Ikenberry’s theory is an explicit appeal to racial hegemony that ignores the racial cartographic insecurities that structure the nature of war

Alexander D. Barder, “Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy”, Oxford University Press, Page 173, 2 August 2021,

Ikenberry’s story of the emergence and expansion of the liberal international order takes for granted the West’s intrinsic universality. “Over the centuries,” as he writes in Liberal Leviathan, “the Westphalian system has evolved as a set of principles and practices and expanded outward from its European origins to encompass the entire world.”6 Centuries of racial hierarchy, empire, and violence appear in his account to seamlessly give way to a consensual process of socializing non-Western elites or states into accepting American hegemony as inherently beneficial.7 Proponents of such accounts of the emergence of the international liberal order tend to assume a global cartography in which the liberal order remains a pacified space, as opposed to the perpetual insecurity beyond its reach. Of course, while Ikenberry does concede that American hegemony often needed to “discipline and coerce weaker states, particularly in Latin America and the Middle East,” there is little or no recognition that under the surface of what appeared tranquility within this liberal order, violence proliferated.8 There is no attempt to take into account the proliferation of social unrest in the 1960s, the civil rights movement within the United States, the anti–Vietnam War movement, or the various social movements that called into question a political order predicated upon racism and patriarchy. Rather than simply creating a line between those who are members of this order and those who, for Ikenberry, are left out in the cold in an illiberal world, the cartography of racial violence in the postwar world imbricated the domestic and international in crucial ways.9 It is not surprising, then, that Inderjeet Parmar notes in his critique of Ikenberry’s account that it fundamentally neglects “the role played by violence and outright war” as a way of reconfiguring imperial practices “trying to maintain a global hierarchy established by centuries of colonial and semi-colonial rule over what is now called the global South.”10 Thus Ikenberry’s account appears as an “ideological legitimation” of the emergence of, and maintenance of, American hegemony, which was “imbued with explicit and implicit racial and colonial/imperial assumptions—in both US domestic and foreign policy.”11