Race and Liberal Foreign Policy

Session Submission Type: Virtual Roundtable

Session Description

This roundtable consolidates and builds on the results of a forthcoming special issue of the journal Security Studies investigating the many ways in which race has shaped and continues to shape liberal foreign policy. For decades, scholars and policymakers have too often omitted racial considerations from their analyses of international security, U.S. foreign policy, and international organizations like the United Nations and NATO. The very label “liberal international order” implicitly attributes a dispassionate, post-racial character to international interactions by assuming that their conduct and motivations accord with liberal norms and values. Even as critics question how purely U.S. foreign policy reflects liberal ideology, their critiques have been rooted largely in a realist tradition that itself downplays the significance of racial identities and biases. This inattention to race contrasts sharply with its prominent role in the origins of academic IR, which has been increasingly recognized within the field following 2020’s protests against racial injustice.

The contributors fill two notable gaps within the current state of security studies research. The first is a substantive gap: the existing literatures on U.S. foreign policy and security studies have largely ignored considerations of race. The perceived rise and fall of U.S. unipolarity has spurred vibrant research on the subject of international order, and the web of institutions and relationships crafted by the United States and its allies after World War II has accordingly taken center stage in analyses of U.S. foreign policy and the future of international security. Yet major debates concerning the extent and endurance of U.S. hegemony, the strategic implications of China’s rise, and the emergence of illiberal domestic forces within the United States and Europe have come and gone with little attention to the role of race. The second gap lies in bridging the chasm between existing critical/postcolonial scholarship on race and international relations and “traditional” security studies in the United States.

The special issue that forms the basis for this roundtable features seven essays divided into two sections. The first section, containing the first three essays, focuses on race and the origins of the liberal international order. Richard Maass opens the issue by confronting the sterilization of race from current debates about the liberal international order. He argues that the relatively benign hegemony on which that order was built owed not to liberalism alone but rather to its marriage with racism, testing that argument through historical case studies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy and examining how it generated an enduring security challenge—the benign hegemon’s dilemma. The second essay sees Amitav Acharya and Randolph Persaud confront the neglect of race in IR theory, the liberal international order’s normative preoccupation with system stability over change, and the Eurocentric bias of its core assumptions and institutional practices, offering a framework for a humane world order based on post/de-colonial and Global IR perspectives as an alternative to the liberal international order. In the third essay, Stephen Pampinella and Tobias Lemke examine how the founders of the liberal international order intentionally removed considerations of race from their institutional plans, as racial stratification within the United States and Australia drove opposition to Japan’s proposal to include a racial equality clause during negotiations over the League of Nations Covenant.

The second section, containing four essays, focuses on race and the operations of the liberal international order. First, Carla Norrlof examines how domestic dilemmas of racial inequality have created both a permissive environment for far-right populism and a backlash undermining U.S. international security provision and the liberal international order itself. Second, Stacie Goddard and Paul MacDonald investigate the operationalization of U.S. security provision abroad, highlighting how racialized conceptions of the adversary have been used to justify a peculiar approach to warfare in the name of pacifying the liberal international order. Third, Mark Ledwidge investigates how U.S. leaders have generated and lost soft power by manipulating U.S. race relations, focusing on case studies of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Donald Trump. Finally, Bianca Freeman studies how racial discrimination within host countries has shaped U.S. decisions to share jurisdiction under Status of Forces Agreements in order to limit exposure of its racially heterogenous forces in countries displaying higher levels of racial discrimination within their court systems.

Sub Unit

• Division 19: International Security 

Chair

• Richard W. Maass Old Dominion University

Presenters

• Randolph B. Persaud

• Stacie E. Goddard Wellesley College

• Paul K. MacDonald Wellesley College

• Bianca Freeman University of California, San Diego

• Stephen Pampinella SUNY New Paltz

• Tobias Lemke University of Delaware

• Paul Higate University of Bristol

• Nivi Manchanda