Racialization and International Security

Racialization fundamentally shapes the exercise of political power, and it deserves thorough consideration within security studies.¹ Understood as the processes that infuse social and political phenomena with racial identities and implications, racialization is itself an assertion of power, interweaving purportedly inherent differences with patterns of authority and violence throughout the modern era. Despite the field's consistent interest in power,² international security studies in the United States largely omitted racial dynamics from decades of debates over international conflict and cooperation, nuclear proliferation, power transitions, unipolarity, civil wars, terrorism, international order, grand strategy, and other subjects.³ Even amid growing recognition of this “willful amnesia,” there remains substantial uncertainty regarding how best to reintegrate the studies of race and security.⁴ This article jump-starts that process by laying conceptual bedrock, charting promising research opportunities, cultivating interdisciplinary dialogues, and bringing a wide range of related scholarship to bear on key questions of international security.⁵

The observation that race and security are intertwined was not always a provocative one. When U.S. President Woodrow Wilson learned of Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917, he expressed an instinct to refrain from declaring war “in order to keep the white race or part of it strong to meet the yellow race—Japan, for instance, in alliance with Russia, dominating China.” Several cabinet members were “much impressed with the president's long look ahead,” but U.S. Secretary of Agriculture David Houston wrote that he was “not apprehensive in the least about Japan, or about Japan, Russia, and China combined,” because “they were relatively weak intellectually, industrially, and morally” and “at best, the danger from them was remote.”⁶ The fact that Wilson, famed liberal ideologist and “father of the League of Nations,”⁷ so readily anticipated a global race war—and that his cabinet engaged the notion using a shared language of racial hierarchy—illustrates how racialized worldviews can shape decisions for war and peace.⁸

Indeed, the modern study and practice of international security grew from racialized topsoil. As Alexander Barder argues, “the very notion of the global” was built on presumptions of racial hierarchy “that took for granted the idea that certain peoples were to be considered naturally inferior and hence exploitable for a wide range of purposes.”⁹ World politics were imperial politics from the fifteenth to the twentieth century: European powers knit formerly isolated regions into a global system of racialized orders, extracting wealth from others’ land and labor, and colonial competition and pacification fueled pervasive violence.¹⁰ Security-minded scholars in the early twentieth century debated questions of “race development” and “imperial administration,” with the Journal of Race Development serving as precursor to the modern Foreign Affairs.¹¹ W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain LeRoy Locke, and others responded with penetrating critiques of race-based imperialism, war, and domestic discrimination.¹² Whether they stood for or against racial equality, everyone recognized race as a fundamental concept in world politics.

One hundred years later, that consensus had been lost. After World War II, transnational movements tore down the normative scaffolding of white supremacy as a source of domestic and international legitimacy by harnessing Holocaust revelations, decolonization struggles, and Cold War pressures to inspire recognition that racism is morally wrong.¹³ Politicians accordingly cleansed overt racism from most public discourse, recasting their rhetoric in nonracial and post-racial terms.¹⁴ The academy mirrored this trend, and by the 1980s began to exclude racial considerations from theories of conflict and cooperation,¹⁵ under the mistaken assumption that they now held little significance for international security.¹⁶ By the 1990s, the preponderance of rationalist and materialist perspectives transformed the argument that “ideas matter” from a self-evident conventional wisdom into a scholarly revolution.¹⁷ Yet even as concepts like ideology, norms, status, and religion began regaining the spotlight, race remained backstage into the first decade of the twenty-first century.¹⁸

This is especially noteworthy given the field's enduring preoccupation with the world wars. Both World War I and World War II were struggles for domination among explicitly race-based empires. They were waged by leaders who openly endorsed racist ideologies, and they featured widespread racialized violence, including several of the worst genocides in history.¹⁹ The same policymakers who garnered praise for designing liberal postwar orders also preserved race-based imperial and segregationist systems, acted on racialized fears abroad, and persecuted racial minorities at home.²⁰ Nevertheless, theories of war, deterrence, security dilemmas, military doctrines, and power shifts routinely omitted racialized considerations, treating even Adolf Hitler's racist ideology and the Holocaust as footnote-worthy aberrations rather than core subjects of interest.²¹ Among the many good reasons to revitalize the study of racialization, its saturation of these foundational cases highlights a disconnect that has primed the field for theoretical innovation.

This article aims to catalyze such innovation across seven sections. Its first section establishes racialization as a concept with profound strategic and distributional consequences, situating it as a core subject of interest to security scholars and laying conceptual foundations to constructively approach related questions. The second section addresses research design challenges associated with the study of race. It explores several advantages of focusing on racialization and develops a framework to consider its overt and embedded forms in the study and practice of international security. Using that framework, sections three to six identify many promising opportunities to examine racialization within both existing and new research agendas. Finally, the conclusion explores questions spanning the framework's internal boundaries and implications for academia and policymaking. Collectively, these discussions aim to cultivate productive interdisciplinary dialogues by bringing a wide range of relevant work by critical and postcolonial scholars, historians, sociologists, political scientists, and others to bear on key questions of international security.

