from Ronald Walters: “Editors’ Interview with Ronald Walters,” in Black Politics in a Time of Transition, ed. Michael Mitchell and David Covin (London: Routledge, 2012), 110.

47 Ibram H. Rogers, “The Black Campus Movement and the Institutionalization of Black Studies, 1965–1970,” Journal of African American Studies 16, no. 1 (March 1, 2012): 22–23; Alan Colon, “Reflections on the History of Black Studies,” The Journal of African American History 93, no. 2 (2008): 274.

48 Rogers, “The Black Campus Movement,” 26–27.

49 See Colon, “Reflections.”

50 See especially Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies : How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

51 Herz, Oral History.

52 Rogers, “The Black Campus Movement,” 24.

53 James Lance Taylor, “The Politics of the Black Power Movement,” Annual Review of Political Science 24, no. 1 (2021): 446.

54 “Reports of APSA Committees,” PS: Political Science & Politics 2, no. 3 (1969): 321–53.

55 Sherri L. Wallace et al., “Chronicling Our Legacy of Leadership: The Task Force Historical Record on the Founders of the Nationl Conference of Black Political Scientists,” National Review of Black Politics 1, no. 1 (2020): 116, 82.

56 “Reports of APSA Committees,” 322.

57 “Reports of APSA Committees,” 334.

58 Mack H. Jones, “Responsibility of Black Political Scientists to The Black Community,” ed. Shelby Lewis Smith (Detroit: Balamp Publishing, 1977), 12.

59 See Mack H. Jones, “NCOBPS: Twenty Years Later,” in Knowledge, Power, and Black Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 34.

60 34.

61 Hans J. Morgenthau, “The Purpose of Political Science,” in A Design for Political Science: Scope, Objectives, and Methods, ed. James C. Charlesworth (Philadelphia: The American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1966), 69.

62 See Seán Molloy, “Realism and Reflexivity: Morgenthau, Academic Freedom and Dissent,” European Journal of International Relations 26, no. 2 (June 1, 2020): 321–43.

63 See Clyde W. Barrow, “The Political and Intellectual Origins of New Political Science,” New Political Science 39, no. 4 (2017): 437–72.

64 Hans J. Morgenthau, The Purpose of American Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960). Incidentally, Herz considered the book to be one of Morgenthau’s “best”; John H. Herz, “Political Realism Revisited,” International Studies Quarterly 25, no. 2 (1981): 184.

65 “The Purpose of Political Science,” 69.

66 Vitalis, White World Order, 167.

67 See Robbie Shilliam, “Race and Racism in International Relations: Retrieving a Scholarly Inheritance,” International Politics Reviews 8, no. 2 (December 1, 2020): 152–95.

68 Jones, “Responsibility of Black Political Scientists to The Black Community,” 15.

69 Wallace et al., “Chronicling Our Legacy of Leadership: The Task Force Historical Record on the Founders of the Nationl Conference of Black Political Scientists,” 103; Mae C. King, Interview, February 5, 1994, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/ark:/16417/xt73r20rrh8p.

70 Hanes Walton Jr, “The South West Africa Mandate,” Savannah State College Bulletin 26, no. 2 (1972): 93–100.

71 Leanneal J. Henderson Jr., “Impact of Military Base Shut-Downs,” The Black Scholar 5, no. 2 (1973): 9–15.

72 Errol Henderson calls this practice “bibliocide”. See Shilliam, “Race and Racism in International Relations,” 184.

73 Mae C. King, “Race and US Foreign Policy: Reflections on West Africa,” The Black Scholar 40, no. 3 (2010): 2–12.

74 For example Richard K. Betts, “A Diplomatic Bomb for South Africa?,” International Security 4, no. 2 (1979): 91–115; Samuel P. Huntington, “Reform and Stability in South Africa,” International Security 6, no. 4 (1982): 3–25.

75 Shilliam, “Race and Racism in International Relations,” 172–73.

76 For example Errol A. Henderson and Richard Tucker, “Clear and Present Strangers: The Clash of Civilizations and International Conflict,” International Studies Quarterly 45, no. 2 (2001): 317–38; Errol A. Henderson, The Revolution Will Not Be Theorized: Cultural Revolution in the Black Power Era (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019).

77 Errol A. Henderson, “The Revolution Will Not Be Theorised: Du Bois, Locke, and the Howard School’s Challenge to White Supremacist IR Theory,” Millennium 45, no. 3 (June 1, 2017): 492–510. Neta Crawford’s work shares a similar constellation to Henderson’s, albeit with different approaches and subject matters. See Shilliam, “Race and Racism in International Relations.”

78 Errol A. Henderson and Russell J. Leng, “Reducing Intergang Violence: Norms from the Interstate System,” Peace & Change 24, no. 4 (1999): 490.

79 See Gary Stewart, “Black Codes and Broken Windows: The Legacy of Racial Hegemony in Anti-Gang Civil Injunctions,” Yale Law Journal 107, no. 7 (1998): 2249–80.

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Notes on contributors

Robbie Shilliam

Robbie Shilliam is a professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is Decolonizing Politics (Polity, 2021).