FORUM: Stripping Away the Body: Prospects for Reimagining Race in IR

Abstract

Abstract It is impossible to talk about race in international relations (IR) without acknowledging the early and groundbreaking intervention of a couple of special issues, followed by conversation-changing book anthologies. Despite these contributions, mainstream IR continues to marginalize the valuable work of non-white institutions and people, while minimizing the role of race and racism in the discipline. In the wake of a historic racial uprising in the United States (and globally) during the summer of 2020, IR scholars returned to critical discussions of race and racism in the contemporary moment. Although the current conversations on race in IR are crucial for directing the field toward a more generative path, there is still work to be done. Many of the existing formulations of race orient the concept around the somatic. The overreliance on the body as an indication of race can obscure how race as a set of dispossessing structures supported and reproduced through a variety of agents and mechanisms can be discerned through other means. Body-centric conceptualizations of race are also typically divorced from their origins at the root of capitalism, in favor of more US-centric renderings of race as identity. The contributors to this forum think through race as the concomitant othering and rank-ordering of groups that translates into material conditions. We illustrate how race as a material–spatial–temporal relation of power exposes the limits of race as merely phenotype or culture. Through our examination of race in this light, issues of gender effortlessly emerge alongside the study of race. As such, we demonstrate how a re-reading of IR with this formulation of race as its central tenet offers a more generative avenue for explorations of class, gender, security, and power, writ large.