Racialization in History and Theory: The World Wars and International Relations

• In Event: Legacies of Race and Empire in IR and World Politics

Abstract

The world wars were struggles for domination among race-based empires, waged by leaders who endorsed racist ideologies, featured several of the worst genocides in history, saw the widespread domestic persecution of racial minorities, and ended up sustaining imperial and segregationist political systems. They were also the foundational events that inspired much of modern international relations theory, a field which is currently reckoning with its decades-long neglect of racialized dynamics. Why then did predominant international relations theories end up neglecting dynamics that were so central to the historical events that gave rise to the field, and what does that say about the relationship between history and theory?

In this essay, we interrogate the ways in which racialized dynamics shape events, the historical narratives through which actors subsequently understand those events, and the theories scholars build based on those historical narratives. Taking as our starting point the axiom that the root of all theory is history—in other words, that scholars develop theories in an effort to generalize from the empirical narratives through which they understand the past—we develop a new typology of racialized dynamics spanning both the study and practice of international relations. In doing so, we focus not only on policymaking aspects like threat perception and the use of force but also academic aspects like the decisions where in time to bound a historical case study and through whose perspectives to assess the meanings and significance of events. We use this typology to identify specific ways in which racialized aspects of the construction of historical narratives came into tension with racialized aspects of the events they were intended to illuminate, examining how the former overrode the latter in the development of international relations theory during the second half of the 20th century.

We illustrate these arguments by interrogating numerous aspects of the world wars era, including many that were commonly omitted from the major narratives that went on to inform international relations theory. Examples include the Russo-Japanese War, Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, and the continuation of anticolonial conflicts before, during, and after the world wars. Drawing on contemporaneous observers whose perspectives differed from those that came to dominate the field, we demonstrate how those dominant perspectives obscured the centrality of racialized dynamics within the world wars and within world politics more generally. Our findings shed fresh light on the relationship between history and theory while simultaneously helping the contemporary field move forward reintegrating considerations of race and security.

Authors

• Richard W. Maass, Old Dominion University

• Robbie Shilliam, Johns Hopkins University