{"title":"What is race? Epistemic ambiguity and liberal international order","authors":"K. Abraham","doi":"10.1093/ia/iiae129","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n There is increasing interest in how anticolonial actors advanced a norm of racial equality in mid-century formations of liberal international order (LIO). Less attention, however, is afforded to simultaneous epistemic conflicts over the scientific object of ‘race’ and their political effects. During postwar order-building and alongside political struggles for racial equality, there was wide and deep scientific debate on the analytical utility of race as a means to categorize human diversity. Race, I demonstrate, was rendered as epistemically ambiguous, caught between social scientists and philosophers who understood it as a social construct akin to ethnicity and natural scientists who maintained a biological basis. This split was not confined to academic debate but shaped political and normative struggles over the institutionalization of racial equality in LIO. Adopting an object-oriented approach, I argue that the epistemic ambiguity of race generated political effects, at once permitting the reproduction of colonial logics in LIO as well as providing latitude for strategies of resistance. Rather than a linear causal effect, I empirically map the work that epistemic ambiguity performed in the creation of mid-century international order.","PeriodicalId":3,"journal":{"name":"ACS Applied Electronic Materials","volume":"2013 20","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.3000,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"ACS Applied Electronic Materials","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiae129","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"材料科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ENGINEERING, ELECTRICAL & ELECTRONIC","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
There is increasing interest in how anticolonial actors advanced a norm of racial equality in mid-century formations of liberal international order (LIO). Less attention, however, is afforded to simultaneous epistemic conflicts over the scientific object of ‘race’ and their political effects. During postwar order-building and alongside political struggles for racial equality, there was wide and deep scientific debate on the analytical utility of race as a means to categorize human diversity. Race, I demonstrate, was rendered as epistemically ambiguous, caught between social scientists and philosophers who understood it as a social construct akin to ethnicity and natural scientists who maintained a biological basis. This split was not confined to academic debate but shaped political and normative struggles over the institutionalization of racial equality in LIO. Adopting an object-oriented approach, I argue that the epistemic ambiguity of race generated political effects, at once permitting the reproduction of colonial logics in LIO as well as providing latitude for strategies of resistance. Rather than a linear causal effect, I empirically map the work that epistemic ambiguity performed in the creation of mid-century international order.
期刊介绍:
ACS Applied Electronic Materials is an interdisciplinary journal publishing original research covering all aspects of electronic materials. The journal is devoted to reports of new and original experimental and theoretical research of an applied nature that integrate knowledge in the areas of materials science, engineering, optics, physics, and chemistry into important applications of electronic materials. Sample research topics that span the journal's scope are inorganic, organic, ionic and polymeric materials with properties that include conducting, semiconducting, superconducting, insulating, dielectric, magnetic, optoelectronic, piezoelectric, ferroelectric and thermoelectric.
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