The affirmatives desperate cries of saving [] with western [] resuscitate the shriveled husk from its own overstretch and belies a deep seeded desire for White Supremacy.

Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy examines the historical connections between race and violence from the early nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. My aim is, first, to show how racial violence and hierarchy were crucial for the development of the very idea of global order. Second, I examine how racial violence proliferated in defense of this global order when its racial hierarchy appeared to be in crisis. Third, this global racial order did not end with the Second World War and with the discrediting of scientific racism, the decolonization of the global South, and the expansion of the state system; rather it continued in different forms as the racialization of cultural or civilizational attributes that then resulted in further racial violence. Finally, examining global politics in terms of race and racial violence reveals a different spatial topology that imbricates the domestic and global in more complicated ways. As a consequence, global histories of racial hierarchy and violence have important implications for understanding the continued salience of race within Western polities. We live in a time when the crisis and waning of a white world order continues to nourish a politics of racial retrenchment and violence at home. The great American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois famously called attention to the “color-line” as the problem of the twentieth century. For Du Bois, racial difference reflected the “relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”2 Du Bois specifically pointed to a racialized global political economy in which race and class conflict fuse together to perpetuate the conditions of transnational oppression and violence. Nowhere was this more prevalent than in the United States, where even in the aftermath of the Civil War and the emancipation of American slaves, “economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary,” continued unabated.3 “Negroes are a segregated servile caste,” Du Bois writes, “with restricted rights and privileges.”4 But what was true about an American political economy based on racial exploitation reflected the longue durée of a Western imperial political economy that gave rise to a sensus communis of racial hierarchy. From the development of the Atlantic slave trade in the fifteenth century to the spread of European empire, the global as we in the discipline of international relations have come to know it since the nineteenth century was not the European state system, notwithstanding all the historical fallacies surrounding Westphalia; rather, the very notion of the global emerged out of a crucible of violent settler appropriation and exploitation.5 Race and racial hierarchy then became the material and ideational scaffold of a global imaginary that took for granted the idea that certain peoples were to be considered naturally inferior and hence exploitable for a wide range of purposes.6 Nowhere is this more evident than in the crystallization of an anti-blackness that came to structure the very modern imaginary of the West itself. Specifically, as Achille Mbembe writes, the very notion of “blackness” was created to “designate not human beings like all others but rather a distinct humanity—one whose very humanity was (and still is) in question.”7 Racial categories became dialectical (without the possibility of reconciliation) in that they reflected the perceive attributes of the Western/white “self” in its attempt to designate an “other” as inherently inferior. More generally, as Afro-pessimist theorists point out, the very category of “blackness,” which is derived from and the “entrenchment” of enslaved objectification, supports the “anti-Black foundations of race and modern society . . . it is Blackness, and more specifically anti-Blackness that gives coherence to categories of non-Black—white, worker, gay, i.e., ‘human’ . . . it is Blackness that is the dark matter surrounding and holding together the categories of non-Black.”8 Thus, for example, according to the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius, “The idea of the barbaric Negro is a European invention”; but it was one that essentially became a political ontology that defined Western modernity through its nonbeing.9 The notion of the color line as an ontological claim is crucial for understanding what I think is an important consequence of this history of race and empire: only certain peoples, it was assumed by a wide range of European and American writers, were capable of creating genuinely political communities. European modernity importantly reflected the crystallization of a vague notion of common civilizational attributes— notwithstanding the incessant internal violence of this European society or community of sovereigns. Nonetheless, a common assumption within early modern Europe was that the establishment of the state and civil society represented a crucial development in political community that other civilizations did not possess. Whereas the Islamic world with the Ottoman Empire and China may have been accorded a certain political recognition, such was certainly withheld from Africa and Africans, for whom the nascent and evolving biological or zoological vocabulary of the eighteenth century came closest to a language deemed capable of describing their lifeworld. As I discuss in Chapter 1, the notion of the “swarm” came to describe a nonpolitical collectivity subject to European predations and extreme violence. The notion of the swarm precluded a recognition of a common political relationship and also, importantly, an ability to become present within a larger human world of collective action, as Hannah Arendt understood it.10 To be sure, Arendt herself is guilty of making the very same racial generalization that Africans were incapable of creating a lasting world of appearance necessary for something like politics to come into being. As she infamously wrote, “Under the merciless sun, surrounded by an entirely hostile nature, [Europeans] were confronted with human beings who, living without the future of a purpose and the past of an accomplishment, were as incomprehensible as the inmates of a madhouse.”11 It is this incomprehensibility that in a way created a certain distance or gulf that the notion of race helped to explain. For Orlando Patterson, the institution of slavery defined and codified this notion of distance between the European and the African, a distance that reinforced “the view that he [i.e., the Black servant] did not belong to the same of Christian, civilized European.”12 Explicitly, the reification of racial hierarchy over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries precluded the possibility of a common world based on a notion of political or juridical equality. Instead, what crystalized this nexus between racial hierarchy and the beginnings of a global racialized imaginary was ultimately the proliferation of unrelenting violence necessary to maintain this order and to preclude its dismantlement.

