Perpetuating racial logics and methodological whiteness creates cycles of racial violence that influence ethical and epistemic assumptions and change understandings

Carlo Wood, “Racial Security: The Unobserved Threat in IR”, E-International Relations, 12 November 2020,

International Relations perpetuates racially insecure strategies through its commonly shared interpretation of anarchy (that is, a belief in no higher authority than the sovereign state) and a racially biased cycle of knowledge. The assumption that democracy can be successfully coerced onto the Global South has shown racially induced inequities over time. During the Age of Exploration, imperialism and capitalism were at their peak with Eurocentric thought defining the parameters of international discourse. Racism thereby evolved from theological to anthropological justifications in pursuit of resources, primarily in Africa (Blatt, 2018). Today, oil and mineral extraction by Western powers have left African countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, and Angola disabled by war and dysfunctional through corruption, with little infrastructure to advance education and health, the other building blocks of democratic societies (Al Jazeera, 2017).

The state of nature and national imperialism

Looking back to the philosophical antecedents of International Relations, the state of nature represents an earlier theologically rooted view of “anarchy” compared to its understanding in today’s structural realist version. It was used to disassociate the white Western world from its soon to be conquered counterparts and was first asserted by Thomas Hobbes. He proposed that Whites faced a hypothetical state of nature and non-Whites a literal one (Henderson, 2013). As demonstrated in the colonization of Native Americans, a dedication to Manifest Destiny fueled religious and economic coercion through slavery, an act framed as a gateway for the (black) Man in a state of nature to a (black) man in civilization. American political scientist and diplomat Paul S. Reinsch deemed this marriage of duty and self (the State) as national imperialism:

The desire to control as large a portion of the earth’s surface as their energies and opportunities permit…to increase the resources of the national state through the absorption and exploitation of undeveloped regions and inferior races (in Shepherd, 1900)

As the justification of imperialism by use of slavery grew, the perceived threat of the state of nature and its black embodiment became imbedded into the understanding of social contract theory. However, the racial interpretation of anarchy did not cease with Hobbes. His philosophical counterparts, Immanuel Kant, squarely placed Blacks into the state of nature because “so fundamental is the difference between these two races of man (whites and Negroes), and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color” (in Henderson, 2013).

Further, Dunn elaborates on the diverse African diaspora that was disregarded when marketing Africa into colonial era tropes such as a “primitive paradise”, “authentic” or “traditional”, all of which remained “unvisited by (white) man” (Dunn, 2004). While white individuals and institutions acknowledged the Black man as a savage and less than the White counterpart, the social contract, upon which democracies are built, wove itself together with what Charles Mills terms as the racial contract. The racial contract perpetuates beliefs of sovereignty through a hierarchy of racial dualism (Mills, 2015). The interdependence of these two contracts within international relations has not properly been examined because their relationship hinges on western democracy and white supremacy.

Cycle of knowledge

Also referred to as “methodological whiteness”, the intentional whitewashing of historical racial violence and narratives does not acknowledge the role in which race has influenced the world (Bhambra, 2017). In turn, it creates a perpetual cycle of racially triggered knowledge that serves as the foundation of IR. Henderson proposes that theories conceived from such knowledges have underlying empirical, ethical, and epistemological assumptions that influence people’s understanding, each working individually and in combination to advance white supremacy (Henderson, 2013). Racist ethical assumptions elevate a “fictious identity of Whiteness” as privileged through the exclusion of social liberties, promoted through media and advertising; areas primarily not of IR concern (Henderson, 2013; Lipsitz, 1995).

However, whether art imitates life or vice versa, racist empirical assumptions have given way to institutional blockages that have silenced notable voices of race in IR like Alain Locke and W.E.B. DuBois. In lectures to Howard University, Alain Locke rejects race as a by-product of biology and argues its clear sociological origins, a radical position in 1916 America (Henderson, 2017). The reframing of race as a social concept to be evolved within itself and beyond led to national black expression through the Harlem Renaissance. Unfortunately, these influential lectures went unpublished until after his death leaving a lapse of alternative thinking to white centric empirical knowledge. In the choosing of what and who to study, racist epistemological knowledge is advanced. In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky draws parallels between the language used by the United States’ First Industrial Revolution and Nazi Germany. Torture and its use on slave labour camps drove and sustained the financial and merchant systems of a country that deemed itself the quintessential example of democracy (Democracy Now, 2015). Therefore, history needs to be viewed in a more critical way that does not negate the experiences of those who built the society that is subsequently cherished, an opportunity not yet been afforded to African Americans.

The recycling of racist knowledge within publications of IR has been equally covert. Termed by Persaud and Walker as “the epistemological status of silence”, IR publications have not ignored race but have indirectly controlled the language and research surrounding it (Persaud and Walker, 2001). The first IR academic journal established in 1910 was the Journal of Race Development. Over the following two decades, the name would change to theJournal of International Relations (1919) and Foreign Affairs (1922). Articles during this transition still contributed to racist narratives of inferiority and received little counterargument primarily due to no racial representation (Zvobgo and Loken, 2020). Despite more egalitarian thinking following WWII, research and discourse remained white-washed. A survey by Roxanne Dotty found that of the five major IR journals from 1945-1993, one article used the word “race”, four used “minority” and thirteen used “ethnicity” (Henderson, 2013). The result being the entire twentieth century of modern and globalized development side-stepping a non-white interpretation of race. The disconnect of Western scholarly application on African (and other Global South) countries using European theories while relying on local scholars for relevant data has been exacerbated by recent COVID-19 inequities (Bhambra et al, 2020). Such shallow methodologies enable the distribution of aid in the form of a twenty-first century rendition of manifest destiny, colloquially termed the “white savior complex”. To break this racist cycle of knowledge and action, a more indigenous understanding of problems should be considered and shared in IR discourse.