Introducing the Special Issue on “Race and Security”

In June 2020—it seems a lifetime ago—I became editor-in-chief of Security Studies. Before assuming the journal’s helm, I floated to the editorial team the idea that we should issue an annual call for papers and special issue proposals on what we believed to be important themes that had not received adequate attention in the field in general and in our pages in particular. The ongoing pandemic made a call on public health and security seem timely. But, as I sat on my deck on the outskirts of Minneapolis, some five miles from the street where George Floyd had been murdered just days before, the choice seemed obvious. We would invite colleagues to explore the intersections between racial categories and formations, on the one hand, and features and dynamics in the field of international security, on the other.

Our call was grounded in, and frankly acknowledged, this real-world context. But our broader purpose was to make a down payment on a larger and, we hoped, enduring effort to help address the field’s “longstanding collective blind spot” and to overcome the ways in which “its dominant discourses have often marginalized scholarship centered on race.”¹ We aimed thereby to recenter racial categories and dynamics which, thanks to Robert Vitalis’ seminal work, we knew had once featured more centrally in the discipline.² We were naturally not the only journal of international relations (IR) that saw this as the right time to rectify persistent silences and ongoing silencing in the field.³ However, Security Studies had long been associated with the field’s putative mainstream, and it therefore occupied a very particular intellectual and disciplinary space. We hoped our call would send a powerful signal and inspire cutting-edge research.

We editors believed that race was not just understudied, but potentially important in constituting and shaping dynamics in the realm of international security—or we would not have issued the call. We knew that scholars of empire, laboring on the margins of our statist field, had long drawn attention to racial difference in the context of imperial relations,⁴ as had colleagues publishing in outlets like Third World Quarterly. And we were well aware that, although Security Studies had in the not-too-distant past published a handful of signal articles on these themes,⁵ our journal had, on the whole, devoted little attention to race.

Our call made clear that we were not interested in articles that once again surveyed the field, decried its silence on racial difference, and called for more research. We were not well-disposed toward articles that once again showed us that philosophers who are part of IR’s claimed intellectual lineage harbored racist ideas or were apologists for empire. All that was surely true, but would tread on already-well-trod ground. We did not share the conviction of some that IR theory—either its traditional paradigms or more critical approaches—was racist, in design or consequence.

Our call proceeded from the conviction that the surest way to set an intellectual agenda is to demonstrate its fruitfulness. We consequently invited articles, special forums, and special issues that advanced our substantive knowledge about how “racial categories, relations, and hierarchies [have] constituted and shaped features and dynamics of international and national (in)security and violence” and about how “features and dynamics of international and national (in)security and violence [have] constituted and shaped racial categories, relations, and hierarchies.”

In summer 2020, we posted the call to our website, advertised it on social media, and asked colleagues in numerous relevant professional associations’ sections to circulate it. In the end, we received over 40 article submissions, including those submitted as part of a special issue. We were gratified when Austin Carson and Bob Pape of the University of Chicago offered to host a workshop for those papers that had, after the first round of review, received an invitation to revise and resubmit. In the end, the pandemic’s revival shifted the workshop online. Meeting on four consecutive Fridays in January and February 2021, our authors received excellent feedback from the University of Chicago community and each other. We are grateful to the University of Chicago graduate students and faculty who generously gave of their time to serve as discussants and constructive critics. We are also especially thankful to Duncan Bell and Neta Crawford, who served as workshop discussants and attended all its sessions. Nearly all the articles that appear in this special issue profited from this unusual opportunity and the important feedback it afforded.

Most special issues come to journals as, more or less, coherent intellectual projects, designed, curated, and led by guest editors. This special issue arose from the bottom up. It is not, was not intended be, and could never be a cogent statement of an intellectual agenda. Its authors do not share a particular set of substantive interests, theoretical commitments, or methodological inclinations. We think that this diversity of substance, theory, and method is a strength of the special issue. The authors show how racial categories, hierarchies, ideologies, and presuppositions constitute and shape dynamics and outcomes in cybersecurity (Mumford and Shires), counterterrorism (Búzás and Meier), counterinsurgency (Goddard and MacDonald), US basing (Freeman), and foreign policy (Pérez, Rathbun and Rathbun). They demonstrate that the lived experience of racism affects how Black Americans think about the use of force (Green-Riley and Leber) and that the effects of racial violence are long-lasting (Arellano). We saw value in publishing one piece that turns the gaze inward, toward the field, by drawing on a unique survey of members of the International Studies Association’s International Security Studies Section and giving voice to those scholars who have felt marginalized (Zvogbo et al.). Finally, to round out the special issue and initiate what we hope will be a robust debate, we invited three senior scholars to reflect on the special issue—its contributions, its presumptions, and its silences. The special issue is better because Adom Getachew, Robbie Shilliam, and Jack Snyder took up the challenge.

My partner throughout this project has been Jennifer Erickson. When we issued the call, per Security Studies’ special issue policy, I tapped Jennifer, as an already long-serving Associate Editor, to help shepherd it through the review process. Neither Jennifer nor I foresaw how involved the process would be—or how long it would take. True to professional form, she has remained deeply involved in this project even after stepping down from the editorial team. Whatever virtues this special issue has are testament to Jennifer’s sound editorial judgment, good humor, and thorough-going professionalism.

This special issue is my last issue as editor-in-chief of Security Studies. It is fitting that the call with which I began my term as EIC has finally borne fruit, as my term comes to an end. But this call was not meant to be a one-shot deal. The journal’s future editors will always be eager to publish top-flight research on race and security. That research may shed light on the constitutive and causal processes through which race has made and continues to make our world. It may qualify, or even dismiss, that claim. What future Security Studies editors will not do is ignore, reject out of hand, or otherwise marginalize scholarship centering on race and international security.

Notes

1 For the call, see https://securitystudiesjournal.org/past-special-calls/race-and-security.

2 Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). See also Jessica Blatt, Race and the Making of American Political Science (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

3 See, among others, Jasmine K. Gani and Jenna Marshall, eds., “Race and Imperialism in International Relations: Theory and Practice,” International Affairs 98, no. 1 (2022); “Forum on Race and Racism in Critical Security Studies,” Security Dialogue 52, no. 1 (supplement) (2021). The 75th anniversary issue of International Organization notably included an article on the theme as well: Zoltán I. Búzás, “Racism and Antiracism in the Liberal International Order,” International Organization 75, Special Issue 2 (2021): 440-463. An essay on this theme finally recently appeared as well in the Annual Review of Political Science: see 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): 175-196.

4 I cannot do citational justice to this large body of work. Some of it is cited elsewhere in this special issue. For an important programmatic statement, see, however, Tarak Barkawi, "Decolonising War," European Journal of International Security 1, no. 2 (2016): 199-214. See also Duncan Bell, Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).

5 I have in mind, notably, 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 (2013): 573-606; and Steven Ward, “Race, Status, and Japanese Revisionism in the Early 1930s,” Security Studies 22, no. 4  (2013): 607-639. My apologies to any Security Studies authors I’ve overlooked.