In this introduction I wish to develop the theoretical lens that informs the historical story that makes up the following chapters. In particular, I want to explore why violence becomes an integral component of the processes of racialization that constituted the global as a specific racialized imaginary and why such racial violence becomes its ubiquitous feature over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To be sure, the history of what I call the global racial imaginary and its racial violence was not necessarily coterminous with the history of the state and its formation; it was never entirely institutionalized within the proto-state apparatuses that were congealing themselves on the frontiers of European empires.13 Racial violence could be perpetuated by a wide range of actors—slave traders, plantation owners, frontier settlers, and so on—who were involved in the various projects of colonial and imperial expansion. As time went forward, racial violence would come to fuse itself with state violence in catastrophic ways, leading to the genocidal projects of the twentieth century and fantasies of racial annihilation that completely overtook the logics of state reason. What then accounts for the proliferation of racialized violence? What explains the ferocity and intensity of such violence? In what follows I make the argument that racial violence represented a particular type of violence, a violence that reflects a crisis in the racial imaginary that structures the very “grid of intelligibility,” as Foucault would say—of the global as such.

International Relations and the Question of Racial Violence

The question of racial war or violence remains largely unexamined in the field of international relations. Due to ontological and epistemological commitments to the concepts of anarchy and state-centrism, racial violence is all too often seen as a consequence of domestic fragmentation. Largely conflated with “ethnic violence” under conditions of civil war, its occurrence is typically explained in terms of strategic action by elites.14 The global, by contrast, remains the domain in which nation-states engaged in a wide range of conflictual and cooperative actions under the conditions of anarchy. Nonetheless, these ontological commitments at the heart of the field are increasingly being called into question and raise interesting questions about the plurality of different forms of violence that can cut across the domestic and the international, and that challenge the predominance of anarchy and the central agency of the state.

In 1951 Hans Morgenthau published In Defense of the National Interest, which framed American foreign policy in terms of the fundamental transformations occurring in the global order after the Second World War. Morgenthau recognized that the dramatic racial transformations of the period reflected a fraying and a disintegration of the very hierarchies that made the global what it was for over two centuries.15 Europe’s decline, Morgenthau argues, “has brought in its wake a fundamental change in the relations between the white and colored races.”16 Europe’s predominance being at an end fundamentally implies for him that “European nations have lost the opportunity for relatively effortless and profitable expansion without necessarily interfering in each other’s interests.”17 Morgenthau goes on to describe the consequences of the rise of Asia in conjunction with Soviet Bolshevism, which “may well carry the gravest implications for the rest of the world.”18 An emancipated Asia will invariably be able to adapt Western technologies to its own benefit and essentially result in the “destruction of the delicate social mechanism of the modern state system.”19 What Morgenthau implies then is that this dismantlement of the European global order would usher in an unrestrained revolutionary violence that would challenge Western civilization itself. Morgenthau’s fears certainly reflect the zeitgeist of the early Cold War, which I explore in more depth in Chapter 6. But what is interesting to note is how much he (perhaps inchoately) attaches importance to a specifically Western-centric global hierarchy that is in crisis. It is such a crisis that opens up the very possibilities of a racialized violence that is distinguished from the rational and strategic violence between Western nation-states.