What is racialization, and why should it concern scholars of international security? Whereas public discussions often employ the related concept of “race,” I argue that security scholars should prioritize “racialization”—the processes that infuse social and political phenomena with racial identities and implications.²² Race is socially constructed, and the ways in which it is created, propagated, and institutionalized inherently entail assertions of power. This section examines how historically contingent and context-specific factors generate racial identities, which function as socially imposed mechanisms of essentialization. In doing so, it underscores the relevance of racialization to international security, within which there is no concept more pivotal than power.

Race is an idea, not a physical property—a claim that certain groups share collective identities, mutual interests, and inherent qualities based on common descent or physical likeness. Widespread understandings of this claim shape real-world behavior, despite it lacking any physical (in this case, genetic) foundations. Accordingly, scholars recognize race as socially constructed; in Tukufu Zuberi's words, “It is the international belief in race as real that makes race real in its social consequences.”²³ Europeans began widely employing the term during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries “to designate a set of persons, animals or plants connected by common descent or origin” that might reveal “where they belonged in God's creation.”²⁴ They linked the resulting racial categories to presumptions of their own superiority by accelerating exploration, enslavement, and imperialism, sparking protracted debates between emerging racialized worldviews and biblical teachings of a unified humanity.²⁵ Amid a broader intellectual shift from seeing “man as a cultural, social, spiritual being … to [seeing] man as a biological being,” scientists began arguing during the early 1800s that certain physical traits corresponded to levels of civilizational achievement. Such arguments helped entrench racialized hierarchies at the local, national, and global levels.²⁶

Yet even as the global color line became a defining feature of the international system, a century of efforts ultimately failed to identify any genetic differences that aligned with racial cleavages within or across societies.²⁷ As Roxanne Doty observes, “Race does not follow from colour in any direct way. Human variation and difference have not been experienced as they ‘really are’ but by and through metaphorical systems that structure the experience and understanding of difference.”²⁸ Accordingly, the content and meaning of race have varied across societies and changed over time, filtering through unique local histories to produce diverse and enduring legacies.²⁹ While Brazil developed a complex racial typology and an ideology of “race mixture or miscegenation,” for example, India's caste system was molded to reflect the racialized worldviews of its nineteenth-century British colonizers.³⁰ Despite its own relatively stark domestic “color line,” the United States initially racialized immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and elsewhere as non-white before later enveloping them into the “Caucasian race.”³¹ That identity itself emerged during the eighteenth century, declined by the late nineteenth century, and was revived amid rejection of the alternative “Aryan race” concept after World War II.³²

Such variance in discursive patterns and ideational content situates race among other socially constructed phenomena that shape international security, such as ideology, religion, and norms.³³ Race stands apart from those other factors, however, in the extent to which the concept itself is suffused with power. Racial identities are not just socially constructed but also socially imposed—applied to individuals by domestic or international society.³⁴ As comparative identities defined in defiance of genetics, their very imposition is an assertion of power that warps social reality and facilitates discrimination in ways that alter physical reality in turn. With imperialism hardening the concept, adapting it to diverse contexts, and diffusing it around the world, race assumed its consequential role as a site for claims to power via racism (prejudice rooted in the purported superiority of one racialized group over another) and other less explicit avenues.³⁵ From Europe to Africa, the Americas, and Asia, ruling elites used racial identities to subordinate Indigenous peoples and reinforce hierarchical orders, generating inequities of property, legal rights, and political access based on presumptions about others’ inherent and inherited inferiority.³⁶ As Robbie Shilliam writes, racialization has “never been a passive project.”³⁷

Power is intrinsic to race because racialization is essentialization. Not only do racial identities categorize people using physical markers; they tether those markers to myths about the essential natures of different groups. In doing so, they gain a potency that extends beyond the exploitative practices that often accompany them. As Michael Omi and Howard Winant write, “Perceived differences in skin color, physical build, hair texture, the structure of cheek bones, the shape of the nose, or the presence/absence of an epicanthic fold are understood as the manifestations of more profound differences that are situated within racially identified persons: differences in such qualities as intelligence, athletic ability, temperament, and sexuality, among other traits [italics in original].”³⁸ Once broad swathes of a society attribute relative qualities, competing interests, and appropriate social roles to assumptions about the inherent natures of different groups, racial identities become virtually inescapable. This “illusion that racial identity is natural and fixed, rather than social and changeable” distinguishes it from related concepts such as ethnic or national identities and contributes directly to its potency.³⁹ Racialization is thus a key dimension of the broader question regarding how actors assert power over others.⁴⁰

In short, racialization is a core conceptual and empirical subject of interest to scholars of international security. Not only has it been used for centuries to launder supremacy and facilitate violence, but racialization itself consists of an assertion of power that reshapes perceived interests and threats. Whereas centering the concept of race may implicitly reinforce static perspectives on the subject, moreover, racialization emphasizes “dynamic” and “historically specific, ideological” processes that draw from “pre-existing discursive elements and … competing political projects and ideas” to generate racial identities and implications through discourse, practice, and institutionalization.⁴¹ The next section further explores why this dynamic concept offers the most useful starting point for scholars to engage questions of race and security.

