How Central is Race to International Relations?

Abstract

While I agree that it is high time for more research on the conceptual and empirical questions of race raised in this special issue, I argue that mainstream approaches including realism and liberalism shed more light on the central mechanisms that drive international politics than do theories that put race in the central position. This is not because mainstream theories ignore identity politics, but because their theories of political identity are more closely tied to the powerful driving mechanisms of the nation-state and social modernization. Mainstream IR has, in recent decades, worked hard to understand the continuing power of nationalism and ethnicity using concepts that can also illuminate the category of race.

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Correction Statement

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

Notes

1 Kelebogile Zvobgo and Meredith Loken, “Why Race Matters in International Relations,” Foreign Policy (June 19, 2020): https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/19/why-race-mattersinternational-relations-ir/; A. Layug and John M. Hobson, Globalizing International Theory: The Problem with Western IR Theory and How to Overcome It (New York: Routledge, 2022).

2 Amitav Acharya, “Race and Racism in the Founding of the Modern World Order,” International Affairs 98, no. 1 (January 2022): 23-43, at 23, 27, emphasis in original.

3 For other examples, see Zoltán I. Búzás, “Racism and Antiracism in the Liberal International Order,” International Organization 75, no. 2 (2021): 440-63; Alexander D. Barder, Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

4 Robert Vitalis, “The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture: Making Racism Invisible in American International Relations,” Millennium 29, no. 2 (2000): 331-356.

5 Zvobgo and Loken, “Why Race Matters in International Relations;” Rohan Mukherjee, Ascending Order: Rising Powers and The Institutional Politics of Status (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023); Alexander D. Barder, Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy, chaps. 5 and 6; Zoltán I. Búzás, “The Color of Threat: Race, Threat Perception, and the Demise of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902–1923),” Security Studies 22:4 (2013), 573-606; Steven Ward, “Race, Status, and Japanese Revisionism in the Early 1930s,” Security Studies 22:4  (2013): 607-639.

6 Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Sankaran Krishna, “Race, Amnesia, and the Education of International Relations,” Alternatives 26, no. 4 (2001): 401-24; Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda, and Robbie Shilliam, eds., Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Color Line (New York: Routledge, 2015); Bianca Freeman, D. G. Kim, and David A. Lake, “Race in International Relations: Beyond the ‘Norm Against Noticing,’” Annual Review of Political Science 25 (May 2022), 175-196; Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “The Structure of Racism in Color-Blind, ‘Post-Racial’ America,” American Behavioral Scientist 59, no. 11 (2015): 1358-1376.

7 Búzás, “Racism and Antiracism in the Liberal International Order,” 445.

8 Aliya Saperstein, Andrew Penner, and Ryan Light, “Racial Formation in Perspective: Connecting Individuals, Institutions, and Power Relations,” Annual Review of Sociology 39 (2013): 359–78, figure 2 at 362, scatterplot showing the prominence of “racialization” theory.

9 Barder, Global Race War.

10 Lucian M. Ashworth, “Warriors, Pacifists and Empires: Race and Racism in International Thought Before 1914,” International Affairs 98, no. 1 (January 2022): 281-301; Srdjan Vucetic, The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).

11 John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001).

12 John Gerard Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,” International Organization 36, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 379-415.

13 V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917 orig. Russian ed.).

14 Gearóid Barry, Enrico Dal Lago and Róisín Healy, “Towards an Interconnected History of World War I: Europe and Beyond,” in Small Nations and Colonial Peripheries in World War I, Enrico Dal Lago and Róisín Healy, eds. (Leiden: Brill, 2016).

15 Woodruff Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

16 Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1981).

17 Eyre Crowe, German Foreign Policy before the War: the 1907 Memorandum of Sir Eyre Crowe (London: Friends of Europe, 1934).

18 “America’s German Roots,” https://www.deutschland.de/en/usa/us-immigration-americas-german-roots.

19 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987).

20 Michael A. Barnhart, Japan Prepares for Total War: The Search for Economic Security, 1919-1941

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).