Morgenthau’s anxieties about civilizational decline and the global consequences echo down to Robert Gilpin’s classic 1981 book War and Change in World Politics. 20 Gilpin recognizes how the diffusion of technologies and ideas potentially makes the exercise of power by dominant powers increasingly costly. Implied is then the potential hegemonic disruption by peripheral powers outside of the bipolar order of his time. Nonetheless, Gilpin circumscribes his analysis within an anarchical system, which “the fundamental nature of international relations has not changed over the millennia,” and an overly materialist framework based on military, economic, and technological change.21

Gilpin’s understanding of world political and hegemonic conflict shares its ontological and epistemological assumptions with Kenneth Waltz’s reformulation of political realism. For Waltz, violence is a ubiquitous feature of human being in the world. International politics cannot be said to be inherently more dangerous than domestic politics.22 Nonetheless, to understand the centrality of violent outcomes in international politics throughout history is to accept a world defined by the lack of institutional mechanisms to adjudicate relations between predatory great powers. What differentiates the international is then this lack of institutional stratification to manage political disputes throughout history. For political realists like Waltz, the emphasis is on uncovering causal mechanisms that explain wars as “organized violence” between similar states, and thus the concern with particular forms of racial or cultural identity is incidental to the history of international politics.23 In this light, John A. Vasquez’s recent The War Puzzle Revisited presents itself as one of the more empirically grounded studies of war in international relations. For Vasquez, war is fundamentally tied to territorial disputes between neighbors. As he writes, “In the modern state system one of the main sets of factors that bring about war among equals is the rise of territorial disputes, particularly between neighbors, that in the absence or failure of a global institutional network to resolve the issue politically makes [sic] actors resort to unilateral solutions provided by power politics.”24 War, then, is all too often treated as consequence of a systemic condition of anarchy in which actors (states) find themselves unable to completely escape.

Rather than seeing war and violence as simply the inevitable consequence of certain ontological conditions, of the invariable changes resulting from shifts in material power, warfare can be understood through cultural motivations. Richard Ned Lebow extends the study of war to the fundamental motivations of “fear, interest and honor.”25 In essence, Lebow provides a cultural explanation for the persistence of warfare that isn’t centered on objective condition of a system; rather honor acts as a way of conditioning status hierarchy, which when challenged can provoke extraordinary violence. Lebow, however, doesn’t extent this insight to the formation and maintenance of racial hierarchies and the violence emanating from the creation of such a global racial order. Indeed, how such racialized violence becomes productive of a particular order is a crucial question. Here, Jens Bartelson’s concept of “ontogenetic war” is an important insight that sees war as not based on predetermined notions of identity or status, but rather constitutive of it. As Bartelson writes, “War does not occur as a result of prior enmity between actors whose identities and interests are given and known but is that which produces identities and interests as well as the patterns of enmity and friendship within which actors are embedded by fighting.”26 “War,” as Bartelson importantly continues,

is a primordial force that imposes structure on a world that otherwise would [be] too chaotic to be accessible to understanding and hence also beyond the reach of human intervention. Making war is therefore also making sense: war is not only a means of imposing order onto chaos but also a way of imposing meaning onto an otherwise enigmatic political world.27

Ontogenetic war captures the conjunction between the practices of, and ideas about, violence and the condition of creating the very order that comes to define the identity of the agents themselves. This opens up a way to conceptualize how the formation of the modern global order was itself crucially tied to the very notion of racial violence and to the creation and reification of a racialized hierarchy, and recognize that modern identity was predicated upon such violence and hierarchy. 28 Indeed, the problem remains the continued lack of attention to the very histories of racialized settler colonial and imperial violence that, all too often, fall outside of the various canonical frameworks of international relations.