How should scholars approach the task of integrating racialization into existing research agendas in international security and initiating new ones? Several research design challenges stand in the way—including whether to study it at all, how to handle such a thorny subject, how theories should account for its complexity, how to test related hypotheses empirically, and where to even begin incorporating it after decades of widespread neglect. This section addresses each of these challenges, discussing advantages that the racialization concept offers and developing a framework for considering its various roles in international security.

The first challenge is whether to study racialization at all. Some see race as a dangerous illusion that deserves to be eliminated from the academic lexicon—inaccurate at best (referencing supposedly natural differences that do not actually exist) and destructive at worst (instrumental in tremendous human suffering).⁴² Others judge it a niche subject, only tangentially related to questions of war and peace.⁴³ But ignoring racialized dynamics does not diminish their social, political, and material consequences. Moreover, portrayals of the modern international system or powerful states within it as color-blind or post-racial have been roundly debunked.⁴⁴ Indeed, the literature assembled throughout this article suggests that racialization's influence rather than its absence should be the implicit null hypothesis of much international security research. Given what is known about its prevalence throughout the modern international system, scholars should strongly suspect that racialization had to shape a wide variety of interactions and outcomes relevant to international security.⁴⁵

A second challenge emerges from the recognition that how scholars handle race in the present affects its conceptual future. Academic research represents one among many forms of social discourse through which concepts such as race are contested and reconstructed. Academia occupies a position of authority in society and, it is important to remember, it actively participated in hardening racialized worldviews during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through “scientific racism.”⁴⁶ Accordingly, critical scholars have cautioned that employing “races” as independent variables “without any contextualization or explanation implies that the causal mechanism for social differences lies in the categories themselves,” thereby reifying racial identities and enabling “biology/genetics to re-enter through the back door.”⁴⁷ In contrast, centering the concept of racialization—which connotes active social construction and reconstruction—helps to ensure that scientific discourse remains normatively self-aware, and that it more accurately reflects social reality.

Third, the same conceptual dynamism that lends nuance and explanatory power to racialization also works against the ambition for parsimonious theorizing. Yet this is ultimately a strength rather than a weakness; in Stephen Van Evera's words, “We can tolerate some complexity if we need it to explain the world.”⁴⁸ Racialization does not occur in a vacuum. It frequently intersects with other factors such as international distributions of military capacity, institutional access, and trade, as well as individual characteristics such as class, gender, religion, and nationalism.⁴⁹ Similarly, racialized “othering” frequently involves domestic, foreign, and transnational groups, and it blurs the common theoretical distinction between domestic and foreign policy—a divide that has itself helped perpetuate racial hierarchies.⁵⁰ Accordingly, racialization may be better theorized not as a static and exogenous causal variable, but as an ongoing and interactive process that molds the security implications of other factors and alters the ways in which other processes operate. Perspectives rooted in racialization thus encourage meticulous attention to potential mutual causation, conditionality, constitutive effects, and other possibilities in theory development.⁵¹

Fourth, scholars face several empirical difficulties when testing theories that involve racialized dynamics. Most notably, racialization need not always entail observable behavior; prejudices are often unstated (especially when prevailing norms formally embrace racial equality).⁵² While overtly racist discourse within primary-source documents may offer clear evidence that racialization shaped a foreign policy decision, its absence should not be interpreted as proving that racialization had no effect on that decision.⁵³ In such cases, scholars may use methods such as comparative historical analysis, spatial analysis, discourse analysis, and ethnography to triangulate relevant contextual details, to examine institutional rules and behavioral trends, or to assess divergent outcomes across racialized groups.⁵⁴ Surveys, interviews, and experimental methods may also produce useful proxy data for testing causal mechanisms that involve racialized perceptions and interactions.⁵⁵ Statistical analysis is often crucial for assessing inequitable distributions, if: it avoids implicitly treating race as a manipulable variable; it includes nuanced theoretical discussions that avoid reifying races as discussed above; and it guards against potential covariance between racial identities and other factors of interest such as region or per capita gross domestic product.⁵⁶ Longitudinal studies must especially account for how “comparing race over time is in reality a comparison of the changing social meaning of race.”⁵⁷ Statisticians have developed a variety of approaches to multicollinearity, though its appearance should also prompt scholars to consider employing increasingly sophisticated theoretical models.⁵⁸

A fifth challenge facing security scholars is where to even begin incorporating racialization into existing research agendas, given its absence from most of the literature underpinning the field's current debates. The remainder of this section develops a framework to help scholars think about racialization in international security, apply related interdisciplinary work to existing research agendas, and identify pathways for new research. This framework is based on two questions: First, do the processes infusing political phenomena with racial identities and implications operate directly and openly, or are they obscured and indirect? Second, do those processes concern the practice or the study of international security? Using these questions, figure 1 depicts four distinct types of racialization.

First, some racialization operates overtly—casting phenomena directly in terms of racial identities and generating clearly observable racial implications. For example, policymakers may candidly express racist motivations, frame decisions using racialized language, or implement policies that generate divergent consequences for racialized groups. When racialization is overt, that visibility can help overcome some of the methodological challenges discussed above, making approaches such as process tracing and archival research particularly useful for examining its relationships with other dynamics. On the other hand, much racialization occurs through embedded pathways. It indirectly biases phenomena that are not formally framed in racial terms, but that may be derived from overtly racialized sources. Theorizing embedded racialization often requires that scholars account for historically contingent path dependency, intersubjective and constitutive relationships, and reciprocal or otherwise complex causal dynamics. Empirically testing such theories may require them to employ contextual triangulation or statistical analysis using reasonable proxy measures.

