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Alexander Barder on Global Racial Hierarchization and International Relations
Only within recent years has race become a common analytical framework within mainstream international relations (IR) theory.1 Alexander Barder argues in his book Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy that the dominant paradigms of international relations are rooted in historical racial hierarchies and power relations.2 The Georgetown Journal of International Affairs (GJIA) discusses the implications of this theory not only for political hotspots but also for International Relations courses as microcosms of imperial ideology.
I want to discuss with you your book on the race war and this theory of international relations as it relates to global politics and the studies of IR more broadly. Could you please give us a bit of background on the concept of a race war, how you chose to put that term specifically together, and what forms of scholarship you drew from?
There's a kind of mythology at the heart of the formation of international relations as a discipline, which is a very young discipline, which really became institutionalized in the twentieth century in the American Academy, or so it appeared. Much of the history of international relations as a discipline is intimately tied to American Political Science, which can be traced all the way back to the nineteenth century and which was primarily concerned with questions of race and empire—in particular, the fear and concern that global politics was actually centered on conflicts between races.3 And so, what I wanted to do with my book was to depart from these interesting insights into rethinking the modern history of international relations from the 19th century to the present, precisely in terms of thinking about race, racial hierarchy, and racial violence as constitutive to our modern international order.
On this idea of race and hierarchy being constitutive, you've discussed a lot of ways in which international relations is regarded as a science and this idea of objectivity surrounding the study. How does race inflect or change that objectivity? In what ways does it creep into studies of IR more subtly, perhaps even in discussions within academic circles or in the classroom?
So, there's always been this attempt to conceptualize international relations, particularly after the Second World War, as a scientific discipline with a reliance on scientific epistemologies. That is particularly evident, for example, in theories of international relations pertaining to structural realism or liberal institutionalism, which are premised on neo-positivism. Now, I think the history of scientific racism and the assumptions underlying scientific racism also have a role in terms of structuring modern international relations theories.
For example, ideas about anarchy as an ontology of international relations are oftentimes understood to be derived from anthropological assumptions derived from Africa. As a result, there's a creeping set of racial assumptions and racial hierarchies that underlie international relations theory. More generally, the philosopher Charles Mills's work on the racial contract demonstrates the extent to which social contract theories are themselves premised upon a racial [End Page 86] epistemology and ontology that carries over it in various ways in international relations theory.4 So his work helps us to call into question a lot of the assumptions that we take to be based on certain scientific approaches.
Where do you find that kind of historical grounding across international relations? Your book is very much a retelling of various historical events between the Haitian Revolution and "Great Replacement" conspiracism in the context of the racial contract, especially within the macrocosm of international relations.
In my book, I was interested in telling the story of the formation of the modern international order through this lens of race and racial hierarchy, and racial violence. I specifically looked at this through an American context because the United States, and particularly the emergence of the United States in the latter part of the nineteenth century, was instrumental in creating the contours of the international order and the international system.
In the American experience, and specifically with settler colonialism in the American Midwest that was guided by Frederick Jackson Turner's notion of the frontier thesis, this idea of expansion comes to be foundational to the way in which American statesmen attempt to redefine international orders.5 The story that I wanted to tell was an American-centric story, particularly how this created a kind of social imaginary that was rooted in a particular set of racial hierarchies, which are important elements in the historical trajectory of the field of international relations to the present. Foundationally, we need to be much more attuned to the extent to which a social imaginary emerges over the course of the nineteenth century that is, at its core, founded upon assumptions of racial difference and racial hierarchies.
In your text, you describe the way in which "the ontological and normative commitments to the global racial imaginary appear to be called into question, through a world in which non-Western powers assert themselves to reshape global order, or through fears of immigration into Western politics from the Global South, what Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe calls a fantasy of annihilation is resurrected." Can you please elaborate on this "fantasy of annihilation" in the context of international relations?
So, what was interesting for me were those historical moments in which racial imaginaries that legitimized political hierarchies were being challenged by non-Western forces. Such challenges evoked extraordinary violence as a means of reasserting hierarchy. Racial enemies are then presented in this context as intractable and incommensurable. What Mbembe refers to as a "fantasy of annihilation" is then an unending and irreconcilable racial struggle. We see this, for example, with White supremacist violence. There is also the consequence that a world in which Western universality is upended is no longer a world worth living in. Such a world represents a world of cultural, political, and economic decline.