In Global Race War, my concern is not only with the historical conditions of this racialized ontogenetic war, but also with the violence that emerges when the very meaning that defines such a hierarchical order begins to be challenged. What happens when the very hierarchies that are assumed to constitute the world come under stress and are in danger of being overturned? International relations scholars have made significant inroads in rethinking the importance of international hierarchy historically and conceptually. 29 Global history is rife with patterns of stratification that have come to constitute a whole multitude of agents. What is less apparent is what happens when those hierarchies that have come to define the very meaning of the global are radically called into question. The importance of ontogenetic war that Bartelson highlights is one side of the story of how to understand the connections between war and order; the other concerns the proliferation of violence when a hierarchical order is in crisis and put in question by those defined to be racially and culturally inferior.

While much of the literature on war and violence in international relations remains aloof to the historical importance of race, the field of international relations itself is beginning to acknowledge the importance of race for its own historical and intellectual development. Robert Vitalis’s White World Order, Black Power Politics called into question how international relations understood its own disciplinary history. 30 American political science as it emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries focused principally on race and empire, given America’s emergence as a global power. Political scientists were especially worried about racial conflict at home and abroad; questions about the administration of far-flung territories made up of alien (i.e., inferior) races were seen as relevant policy issues of the day. In other words, what Vitalis shows was that the origins of the “science” of international relations were certainly far from our contemporary theoretical focus on anarchy, state-centrism, and great power geopolitics. Its prevalent consideration revolved around the longevity of white supremacy, which was feared to be always at risk of being enervated by domestic (African Americans in Harlem) and foreign races.

Vitalis’s work, along with that of others who have called our attention to the issue of race in global politics, has left the door ajar for a continued critique of the racial foundations of our modern global order and our global politics.31 It is no longer tenable to accept without serious reservation the ontological assumptions that have defined the field of international relations since its mythological foundations after the Second World War. Such a mythos is largely predicated upon historical narratives about the emergence of a system or society of (European) states outside the histories of empire and racial hierarchy. Postcolonial theorists, in particular, have also shown for some time now the importance of rethinking global politics beyond the particularities and uniqueness of the Western historical experience.32 The question of race has come to the forefront of the field, not least because of Robert Vitalis’s disciplinary revisionism about what international relations meant to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American political scientists, but also given the renewed attention to previous writers—going back to W. E. B. Du Bois’s sociology and the Howard School—who have largely remained on the periphery of the field and never part of the canon. What I believe that such a disciplinary revisionist historiography accomplishes is to refocus our attention to the pervasiveness of race in creating and structuring a modern global order. This is what I explore as the global racial imaginary.

The Global Racial Imaginary

The rapid expansion of European settler colonialism beginning in the fifteenth century had profound ramifications for the emergence of the idea of the global. What emerged in the aftermath of the genocidal land appropriation in North and South America and the enslavement of Africans was a racialized transnational political economy that came to structure the very foundation of proto-capital accumulation and an imaginary of the global based on racial hierarchy. With respect to the former, Cedric Robinson famously argued that the rise of the “world system” was predicated upon what he calls the formation of “racial capitalism,” which itself emerged from an already racially striated European continent.33 Europe’s own internal “others” were already subject to forms of racialized dispossession, internal colonialism, and indentured servitude or slavery, which would provide the model for European expansion, appropriation of land, and enslavement of peoples across the centuries—essentially, building the global order. As Robinson writes, “Racism . . . was not simply a convention for ordering the relations of European to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the ‘internal’ relations of European peoples.”34 The important point that Robinson makes is that race should not be viewed as a form of ideological mystification that provides, in a sense, a cover for the violence of accumulation and dispossession at the heart of the European colonial project. “Racialism,” Robinson adds, should be understood as a “material force . . . [that] would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism.”35 In other words, what is at work here is a process of racialization that expanded across the planet and created a material and ideological reality in which racial difference and hierarchy came to be understood as constitutive of the order of things.36