21 Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), chaps. 3 and 4.

22 Eric L. Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Douglass C. North, Structure and Change in Economic History (New York: Norton, 1981); John Gerard Ruggie, “Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations,” International Organization 47, no. 1 (1993): 139–74.

23 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); Michael Hechter, Containing Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Daniel Nexon, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), chaps. 2-4; Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), chaps. 3-4.

24 Anthony Marx, Faith in Nation (New York: Oxford, 2003).

25 Barry Posen, "The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict," Survival 35, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 27-47.

26 David Lake and Donald Rothchild, “Containing Fear: The Origins and Management of Ethnic Conflict,” International Security 21, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 41-75; James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin. “Violence and the Social Construction of Ethnic Identity,” International Organization 54, no. 4 (2000): 845–77; Stuart J. Kaufman, Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic Conflict (New York: Cornell University Press, 2001); Roger Petersen, Western Intervention in the Balkans: The Strategic Use of Emotion in Conflict (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), chaps. 2, 3, 6.

27 Stephen Van Evera, “Hypotheses on Nationalism and War,” International Security 18, no. 4 (Spring 1994): 5-39; Daniel Byman, “Forever Enemies? The Manipulation of Ethnic Identities to End Ethnic Wars,” Security Studies 9, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 149–90; Stephen Shulman, “Nationalist Sources of International Economic Integration,” International Studies Quarterly 44, no. 3 (Sept. 2000): 365-390.

28 Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).

29 Anderson, Imagined Communities, chaps. 1-3.

30 Saperstein et al, “Racial Formation in Perspective.”

31 Anthony Marx, Making Race and Nation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

32 Posen, "The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict."

33 Fredrik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969).

34 Karl Deutsch quoted in Roxanne Lynn Doty, “The Bounds of ‘Race’ in International Relations,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 22, no. 3 (1993): 443-61, at 450.

35 Posen; E. Gellner, "Nationalism in the Vacuum," in Thinking Theoretically about Soviet Nationalities, Alexander Motyl, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), chap. 10.

36 Kanchan Chandra, "What is Ethnicity and Does It Matter?" Annual Review of Political Science 9 (2006): 397-424; Daniel N. Posner, Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) uses a very similar framework.

38 Lars-Erik Cederman, Emergent Actors in World Politics: How States and Nations Develop and Dissolve

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Fotini Christia, Alliance Formation in Civil Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

39 For other hybrids of biology and culture, see Azar Gat, Nations: The Long and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), chapter 2, and Paul MacDonald and Stacie Goddard in their article on counterinsurgency in this special issue.

40 Vitalis, “The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture,” 344-5.

41 Bonilla-Silva, “The Structure of Racism in Color-Blind, ‘Post-Racial’ America,” 1358-1376.

42 Vitalis, “The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture,” 344-5.

43 Cecilia Ridgeway, “Why Status Matters for Inequality,” American Sociological Review 79 (2014): 1-16.

44 Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross, Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980).

45 Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).

46 Muzafer Sherif, O. Harvey, B. White, W. Hood, and C. Sherif, Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment (Norman, OK: University Book Exchange, 1961).

47 Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press,1985), 143-9, 167-8; Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 540-53.

48 Henri Tajfel, Human Groups and Social Categories (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

49 J. Lawrence Broz, Jeffry Frieden and Stephen Weymouth, “Populism in Place: The Economic Geography of the Globalization Backlash,” International Organization 75, no. 2 (Spring 2021); Katherine J. Kramer, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

50 Amitav Acharya, “Global International Relations (IR) and Regional Worlds: A New Agenda for International Studies,” International Studies Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2014): 647-659.

51 John Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 82-119.

52 Jayne Cubbage, ed., Critical Race Media Literacy: Themes and Strategies for Media Education (New York: Routledge, 2022).

53 Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004), chapter 11.

54 Markus Prior, Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jack Snyder

Jack Snyder is Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science and the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. He is the author most recently of Human Rights for Pragmatists (Princeton University Press, 2022).