Description
While prominent accounts of international order, including those of Bull ([1977] 2012) and Ikenberry (2011), display a subtle recognition of a darker underside to the ostensibly “liberal” or progressivist narratives of the creation and operation of international order, the possibility that international order continues to be constituted through forms of colonial and racialised rule is left unexplored. Against this commonplace side-lining of colonialism and race, in this paper, I argue for the centrality of race in understanding the constitution of international order, drawing on work in both critical race studies and studies of order, including that of Patrick Wolfe (2016), Barnor Hesse (2007), Alana Lentin (2020), and Cedric Robinson ([1980] 2016). I reconceptualise race as a fluid technology of power with concurrent epistemic and governmental dimensions, and international order as an ongoing process involving the recognition of patterns and attempts to secure regularity, in order to foreground how the two are dynamically intertwined and co-constitutive. Doing so, I argue, opens up a space for analysing not only how the contemporary international order developed in tandem with colonialism and race but also how it remains imbricated in discourses and practices of racialisation.