What interests me, in particular, are the implications of this materialization of race for understanding the development of what I call a global racial imaginary. How is it that race can become itself a “material force” or embody a material reality that effectively constitutes the underlying intelligibility of social reality? This is of course not to suggest that race has any basis in a biological materiality; rather, as Michael Hanchard puts it, “[Racial] symbols, meanings and material practices distinguish dominant and subordinate subjects according to their racial categorizations. Race in this regard is not only a marker of phenotypical difference, but of status, class, and political power.”37 The sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has argued that racism cannot simply be viewed as the product of an irrational individual prejudice or of atavistic legacies; rather, racism is the consequence of processes of racialization, which, for Bonilla-Silva, “forms a real structure—that racialized groups are hierarchically ordered and ‘social relations’ and ‘practices’ emerge that fit the position of the groups in the racial regime.” As Bonilla-Silva continues,

The analytical crux for understanding racism is uncovering the mechanisms and practices (behaviors, styles, cultural affectations, traditions, and organizational procedures) at the social, economic, ideological, and political levels responsible for the reproduction of racial domination. I labeled my approach material because the views and behaviors of actors are fundamentally connected to their position [in] a racial regime.38

The materiality of racial order gives a sense of the solidity of racial hierarchies that congealed during moments of violent domination, which comes to be seen as entirely natural. To think the racial order in material terms is to understand that its ideological formation is predicated on the natural longevity of racial hierarchy across history—even if its content changes over time. It is this ideological configuration that gave intelligibility to the perpetuation of colonial subjugation that Europeans employed in the New World and the Atlantic slave trade and that would then form the basis of emergent global order of the nineteenth century. Thus, as Bonilla-Silva continues, “Racialized societies could not survive without ideology as it fulfills five vital functions, namely accounting for the existence of racial inequality, providing basic rules on engagement in interracial interactions, furnishing the basis for actors’ racial subjectivity, shaping and influencing the views of dominated actors, and, by claiming universality, hiding the fact of racial domination.”39 This racial ideology, when it comes to its role in the emergence of the global, I call the global racial imaginary.

A social imaginary, Charles Taylor argues, is how “people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.”40 A social imaginary reflects the manner in which “ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings, and this is not often expressed in theoretical terms, but is carried in images, stories, and legends.”41 Furthermore, Taylor adds, a social imaginary is not a theoretical vantage point by a minority but rather reflective of a constitutive understanding of the world that brings together a people as such. A social imaginary legitimizes practices that are typically seen as entirely natural and selfevident to the social life of the group. Taylor emphasizes the extent to which the social imaginary is akin to a “social map” and facilitates “how we stand to each other, how we got to where we are, how we relate to other groups, and so on.”42 Taylor does not, to be sure, extend his understanding of the social imaginary to the very processes of racialization that have come to be so important in modernity. To focus on race would certainly contradict his own objective, to show that modernity was the “order of mutual benefit” among individuals even under conditions of hierarchy. And yet it is here where the development of race plays a crucial role in defining the very “social map” that would implicate not only Western polities themselves but the very modern global order. A racial imaginary integrates the material and ideological foundations—the very “mechanisms and practices” Bonilla Silva refers to—and reflects specifically the placement of different groups within a hierarchical order. A racial imaginary then provides a “social map” in making that hierarchical order appear self-evident and entirely the natural byproduct of certain immanent societal developments rather than violent appropriation or domination. Extending the concept of the racial imaginary to the idea of the global, I claim that the very “images, stories, and legends” that made the global intelligible qua global came out of the long history of settler colonial appropriation and a transnational racial formation. The content of the global racial imaginary solidified itself in the eighteenth century with the acceleration of European colonial projects, particularly Franco-British colonization in North America, the Caribbean, and India. But it also began to crystalize with an entire intellectual foundation for rethinking the place and interactions with non-European peoples. The “social map” that inchoately developed throughout the eighteenth century rested upon a language rooted in the natural sciences and climate theory that would only be more fully developed in the following century. 43 The advent of a substantial travel literature and proto-ethnological and geographical knowledge would percolate a view of the immeasurable gulf, not only in civilizational attributes but in mental faculties, between Europeans and their “others,” especially in Africa and the western hemisphere. It created the very categories, classification schemes, and scientific typologies that would congeal in the racial science of the following century. And as a consequence, it created the very sensus communis that gave this political-economic global order its racialized hierarchy.