The framework's second dimension distinguishes racialization in the political world under study from its manifestations within the academic enterprise itself. From threat perceptions and uses of force to alliances and international orders, racialization has shaped many political phenomena of interest to the field of international security. Yet scholars are not impartial observers removed from the sociopolitical conditions of their time, and racialization can shape their understandings of international security beyond its actual practice. The origins of academic international relations during the early twentieth century were saturated by that era's prevailing racialized worldviews, and the field has barely begun to grapple with persistent legacies, including the composition of the professoriat, which questions or cases merit attention, predominant theoretical framings, and how to define concepts as central as security itself.

To consider how each type of racialization should inform current and future research agendas in international security, the next four sections address two key questions: How does each type of racialization bear on major questions, theories, and debates within the field? What new research avenues does a perspective rooted in each type of racialization suggest deserve greater attention from security scholars? In answering these questions, these sections fulfill four interrelated purposes: identifying new pathways for research on racialization in international security; demonstrating its widespread pertinence within the field; facilitating security scholars’ engagement with relevant interdisciplinary literatures; and encouraging collaborative dialogues as racialization attracts increasing attention within security studies.⁵⁹

For many, the primary association between race and security concerns overt political racialization, which directly casts political phenomena in terms of racial identities or generates clearly observable racial implications. This form of racialization is arguably the most straightforward to integrate into existing research agendas because it entails relatively conspicuous causal mechanisms that generate clear observational evidence. Security scholars understand how social psychological elements such as uncertainty, fear, and prestige drive leaders to make presumptions about their security environment, to take preventive measures that make conflict more likely, and to demand more onerous concessions from some relationships than others. The conceptual discussion above implies that racialization should directly influence these and other processes. This section identifies several pathways to examine overt political racialization in international security, exploring its roles in three research questions of long-standing interest: how leaders perceive threats, how they reach policy decisions (including uses of force), and how the state is constituted as a security actor.

Threat perceptions are central to any notion of security, and scholars have identified a variety of biases that can divert leaders from making rational assessments of military capabilities and signaled intentions.⁶⁰ Racialization can do so in cross-cutting ways, making adversaries seem both more hostile (based on presumably irreconcilable differences and predispositions to violence) and less capable (based on presumably inferior strategic thinking, technical capacity, and organizational culture). Fears of a “Yellow Peril” fueled U.S. efforts to contain Japanese expansion in the early twentieth century, for example, and 9/11 catalyzed hostility toward several racial minorities in Europe and the United States.⁶¹ On the other hand, racist disdain impaired strategic planning before the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor—as Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet Adm. Husband Kimmel later confided, “I never thought those little yellow sons-of-bitches could pull off such an attack.”⁶² Israeli intelligence similarly downplayed signals that Syria and Egypt were preparing to attack in 1973 because, in the words of Mossad Director Zvi Zamir, “We simply did not believe they were capable…. We scorned them.”⁶³ Further research on racialized dynamics in military assessments and strategic narratives is particularly important amid current U.S.-China tensions.⁶⁴

Racialization can also shape threat perceptions when leaders interpret threats through racial ideologies or treat racialized institutions and hierarchies themselves as national interests. Just as security scholars recognize how ideological rifts may breed perceptions of an existential threat (e.g., among European monarchies witnessing French Revolutionary liberalism), there is ample room for future research on how ideologies that promote racialized domestic hierarchies might accentuate the perception of specific threats—even from far weaker actors.⁶⁵ For instance, resistance to settler-colonial policing and imperial intervention has been framed as an outsized security threat in contexts from Canada to Afghanistan.⁶⁶ U.S. leaders from the antebellum South demonized Haiti after its 1804 independence, fearful that a successful “Black Republic” would threaten slavery at home and abroad.⁶⁷ In 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump promoted replacement fears toward Latin American refugees and asylum-seekers with statements like “they're going to be able to vote and once that all happens you can forget it,”⁶⁸ and as president his declaration of a “national emergency concerning the southern border” in 2019 was based far more on the perceived otherness of migrants than their military capabilities.⁶⁹ Racialized immigration policies and rhetoric have drawn substantial attention among scholars of securitization, raising questions about racialized securitization processes, who is empowered to securitize, and related issues.⁷⁰

Another research area that is ripe for scholars to consider racialization concerns how leaders formulate policy options and make decisions, particularly those involving coercion and uses of force. Racialization may distort assessments of a policy's feasibility, normative desirability, and likely consequences, driving leaders to dismiss some options and prioritize others. U.S. policymakers felt pressure to refrain from using nuclear weapons during the Korean and Vietnam Wars because further nuclear strikes in Asia after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would, in the words of Under Secretary of State George Ball, “inevitably be met by a Communist accusation that we use nuclear weapons only against yellow men (or colored men),” and would generate “profound shock … among the non-white nations on every continent.”⁷¹ Public attitudes on racial issues generated incentives for elected officials to ban the slave trade and slavery itself during the nineteenth century and to implement anti-apartheid sanctions on South Africa during the 1980s.⁷² That said, racialized assumptions can also fuel intervention, as when U.S. leaders ruled out independence for the Philippines in 1898 because they judged its “heterogenous compound of inefficient Oriental humanity” incapable of self-governance.⁷³ Recent work on global racial imaginaries and “worldmaking” further opens the door for security scholars to examine how leaders’ racial understandings shape foreign policy decision-making.⁷⁴

