Critical privilege studies: Making visible the reproduction of racism in the everyday and international relations

Abstract

The world is undeniably in trouble. Crises and corollary insecurities are legible everywhere, marked by environmental degradation, healthcare panics, stark inequalities, militarized conflicts, and the rise of authoritarian movements and virulent alt-right populisms. That racism figures in producing and structuring these entwined crises is widely recognized, and, given its disciplinary remit, international relations is best positioned to examine ‘the link between race as a structuring principle and the transnational processes of accumulation, dispossession, violence and struggle that emerge in its wake’ (Anievas et al., 2015: 9). Yet international relations’ problematic engagement with race is now well-documented,1 including the discipline’s ‘origin’ as an imperial racist project (Vitalis, 2015), the ‘willful amnesia’ that this encouraged (Krishna, 2001: 401), and the legacy of ‘racist epistemological assumptions that inform much of contemporary mainstream and even critical analyses of world politics’ (Sajed, 2016a: 168; see also Grovogui, 1996; Hobson, 2012; Gruffydd Jones, 2016). Revisiting points made in his 1997 book, Charles Mills (2015b: 542) concludes that ‘the racial contract is very much alive and well . . . and the “epistemology of ignorance” that now guards it is as active as ever’. But the problem is larger. Despite abundant evidence of institutionalized racism, international relations persists not only in habitual neglect and a deeply flawed theorization of race, but also in actively resisting, marginalizing, depoliticizing, and hence devalorizing anti-racist research and those who produce it (Bhambra et al., 2020; Chowdhry and Rai, 2009; El-Malik, 2015; Shilliam, 2020; Vitalis, 2015). Given epistemological priorities, we might expect this resistance by conventionally ahistorical, non-reflexive mainstream scholars. But it is unexpected and poses fundamental questions when ardent resistance to critique is practiced by self-identified critical scholars, whose objectives presumably extend beyond the production of ‘more accurate descriptions’ to include the reduction, or at least mitigation, of structural violence. How is it possible for those who