As I mentioned earlier, then, the acknowledgment of racially different peoples would have consequences for how Europeans imagined their own civil society and the state. Here Charles Mill’s notion of the racial contract is key. Mills shows that embedded in social contract theory is an epistemological claim that implicitly imagines the world it creates. What Mills calls the racial contract acknowledges that this epistemological assumption rests upon a demarcation at the heart of humanity in which whites (understood, ultimately “a set of power relations”) are to be distinguished from nonwhites.44 As Mills writes,

The Racial Contract is that set of formal and informal agreements or meta-agreements (higherlevel contracts about contracts, which set the limits of the contracts’ validity) between members of one subset of humans, henceforth designated by (shifting) “racial” (phenotypical/genealogical/cultural) criteria C1, C2, C3 . . . as “white,” and coextensive (making due allowance for gender differentiation) with the class of full persons, to categorize the remaining subset of humans as “nonwhite” and of a different and inferior moral status, subpersons, so that they have a subordinate civil standing in the white or white-ruled polities the whites either already inhabit or established or in transactions as aliens with these polities, and the moral and juridical rules normally regulating the behavior of whites in their dealings with one another either do not apply at all in dealings with nonwhites or apply only in a qualified form (depending in part on changing historical circumstances and what particular variety of nonwhite is involved), but in any case the general purpose of the Contract is always the differential privileging of the whites as a group with respect to the nonwhites as a group, the exploitation of their bodies, land, and resources, and the denial of equal socioeconomic opportunities to them.45

The racial contract, which forms ultimately the basis of a contractual society, “requires the intervention of white men, who are thereby positioned as already sociopolitical beings.”46 It as a consequence assumes that nonwhites bodies are restricted from the political space, “being judged incapable of forming or fully entering into a body politic.”47 As Mills notes, this idea of inability to form or enter the political can be traced back to Aristotle and the stark division between Greek and non-Greeks, for whom the latter were inherently or natural slaves. It comes then to structure an entire edifice of thought with respect to the Native Americans in the New World or to Africans, for whom the “Racial Contract establishes a fundamental partition in the social ontology of the planet” and thus relegates them to being “Untermenschen.”48 The racial contract, moreover, implicates the development of a European order of states. The field of international relations, which largely takes for granted the universalizable moment of the state system, reflected this racial contract.49 The intelligibility of the European order, as a society or community of sovereigns bound by a common set of rules limiting violence, was predicated on the exclusion of non-Europeans from such an order, all the while including them through violent expropriation and domination.

While the racial contract provides the theoretical or conceptual basis for understanding how domestic and international politics remains constituted on the basis of racial difference and hierarchy, the racial imaginary is the percolation of the racial contract into the everydayness of the lifeworld. What really connects Mill’s notion of the racial contract with the racial imaginary is the fear and anxiety of its potential dismantlement at the hands of so-called inferior races. Violence, then, becomes the ever-present practice meant to preclude what Mills calls the “ontological shudder [that] has been sent through the system of the white polity, calling forth what could be called the white terror to make sure that the foundations of the moral and political universe stay in place.”50