No subject commands more attention than why, how, and against whom states employ violence. Scholars should examine the racialized dynamics of those decisions. Most notably, racialization contributes to dehumanization—diluting the perceived moral value of the lives of others, disqualifying them from human rights, and paving the way for “war without mercy,” or even genocide.⁷⁵ Even societies that prize individual rights have tolerated extensive civilian casualties among racialized others in the service of strategic objectives, including British inaction during the 1943 Bengal famine, Iraqi civilian suffering under 1990s United Nations (UN) sanctions, or “collateral damage” during the U.S. War on Terror.⁷⁶ Likewise, racist notions of a civilizing mission generated moral and legal exceptions that countenanced systematic violence throughout European empires well into the twentieth century.⁷⁷ In domestic settings, stereotypes associating minorities with violence fuel harsher policing of nonviolent resistance movements among them than among racial majorities.⁷⁸ From policymakers to soldiers to civilians, questions regarding how racialization shapes political violence deserve sustained attention from theories of international conflict.

Studies of overt political racialization should also consider the domestic foundations of states as security actors. Racialized dynamics shape national leader selection via citizenship laws, immigration policies, and local identity politics, raising questions about how they perpetuate or stifle certain perspectives within policymaking circles.⁷⁹ State-sanctioned racial discrimination has been found to impair military effectiveness by fueling desertion, side-switching, and reluctance to fight among soldiers from victimized groups.⁸⁰ It can also generate security externalities from terrorism and irredentism to migration and diaspora mobilization.⁸¹ As scholars increasingly problematize the assumption that states rationally advance consistent national interests, racialized dynamics within their construction as security actors remain a vibrant area for future research.⁸²

Much racialization is not overt but embedded in phenomena that exhibit biases and inequities despite the absence of formally racialized trappings. As Branwen Gruffydd Jones writes, racism is “reproduced not only through intentional acts but also, more routinely, as a result of structural forces arising from the configuration of social relations.”⁸³ While the relative scarcity of causal-process evidence makes embedded racialization easier to overlook, scholars can nevertheless track it using correlational methods such as statistical analyses and macrohistorical case studies. Divergent educational and health outcomes, postcolonial comparative advantages, concentrations of financial leverage, and the “digital divide” in technological access and proficiency have all been found to perpetuate international economic inequities in ways that stem from their colonial origins.⁸⁴ Four out of five permanent seats on the UN Security Council are held by European countries and by the United States, an allocation that informs Security Council resolutions and peacekeeping missions. The result is a tendency for military interventions to target areas of the Global South, separating the international system, in Marc Trachtenberg's words, into “two castes of states.”⁸⁵

Whereas systemic inequities are relatively widely recognized, more research is needed on subtler racialized elements in international diplomacy. For instance, objectifying racial others may cause leaders to approach diplomatic interactions as opportunities to dictate rather than negotiate, drive publics to support allocating foreign aid paternalistically, and undercut efforts to cultivate trust or pursue cooperative security activities such as intelligence sharing.⁸⁶ Scholars have noted how U.S. policymakers structuring Cold War alliances in Asia preferred bilateral relationships with themselves as senior partners, whereas in Europe shared identities helped foster a sense of security community.⁸⁷ Racialized bonds may also facilitate other forms of international cooperation, such as smoothing the rapprochement between the United States and Britain during the late nineteenth century—the most prominent modern case of a peaceful power transition—and helping sustain U.S. partnerships with Australia and South Africa against transnational condemnation of white supremacist institutions during the mid-twentieth century.⁸⁸ The racial equality norm renders it increasingly unlikely that written records will feature overtly racialized rhetoric in more recent cases. It is therefore particularly important to consider how institutionalized practices, relationships, and other long-standing path-dependent phenomena may perpetuate embedded racialization in modern diplomacy.

International law scholarship has had some of the greatest success to date in unveiling embedded racialization. As Jennifer Pitts observes, “International law, together with structures of international governance, is in important respects a product of the history of European imperial expansion.”⁸⁹ European legal philosophers divided the world into “uncivilized,” “semi-civilized,” and “civilized” nations, understanding the last to include all Christian European nations.⁹⁰ They used such gatekeeping categories between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, along with other legal mechanisms—often racialized in their effects if not always in their terminology—to deny others sovereign recognition and facilitate European domination.⁹¹ For example, the doctrines of discovery and of terra nullius categorized many areas populated by non-European peoples as legally uninhabited, granting sovereignty to whichever European power “discovered” them.⁹² Treaties and property laws similarly functioned as vehicles for racialized dispossession. As Benjamin Rhode writes, “Many deemed it quite natural for those states considered incapable of ‘self-government’ to be governed instead by those who were.”⁹³ Although scholars routinely identify legalization as a centerpiece of the “liberal international order,” related debates within security studies rarely engage much with international law scholarship.⁹⁴ In this area, as in others, cultivating interdisciplinary conversations can help scholars consider how embedded racialization shapes international security.⁹⁵

