Race and Racism in International Relations

Ethnography and international relations: situating recent trends, debates and limitations from an interdisciplinary perspective

“…This is especially true of the erasure of academic material, including classical ethnographies, that helps students and scholars alike learn about and reflect on their role as structuring forces. This erasure not only limits the ability of IR scholars to engage fully with the reality they wish to understand and explain, but it also arbitrarily reduces what counts as relevant knowledge in the field to the detriment of already available sources, including Indigenous and non-Western knowledges (Anievas et al 2015;Beier 2005;Grovogui 2006;Le Melle 2009;Vitalis 2005).…”

“…The classical anthropological literature reveals a lot about colonialism and imperialism as global structures and their everyday consequences. However, it is left out of the IR corpus, as is the vast majority of non-Western autoethnographical and autobiographical accounts of specific international moments of world history (Anievas et al 2015;Evans-Pritchard 1954;Geertz 1980;Grovogui 2006;Mandelbaum 1973).…”

Internal colonisation: The intimate circulations of empire, race and liberal government

“…However, the most extensive of these engagements have taken place outside of IR (Adebanwi 2016;Povinelli 2011;Stoler 1995Stoler , 2016Chow 2002;Legg 2014;Venn 2008;McIntyre and Nast 2011;Scott 1999). Despite the emergence of work examining IR's neglect of racism and colonialism (Shilliam 2013;Anievas, Manchanda, Shilliam 2014;Bell 2013;Rutazibwa 2016;Carrozza et al 2017) and the push to engage postcolonial and decolonial scholars in the critique of war, humanitarianism and development (Sajed 2013, Burkawi 2016Sabaratnam 2017) there still remains a tendency for scholars of European states to overlook the place of colonial in the development of contemporary rule and the production of modern racism (see Venn 2009). This is further exacerbated by a persistence of a methodological nationalism and/or Eurocentricism (Tansel 2015) when exploring state formations prior to the 20th century (and the rise of globalisation) and a tendency to treat modern domestic liberal politics as endogenously produced, rather inherently tied to and made possible by upon transnational and explicitly colonial processes of accumulation, exploitation and control (Neocleous 2012).…”

Primordial Identities, Bounded Territories, and Contemporary Violence?: American Geopolitical Perspectives on the Middle East's Cultural Landscapes

“…Implicitly (and sometimes explicitly), a commitment to imperialism underlies these calculations (Hobson, 2012). Some historians of international relations argue that these imperialistic and situated worldviews in contemporary international relations are firmly rooted in "racial development" thinking of the early 20th century (Anievas, et al 2014).…”

“…While racial tropes have largely been expunged from mainstream discourses on world politics in the post-Second World War era, race and racism are a significant part of the underlying structure of international relations (Vitalis, 2015: 9). Anievas et al, (2014: 3) write that postcolonial scholarship has allowed scholars to make connections between orientalist/racialist frameworks of analysis and practices of grand strategy formulation, interstate conflict, and war. These authors argue that contemporary international relations is very much a situated worldview rooted in its original design as a policy science created to solve problems posed by empire building and colonial administration facing Western powers expanding into and occupying what is now known as the "Global South."…”