I began thinking about Mbembe's idea in the context of the Haitian Revolution, where the assertion of Black sovereignty and individual autonomy were crucial to its success. The Haitian Revolution clearly demonstrated the racial assumptions at the heart of the Enlightenment project and the inability of European philosophers to accept Black autonomy.
What underlies that, in the book, is the claim, particularly by Afro-pessimist theorists, that modernity is, in fact, constitutive of this anti-Blackness. It addresses questions like: what does it mean to be free? What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to create a political society? Afro-pessimist writers suggest that the meaning of such questions is given by defining who is unfree, who lacks humanity, etc. For them, the Black body comes to represent the very answer to such questions. That determination then comes to conceptualize the world in terms of a naturalized racial difference. So that's part of what we're trying to reckon with.
I would love to go specifically to where you left off, especially around this idea of anti-Blackness and modernity. There are criticisms of Afro-pessimism in the context [End Page 87] of international relations where the totalizing understanding of Blackness from an American experience of the Middle Passage and slavery sometimes occludes Blackness in other contexts, for example, in the Afro-Caribbean space.6 I am curious how you reconcile that in the context of your own theory and also how you think Blackness works as a structure of modernity writ large rather than, say, American modernity.
That's a fair criticism of a particularly American-centric Afro-pessimism, which, as you mentioned, devises a kind of totalizing view of the way in which the notion of the global comes into being from the history of the African slave trade. However, it does help us understand the extent to which the formation of our concepts is predicated on a notion of Blackness or anti-Blackness. As I discuss in the book, many Enlightenment thinkers relied on the assumption that Africans were incapable of exercising moral or individual autonomy when they were devising ideas about what constitutes individual autonomy, moral autonomy, or political community.
This perceived lack of autonomy is what legitimized slavery to Enlightenment thinkers, who, nonetheless, hoped to eventually free the Africans they captured once they were socialized and disciplined into a European world. However, what's interesting for me is the sense in which our Enlightenment ideals are predicated on a structural anti-Blackness. In other words, we need to understand the extent to which concepts such as autonomy, political community, or sovereignty have an intellectual history that is based on the exclusion of others.
Another objection that might be brought up to your book's thesis is that, although the United States committed egregious wrongs against peoples and states because other states are a lot worse, we cannot let them take over the international order. I am curious what you think about that 'either/or' discourse, that discursive framing of a power transition, the idea of other actors filling in, and how the theory of the race war interacts with that dynamic.
That's a great question and deeply pertinent today. So, it's something that is emerging in an international political context in which the influence and power of the West are increasingly waning, particularly as it relates to China and Russia. There are historical moments when American political discourse made explicit racial references to justify policy choices to preclude the idea of a rival power being a legitimate stakeholder in the international order. This was clearly the case in the late 1940s and early 1950s with respect to the Soviet Union. For George Kennan, in his famous essay "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," there is a racialization of the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union: he refers to them as emerging from the "Russian-Asiatic world." As a consequence, they are framed as non-European, possessive of a "particular brand of fanaticism" that he claimed was absent in the Anglo-Saxon tradition.7 Ken-nan thus racializes the Soviets in order to explain why conflict with the Soviet Union will go on until either it collapses or they radically change their behavior. Nonetheless, what is interesting here is that there's always a revisionist history at work. Russia's identity with the West is all too often predicated upon its security threat. Most recently, with the Ukraine War happening in 2022, there have been commentators suggesting that Russia is really not part of the West and is, in fact, an Asiatic country.
What are the risks of this kind of epistemic commitment to the paradigm of global racial hierarchy as it relates to the future of international relations?
I worry that as time goes forward, there will be a politics of retrenchment. For example, fears [End Page 88] of mass migration in Western states will lead to fascistic politics. We're seeing this in the kind of populist politics in the West with the Trump era. We see this in European politics with the sense of needing to retrench and protect borders. It is an increasing delegitimization of liberal democracy and an effort at creating or attempting to create a line between "us" and "them."
