Race and Racism in International Relations ─ Confronting the Global Colour Line

International Relations does not grant race and racism explanatory agency in its conventional analyses. Even postcolonial approaches in the discipline do not sufficiently grapple with what W.E.B. Dubois famously termed the "global colour line". Nevertheless, it is possible to track in recent years increasing interest by IR scholars in race and racism as constitutive categories of global politics and international thought. The aim of this text is therefore to mark the long overdue arrival of – some would say return to - the "race question" in IR. Confronting the Global Colour Line will provide an accessible entry point for both IR students and scholars into the literature and debates on race and racism by borrowing insights from disciplines such as history, anthropology and sociology where race and race theory figures more prominently. Mobilized to speak to the concerns of IR, the cutting edge contributions will engage with both the theoretical and substantive aspects of confronting the global colour line.

Drawing together a wide range of contributors, this much-needed book will be essential reading for students and scholars in a range of areas including Postcolonial studies, race/racism in world politics and international relations theory.

Alexander Anievas is the Anna Beigun Warburg Junior Research Fellow at St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford. He is the editor of Marxism and World Politics: Contesting Global Capitalism (Routledge, 2010) and author of the forthcoming manuscript Capital, the State and War: Class Conflict and Geopolitics in the Thirty Years’ Crisis, 1914-1945 (University of Michigan Press). He is a member of the editorial collective Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory.

Nivi Manchanda is a PhD candidate at the department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation looks at Anglo-American representations of Afghanistan. She is also the editor in chief of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.

Robbie Shilliam is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. He publishes widely on issues to do with race, colonialism and international relations. He is author of The Black Pacific: Anticolonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections (Bloomsbury Academic Press, Forthcoming 2014); and editor of International Relations and Non-Western Thoughts: Imperialism, Colonialism and Investigations of Global Modernity (London: Routledge, 2010). He is chair of the Global Development Section of the International Studies Association (2012-2013), and on the Advisory Board of the Transnational Decolonial Institute.