Racism and global war in world politics: As obvious as it is ignored

Abstract

Contemporaneous theorizing of the Howard School of IR theory on the role of white supremacism in WWI implied a more general relationship between racial imperialism and global war, which we examine in this essay. Taking as its point of departure Rosenau’s (1970) admonition that mainstream IR seemed to ignore issues of racism in world politics even as a ‘surfeit’ of models existed that were applicable to the subject, we attempt to show how the ‘norm against noticing’ racism in IR could’ve been addressed utilizing resources available to Rosenau’s contemporaries more than a half century ago on an issue of major concern to mainstream IR at the time (and today): global war. Our analysis of global wars that were a major focus of mainstream studies of war during the Cold War era (e.g. the War of Jenkins’ Ear, the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, WWI and WWII) reveals that racism was attendant to these wars with respect to the impact of racial imperialism in each of them. Nevertheless, the relationship between racism and global war has been largely absent in influential studies in IR; and this absence converges not only with the norm against noticing, but calls into question our ability to adequately, much less accurately, account for these wars, in particular, and to build theory that explains important phenomena in IR, more generally.