In this sense, I share a recognition of the historical and contemporary uniqueness of the racial violence that Afro-pessimism takes as central to the formation of Western modernity, as I alluded to previously. For Afropessimist theorists, the historical and contemporary connections with slavery’s gratuitous violence structurally permeate, specifically, American society to the present with the proliferation of violence against Black bodies by a whole host of state institutions. Such violence cannot be taken as strictly instrumental, however. Rather, as Frank B. Wilderson III argues, “Violence against Black people is a mechanism for the usurpation of subjectivity, of life, of being.”51 Such violence maintains, as Wilderson continues, the “psychic stability in all others who are not slaves.”52 Wilderson then contrasts this with the genocidal violence perpetuated against Native Americans. Such genocidal violence is for him reflective of a “usurpation of cartography, of space” and holds a different ontological status than the violence perpetuated against Black life.53 However, this juxtaposition between genocidal violence as constitutive of liberal “white” modernity versus its instrumentalization as a settler-colonial or imperial project has the (unintended) consequence of creating an a priori ontological chasm: the genocide of Black lives becomes a congealed and reified ahistorical (i.e., depoliticized) structure, whereas the genocide of Native Americas is of history. 54 Rather than assuming such a profound ontological and ultimately ethical chasm, it is perhaps more useful to think in terms of an ontology plasticity to describe the historical transformations of the very “destructive processes” at the heart of the global racial imaginary. Following Catherine Malabou’s work on plasticity, which for her signifies the alteration of form, Benjamin Meiches argues that genocidal “destructive processes exhibit ontological features of plasticity insofar as they form, reform and transform themselves and others in the process of unfolding.”55 Thinking in terms of an ontology of plasticity reveals instead that “destructive processes . . . become horrifyingly creative or productive.” And as Meiches continues, “These transformations . . . invent new scales, intensities, and forms of violence that develop in unforeseeable ways, a mutation of violence that does not obey a taxonomy of different stages or levels, but that would emerge as the capacity for relations of violence to undergo self-reformation and transformation.”56 Such an ontology would consider the various historical moments that congealed the global as racial hierarchy to continue to contribute to the “self-reformation and transformation” of racialized violence as necessarily constitutive of the global racial imaginary. Put differently, the “genocidal usurpation of subjectivity” is always historically co-constitutive with the “usurpation of cartography or space” that has made up the modern Western settler-colonial project over the past four centuries.

Race War

As the European colonial and imperial projects across the planet proceeded apace, the deployment of racial ideology as an imaginary became increasingly accepted as a natural feature of the social fabric of the global. But what is important to recognize is that the racialization of the global could never be an entirely smooth process. Racialization is always a process of contestation. As Bonilla-Silva writes, “Because races are always in a relation of opposition, racial contestation is the crucial driving force of any racialized social system.”57 But what does this mean for understanding the global racial imaginary? If, as Taylor argues, the imaginary is a social map that helps us navigate the placement of different groups, that tells us what to expect from our relations with others, the processes of contestation at the heart of the global racial imaginary are always, in a sense, putting into question such relations or expectations. In other words, there’s always an inherent instability—an “ontological shudder,” as Mills calls it—within the global racial imaginary that provokes incessant anxiety and fear that the racial hierarchies are themselves prone to crisis and violent upheaval. Hence the surfeit of violence comes out of this very instability of a racialized imaginary. Any crisis or calling into question of white supremacy, then, is met with extraordinary and creative violence unrestrained by the very rules that make up a common political world. As I discuss in Chapter 1, the Haitian Revolution was such an event. Faced with a slave insurrection, the French imagine that their only response is the extermination of the Black population and its replacement with new slaves. Such fantasies and fears of racial annihilation that the revolution embodied —especially in the aftermath of the liquidation of the white population by Dessalines in 1804—represented the credible vision of what happens to a racially mixed society when white supremacy is undermined. This fear was particularly prevalent in the early American Republic with its own growing enslaved population. By the early twentieth century (Chapter 4), racial violence and annihilation become the language through which to understand the degeneration of multiethnic empires and what the American ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Henry Morgenthau, describes as the racial murder of the Armenians in 1915. By the 1940s, the project of Nazi genocide (Chapter 5) as racial annihilation is entirely predicated on not only the biopolitical fear and anxiety of infiltration and contamination, but the larger necessity of radically destroying any political structure that stands in the way of racial differentiation and hierarchy.

The violence of racial war is a violence imagined à outrance. It is not subject to the restraints of war politically defined by any sense of mutual recognition. In this sense, it characterizes the settler-colonial projects on the global periphery. And yet, in dialectical fashion, it defines the very parameters of what is supposed to be the political world. Hence, for example, racial war is often described as the type of conflict that occurs outside the politico-juridical boundaries of Europe. Duncan Bell quotes a remarkable passage from the late nineteenth-century historian W. E. H. Lecky from his 1893 essay “The Empire: Its Value and Its Growth”:

