Race and ethics in International Relations

The field of international relations emerged, as Robert Vitalis contends, from what could be called the task of implementing global white supremacy. This goal was premised on the understanding of the United States as the exemplar of a manifest destiny of whites ruling and setting the course for future direction of the human species. Race in international relations, then, is at the foundations and core of the field. Although the Cold War and post–Cold War tasks of international relations were premised on going beyond its initial racist foundations, questions already emerge on the normative bases of such a transition and the implications they have for the contemporary practice of the field. This chapter will first acknowledge the racist history of the field, its historical transformations (although wedded to a presupposition of the United States and its moral and political models at the centre of what animates international relations), and the contemporary challenges in terms of how the academic study of ethics in the context of race is understood in two senses. The first is simply what could be called ‘mainstream’ ethics applied to challenges raised by race. The second is a set of ethical concerns that emerge out of race studies as an independent area of inquiry. We will address both.