Recent research on international orders has emphasized how they take root among preexisting networks of authority and influence, reflect exclusionary motives, and fall short of equitable standards.⁹⁶ Yet racialization's roles in these processes—and in the resistance that they encounter—have so far been investigated primarily by scholars beyond security studies.⁹⁷ Moreover, legal principles that are otherwise favored for helping mitigate international conflict (e.g., sovereignty, territorial integrity, and uti possidetis) have been found to simultaneously enable global and local actors to evade the racial equality norm and solidify racialized distributions of property and power.⁹⁸ Even the rule of law—a central element of liberal prescriptions for good governance—can privilege dominant actors by perpetuating a status quo that reinforces preexisting inequities instead of remedying them.⁹⁹ Assessing how various ordering approaches affect security issues requires disentangling their virtues in principle from potentially racialized implementation in practice.

Beyond the practice of international security, understandings of it can also be racialized through the analytical scaffolding that scholars bring to their subject matter. As in the political world, the languages, theories, and worldviews that scholars consciously or unconsciously employ end up bounding “conceptions of possibility” and “modes of thought and discourse” within academia.¹⁰⁰ Patterns in those intellectual frameworks should be expected to vary systematically in ways that reflect the composition of the professoriat. This section probes several forms of overt academic racialization relevant to international security, including the use of concepts that reinforce rather than problematize the essentialization of racial identities and academic structures that promote the perspectives of specific racial groups.

It is now widely understood that the origins of academic international relations in the United States were saturated by overt racialization.¹⁰¹ Early twentieth-century scholars saw races as natural building blocks of world politics. Consequently, they deployed racialized concepts in ways that perpetuated the essentializing dynamics discussed above—in Duncan Bell's words, “Race was widely and explicitly considered a fundamental ontological unit of politics, perhaps the most fundamental of all.”¹⁰² Accordingly, theories that would now be condemned as unapologetically racist and factually incorrect represented conventional wisdoms throughout that era.¹⁰³ The field's “early works were firmly situated in the prominent social Darwinist evolutionary theses of the day,” Errol Henderson observes, “which assumed a hierarchy of races dominated by white Europeans and their major diasporic offshoots in the Americas, Australia and South Africa, with nonwhites occupying subordinate positions.”¹⁰⁴ As Robert Vitalis notes, scholars “continued to think both in terms of territorial and phenotypical units of analysis” well after World War I, and the fallout from this extensive academic racialization remains ripe for further study.¹⁰⁵

Even as the failure of scientific racism and growing respect for racial equality delegitimized overtly racist approaches during the late twentieth century, some prominent theories continued to employ essentializing logic using concepts like ethnicity, nation, or civilization rather than race.¹⁰⁶ “Primordialist” theories of nationalism and ethnic conflict located the roots of those phenomena in supposedly inherent bonds passed down through centuries of shared ancestry.¹⁰⁷ Samuel Huntington's “clash of civilizations” thesis argued that purportedly essential differences between “Muslim and Western societies” would trigger a central fault line of international conflict.¹⁰⁸ Such arguments generated far more heat than light, and their claims to identify fundamental divisions within humanity have been debunked. Yet in attracting enough attention to escape the ivory tower and enter public discourse, they attest to the cognitive ease with which people can fall back on essentialist myths. Indeed, such ideas continued to echo in public commentary amid Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine that began in 2022.¹⁰⁹ Accordingly, efforts to unveil and critique essentialist logics will remain important contributions to the study of international security.

Just as academic perspectives can demonstrate overt racialization, so too can academic institutions. As table 1 shows, scholars identifying as “Black” or as “Hispanic” combined to make up less than 9 percent of the International Studies Association's International Security Studies Section in 2019 and roughly 6 percent of the American Political Science Association's International Security section in 2020, despite more than 31 percent of the U.S. population sharing those identities. In contrast, roughly 80 percent and 75 percent of those sections, respectively, identified as “White,” reflecting demographic overrepresentation that was previously even more extreme.¹¹⁰ Academia has long suffered from a “leaky pipeline” of non-white PhDs leaving the field (mirroring similarly inadequate retention of female scholars).¹¹¹ Studies also find that “the IR [international relations] community in the United States appears to be relatively insular compared to its counterparts in other countries,” spurring efforts to cultivate underrepresented perspectives.¹¹² Because academic institutions with relatively homogeneous memberships are likely to suffer corresponding blind spots and reproduce collective biases, sustained attention to unveiling and uprooting those biases should promote better understandings of international security. There is also ample room for greater reflection on how internalized racial identities and personal experiences with racialization and racism (or the lack thereof) inform theoretical perspectives in the field.¹¹³

Given the pervasiveness of overt academic racialization only a few generations ago and enduring demographic imbalances within the academy, it would be naive to expect no lingering symptoms within security studies. Beyond diversifying the professoriat itself, revealing and countering embedded biases is crucial both to determine how alternative ideas have been marginalized, and, ultimately, to develop better theories.¹¹⁴ Fortunately, scholars increasingly recognize that the exorcism of overtly racist rhetoric from social discourse and academic writing does not adequately solve these issues. This section explores several modes of embedded racialization within conventional approaches to international security that deserve further attention, including how scholars conceptualize security itself, employ other inherited concepts, and construct empirical data.