Remember what India had been for countless ages before the establishment of British rule. Think of the endless wars of race and creed, its savage oppressions, its fierce anarchies, its barbarous customs, and then consider what it is to have established for some many years over the vast space of the Himalayas to Cape Comorin a reign of perfect peace; to have conferred upon more than 250 millions of the human race perfect religious freedom, perfect security of life, liberty, and property; to have planted in the midst of these teeming multitudes a strong central government, enlightened by the best knowledge of Western Europe, and steadily occupied in preventing famine, alleviating disease, extirpating savage customs, multiplying the agencies of civilization and progress.58

The passage is, first of all, an illustration of what Mills refers to as an “epistemology of ignorance” in which misrepresentation aids in the project of empire and the legitimacy and maintenance of racial hierarchies.59 Of course, it bears little or almost no resemblance to what precolonial India actually was. However, it conveys to the reader an imaginary space without history—“countless ages”—a space of “teaming multitudes” wracked by “savage customs” and mired in “endless wars of race and creed.”60 While British imperial rule represents “civilization and progress” versus the anarchy and chaos of native government, it highlights in the mind of the reader the very idea that a world without European supremacy will invariably be one where such civilization and progress comes to an end and the “endless wars of race and creed” return. British imperial rule, and. in fact, the indefinite domination of Western/white civilization, is then a prophylaxis against the very chaos and “barbarity” that always lurks in the background. A few decades later, Lothrop Stoddard, the infamous American racist writer, emphasized this ever-present threat by conflating civilization with race: “If white civilization goes down, the white race is irredeemably ruined. It will be swamped by the triumphant colored races, who will obliterate the white man by elimination or absorption.”61 The defense of “civilization” is a racialized defense that comes to play an important role in post–Second World War Western discourse. Indeed, as I argue in Chapters 8 and 9, references to civilization and civilizational conflict represents another form of racialization of the global imaginary and a fear of a world in which white Western supremacy will no longer endure. From Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” to so-called theories of population replacement, or the “Great Replacement,” at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there is this unremitting assumption that Western civilization is always threatened by an encroaching racialized other.

The concept of race war here serves not just as Michel Foucault articulated it in his important 1975–76 lectures at the Collège de France, as a counter-history or counter-concept that ultimately fuses itself to state practice. As Foucault saw it, race war as a concept evolved from an aristocratic description of the incessant internal conflicts between rival groups to its fusion with state practice as a way of defining the survivability of a population and legitimation of sovereign power to excise such biopolitical threats.62 Modern biopolitical state power, Foucault argues, operationalizes “racism that society will direct against itself, against its own elements, and its own products. This is the internal racism of permanent purification, and it will become one of the basic dimensions of social normalization.”63 The salience of Foucault’s analysis of the nexus between race war and state power is the extraordinary malleability of its deployment by a variety of modern states. Though Foucault’s genealogy of sovereign and biopolitical power remains a crucial history of the modern state, its goal of elucidating the inner working of biopower ends up neglecting the very prevalence of racial conflict as a conflict between different races. As Alexander Weheliye shows, Foucault’s notion of the biopolitical rests upon a set of spatiotemporal and geographical assumptions that ultimately reflect colonialist discourses of the natural and inevitable confrontation between non-European races (ethnic racism) versus a race and racism internal to European political history (biopolitics). As Weheliye writes, “Foucault never interrogates the bare existence of racial difference and those hierarchies fabricated upon this primordial notion and, as a result, reinscribes racial difference as natural.”64 By relegating what Weheliye calls “ethnic racism” to the geohistorical periphery in order to emphasize the development of the biopolitical in the West, Foucault misses the continued importance (of alternative forms of) racial war to structure not just state biopower but especially the very ontological and normative ideal of a world worth living for. When 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 polities from the global South—what Mbembe calls a “fantasy of annihilation” is resurrected. “This fantasy,” Mbembe writes, “is present in every context in which social forces tend to conceive the political as a struggle to the death against unconditional enemies. Such struggle is then qualified as existential. It is a struggle with no possibility of mutual recognition, and even less of reconciliation.”65 Race war is the outcome, for Mbembe, of a metaphysics of Western universality unable to think “through its own finitude.”66 In other words, it is easier to imagine the end of the world, a “purification by fire,” as Mbembe puts it, than to share it with others.67