Race and Racism in Foreign Policy

Session Submission Type: Virtual Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Race and racism have been, and continue to be, central to the content and conduct of United States (U.S.) foreign policy. Despite the salience of race to U.S. foreign policy, research within international relations (IR) has paid little attention to this subject. This panel showcases new work on race and foreign policy to contribute to renewed interest in the topic. Two papers focus at the level of government and bureaucracy. Using discourse in the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), Austin Carson, Eric Min, and Maya Van Nuys explore the role of race in bureaucratic assessments of foreign leaders. The authors find evidence of the pervasive influence of racial thinking in intelligence materials. In the second paper, Bianca Freeman explores why the U.S. shares jurisdiction under some Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs) and not others. Freeman’s results indicate that the U.S. may alter the jurisdiction of SOFAs to limit troop exposure to court systems that exhibit higher levels of racial discrimination. The next two papers focus on the influence of race on public attitudes toward foreign policy. Naima Green-Riley and Andrew Leber use historical surveys and an original survey design to investigate the role of race and ethnicity in U.S. public support for the use of force. Green-Riley and Leber find that non-white groups display markedly less enthusiasm for the use of force abroad than their white counterparts. Finally, Cleo O’Brien-Udry and Lauren Ferry investigate how citizens update their perceptions of state rankings in the international system using online information experiments. The findings indicate that white respondents are less likely than Black respondents to alter state rankings as a result of status-altering events. The papers presented in this panel significantly improve our understanding of the impact of race and racism on U.S. foreign policy at multiple levels. The conclusions highlight the salience of race in bureaucratic decision-making as well as public opinion on foreign policy. These findings will benefit future scholarship addressing the influence of race and racism for other nations’ foreign policy and for other aspects of global politics.

Sub Unit

• Division 20: Foreign Policy

Individual Presentations

• Race and Racism in President’s Daily Briefs (1961-1977) - Maya Van Nuys, University of Chicago; Austin Carson, University of Chicago; Eric Min, UCLA

• Racial Discrimination and Jurisdiction in Status of Forces Agreements - Bianca Freeman, University of California, San Diego

• Intervening Variables: Race and Preferences Towards the Use of Force - Andrew Leber, Harvard University; Naima Green-Riley, Harvard University

• Turning the Tables? Status Stability and Race in the International System - Cleo Marie O'Brien-Udry, Yale University; Lauren Elizabeth Ferry, University of Mississippi

Chair

• Randolph B. Persaud

Discussants

• Zoltan I. Buzas University of Notre Dame

• D.G. Kim University of California, San Diego