The academic boundaries of international security hinge on scholars’ conceptions of what security itself means. Although long-standing tradition emphasizes “threats of external aggression,” Arnold Wolfers noted seventy years ago that defining security in that way or any other way inherently involves a moral choice, “comparing and weighing values in order to decide which of them are deemed sufficiently good to justify the evil of sacrificing others.”¹¹⁵ Should conceptions of security prioritize the protection of borders, lives, wealth, health, power, honor, identity, or something else—and for whom? These trade-offs frequently reflect stated or unstated biases, as policymakers decide whose values should be secured and whose sacrifices, both domestic and international, are justified. Likewise, scholars decide whose vulnerabilities and struggles warrant studying as security.¹¹⁶ For instance, broadening prior research agendas to include gender-based violence and women's political roles has changed our understandings of war, democratic peace, and other security issues.¹¹⁷ Similar attention should be directed toward racialized subordinations of human security (e.g., amid international investment projects across Latin America, the Middle East, and India).¹¹⁸ Even the choice to define security in terms of military defense while downplaying threats such as climate change, pandemics, and poverty carries racialized domestic and international consequences.¹¹⁹ Broadening the security concept can thus help scholars better explain underappreciated experiences of insecurity and the construction of security perspectives among policymakers and publics.

Beyond security itself, many other core concepts of security studies also exhibit embedded racialization. Most notably, postcolonial scholars have laid bare the Eurocentric roots of anarchy and “Westphalian” sovereignty, which remain building blocks of major theories of international security despite having been crafted by nineteenth-century German historians and international jurists with overtly normative and racialized agendas.¹²⁰ European perspectives on international order are routinely universalized, treating states as exogenous units for theorizing purposes and neglecting the racialized processes of state formation and expansion that produced their privileged modern positions.¹²¹ Both foreign policies and studies of them reference concepts like “development” and “good governance,” often with little regard for the racialized histories that predispose certain nations to seem backward by such measures.¹²² Meera Sabaratnam critiques canonical theories of international relations for uncritically extrapolating from the experiences of great powers, advanced industrial states, or nations displaying “standards of civilization,” thereby emphasizing episodes and forms of conflict and cooperation that have been prominent among those states while downplaying “peripheral” cases.¹²³ At a minimum, such critiques suggest that the field would benefit from greater self-reflection on the appropriate prerequisites for theories to claim generalizability.

Racialization is also frequently embedded in the data that scholars use, biasing the standards by which some theories gain widespread acceptance and not others. Eurocentrism has constrained how scholars select cases and develop theories,¹²⁴ with Europe and its settler-colonial offshoots overrepresented across empirical scholarship and graduate education.¹²⁵ Furthermore, to the extent that both overt and embedded racialization have influenced the academic study of history, they have helped curate which historical perspectives, depictions of events, and primary-source quotations have merited inclusion in the secondary sources on which political scientists routinely depend for data. The resulting fallout plagues not only case-study research but also widely used statistical datasets. Reflecting a “state-centric perspective,” for instance, the Correlates of War dataset initially coded as “colonial” or “imperial wars” only those conflicts that involved “a minimum of 1,000 battle-related fatalities for the system member alone during each year of the war [emphasis added].”¹²⁶ This coding disregarded the violence that those “system members” inflicted on colonized peoples. More recently, Jeff Colgan finds that coder nationality biases powerful enough to skew regression outcomes exist in three other widely used datasets, which underscores how much work remains to be done to improve data quality and reevaluate prior findings.¹²⁷

Security scholars have much to gain through renewed attention to racialization, a concept that has saturated modern diplomacy, order, and violence. This article has aimed to catalyze such efforts by laying conceptual bedrock, linking interdisciplinary literatures to major research agendas in international security, and charting many promising paths to consider how overt and embedded racialization shape the study and practice of international security. I conclude by discussing additional research questions that span the four types of racialization (overt and embedded as well as political and academic) and considering additional implications for academia and policymaking.

One line of inquiry should connect overt and embedded racialization, comparing them and exploring transitions from one to the other. While overt racialization attracts greater attention because it is relatively brazen and easy to observe, the racial equality norm makes embedded racialization more likely to endure in the twenty-first century. To what extent can findings concerning the former be reliably externalized to understand cases of the latter? What security dynamics specific to the latter may go underappreciated if scholarly debates overemphasize the former? Racialized U.S. perceptions of Haiti, the Philippines, Japan, and other countries have generated path-dependent historical effects that continue to shape international security today, but how precisely do those embedded modern effects relate to their overtly racialized roots?¹²⁸ Growing interest in international hierarchies and exclusionary ordering practices offers additional entry points for comparing their racialized dynamics, and postcolonial scholarship should spark further work on embedded racialization within security dependencies and interdependent economic networks.¹²⁹