We see this in a lot of White supremacist violence. And that is something that I'm really concerned about. Because if you read their ideology, and if we take seriously what White supremacists are articulating in their own manifestos, it is that the line between 'us' versus 'them' is increasingly blurred in this post-colonial pluralistic world. So, what does it mean, then? What does the United States mean as a nation-state, and what do European nation-states mean in this context when you have a diverse population as a result of migration? This is all going to intensify with climate change which is going to act as a catalyst for all sorts of political transformations, population transfers, and so on as areas of the world become increasingly unlivable. So how we deal with the concatenation of such crises politically is going to become much more acute over the next decades.
Got it. The next set of questions is around this idea of how the crystallization of global racial hierarchy often takes place. In more intimate academic spaces, we generally think of it as taking place in the outside world out there, but it's often within academia as well. So how do you think the academic field of international relations supports the crystallization of an international racial hierarchy? What are the alternative ways of teaching, learning, or describing IR outside of the dominant mode of thinking that you think is important for dialogue and learning?
I was taught international relations in a particular way: in terms of foundational myths about the great debates and realism versus liberalism or utopianism and so on. But that was the structure and mechanism of the evolution of the discipline, and, in a certain sense, we chose to forget everything that happened prior to the Second World War. If you look at a lot of syllabi of international relations graduate seminars, some of them begin in 1979 with Kenneth Waltz and his theory of international relations.
However, the problem with the way we teach international relations is that we teach it ahistorically, whereas we need to be much more attentive to how our concepts in the present are mediated by the histories of race, hierarchy, and Empire. Over the years, I've been switching my curriculum and focusing much more on problematizing the Eurocentrism which lies at the heart of international relations theory. This way, my undergraduate students are more aware of the Eurocentric or Western-centric understandings of the world, which guide the field of international relations.
On the topic of international relations theory, what do you think about the way in which constructivism—how norms, beliefs, and social conditions shape foreign relations—is taught in IR classrooms?
Social constructivism, as an approach to the study of international relations, is meant to demonstrate the importance of intersubjectivity in language and norms. However, until recently, constructivism has not been focused on this question of racial hierarchy. The introduction of post-colonial theory in international relations has been instrumental in making scholars more aware of the racial dimensions at the heart of our theories of international relations.
How should students approach these questions going forward, especially in universities that perhaps are dominated by more traditional approaches to IR?
There are more and more people who work at the margins of the discipline who are trying to draw attention to these issues, and oftentimes, [End Page 89] many are successfully finding their work on syllabi. There is also a lot of interesting work in sociology, anthropology, history, and Black studies, which can add important works to expand upon how and what students learn in traditional IR classes. Specifically, students can make a conscious effort to expand on the assumptions made by, for example, realism, liberalism, and other more-traditional theories.
My last question is on the topic of moving towards a broader idea of social life and the international community that's not restricted to these notions of sovereignty or nation-states. What do you think is the work that still needs to be done to achieve this?
There's a lot of work to be done. The way in which we in the discipline of international relations understand history is deeply problematic. What we take to be our founding ontology of the discipline—anarchy, states-centrism—must be problematized so that there are different ways of conceptualizing international relations. Once we expand our imaginary of the history of international relations, what we see is that it has a much more complicated narrative than we typically assume. Because of the way in which international relations have typically appropriated history as a data point for testing theories, it is critical to go back to this question of the scientific approach to the study of international relations. What's absolutely needed is a much more complicated and nuanced sense of history in the IR field.
Alexander Barder is the Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director for International Relations Politics and International Relations at Florida International University. He has published two books on assemblages of international relations and imperialism: Empire Within: International Hierarchy and its Imperial Laboratories of Governance (2015) and Global Race War: International Political and Racial Hierarchy (2021).
Notes
1. Kelebogile Zvobgo, "Why Race Matters in International Relations," Foreign Policy, June 19, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/19/why-race-matters-international-relations-ir/.
2. Alexander Barder, Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021).
3. Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017).
4. Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
5. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (Madison, WI: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1894).
6. Vinson Cunningham, "The Arguments of 'Afropessimism," The New Yorker, July 13, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/20/the-argument-of-afropessimism.
7. "X" (George F. Kennan), "The Sources of Soviet Conduct", Foreign Affairs, July 1947, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/1947-07-01/sources-soviet-conduct.