Another important line of inquiry concerns how security processes transition between overt, embedded, and nonracialized forms. For instance, incomplete transitions from overt racialization can leave racialized features embedded in contemporary military interventions, training, and development programs.¹³⁰ The relationship between agency and structure within such transitions also deserves to be thoroughly examined: How have states, groups, or individuals sought to manipulate racialization under various institutional and systemic conditions? Transitions themselves may generate second-order effects. For example, rejecting overt racialization might spur a sense of triumphalism that stifles calls to address embedded biases. The causes and dynamics of potential backsliding also remain subjects of urgent concern. Recent studies reject linear or teleological accounts of the racial equality norm in favor of more dynamic models of normative contestation, findings that mark scholarship on international norms as another promising site for interdisciplinary engagement.¹³¹

Of course, another crucial avenue for studying the relationship between overt and embedded racialization concerns academia itself. Demographic representation within security studies remains a work in progress, and more research is needed on obstacles to and best practices for promoting racial diversity.¹³² While most scholars now reject overtly racialized concepts and theories based on essentializing logics, there remains ample room to investigate marginalized perspectives throughout the field's history and to explore the forsaken promise of paths not taken.¹³³ Seriously contemplating embedded racialization within core concepts, theories, and data should further help scholars revise flawed conventional wisdoms. Although Eurocentrism will likely remain a challenge given the global scope of U.S. and European foreign policies, scholarship on racialization and security should strive to engage broader perspectives and contexts.¹³⁴

Beyond questions that span racialization's overt and embedded forms, security scholars should also examine how academic and political racialization intersect. Ongoing efforts to bridge the gap between academic expertise and policymaking highlight various ways in which influence flows (and fails to flow) in both directions, offering ample room to investigate how racialized political rhetoric may become accepted academic terminology, and vice versa.¹³⁵ Grand strategy scholarship is also increasingly problematizing the identities, assumptions, and values that leaders bring to the table, as well as the distributional effects of their policies.¹³⁶ Studies of racialized cross-pollination between academia and policymaking should engage precisely such questions and take advantage of rich opportunities to integrate postcolonial critiques with constructivist theories of legitimation, the political economy of security, and other approaches.¹³⁷ The domestic burdens and beneficiaries of security policies vary with geography (e.g., fortifications shielding residents of a vulnerable border region) and economics (e.g., decolonization removing competing producers from domestic markets). They also vary across racialized domestic groups—from race-based terrorism¹³⁸ and “opportunistic repression” amid the COVID-19 pandemic,¹³⁹ to war costs imposed disproportionately on racial minorities (e.g., during Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine).¹⁴⁰

Finally, what implications for policymaking emerge from considering racialization in international security? Rather than prescribing specific policies, this article's findings offer seven broader insights to help leaders compose, select, and assess policy options. First, recognize that racialization is about political power. Leaving behind misconceptions of it as a purely societal or domestic matter opens the door to important conversations about its relationships with international diplomacy, coercion, and violence. Second, think critically about overt and embedded racialization within major concepts (including security itself) to discern where discriminatory assumptions, essentializing logics, and Eurocentric perspectives may be baked into prevailing discourses, institutions, and policies. Third, centuries of racialization leave a large wake, so build a habit of questioning the instrumental, strategic, and normative value of the status quo rather than maintaining it for its own sake. Fourth, reject portrayals of the liberal international order as post-racial, the racial equality norm's rise as inevitable or irreversible, and perspectives that are not expressed in overtly racialized terms as color-blind. Beyond being incorrect, such depictions complicate public diplomacy at home and abroad by fostering divergent worldviews between those who see through them and those who do not.

Fifth, interrogate potentially racialized aspects of various policy options, including their material impacts and public perceptions at home and abroad. For example, the September 2021 AUKUS (Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) announcement broadcast deepening military cooperation among three states known throughout Asia for having racialized imperial histories, within the context of a U.S.-China rivalry that had already been prominently framed as “a clash of civilizations.”¹⁴¹ Policies such as the Joe Biden administration's October 2022 restrictions on China's semiconductor trade and stratified security regimes such as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty similarly play into narratives of renewed postcolonial subjugation, which should be understood when weighing their strategic value.¹⁴²

Sixth, ensure that diverse perspectives have a voice in policy formation. Just as underrepresentation within the academy limits scholars’ theoretical horizons, homogeneous worldviews within policymaking circles constrain foreign policy possibilities.¹⁴³ Last, this article underscores that there is still much to learn, so approach questions of racialization and security with a healthy dose of humility. That said, both overt and embedded racialization permeated the modern international system within living memory, and both continue to shape world politics today. Accordingly, stay abreast of new research to ensure that it helps improve not just the study but also the practice of international security.

For helpful comments and conversations during this article's development, the author is grateful to Amitav Acharya, Zoltán Búzás, Austin Carson, Neta Crawford, Bianca Freeman, Jenna Gibson, Desh Girod, Stacie Goddard, Naima Green-Riley, Robert Gulotty, Paul Higate, John Kurt Jacobsen, Tobias Lemke, Paul MacDonald, Nivi Manchanda, Stephen Pampinella, Robert Pape, Randolph Persaud, Eteri Tsintsadze-Maass, the anonymous reviewers, and roundtable participants at the 2021 American Political Science Association conference. The author thanks Nikita Lumijoe for diligent research assistance.