Description
Entering into the 21st century (especially since its second decade), IR discipline witnesses a boom in researching and critiquing how the global colour line cuts across crucial sites of practices, such as multilateralism and beyond. However, critiques of these critiques of racism in international relations also arise and often lead to murky debates. This is partially due to a lack of consensus and precise definitions of what one means by racism (as opposed to Whiteness or Westerncentrism). This paper aims to make sense of current critiques of racism in multilateralism (and in international relations more generally), by problematizing the central issues commonly underlying existing scholarship, i.e., the twin issues of analytical (or conceptual) binary and practical essentialism. I define analytical binary as the tendency to work with, rather than deconstruct, the existing non-White/White binary in analysis; practical essentialism is understood as the practice of reducing race to – and essentialising race as – biological differences, which are often operationalized as skin colour. It is “practical” in the sense that this normally does not happen at the conceptual level but at the level of research operationalization, which more often arises in quantitative research with large N data.
This article considers Eurocentrism as the root cause that give rise to the twin issues, which in turn leads to certain hurdles. Eurocentrism manifests in three primary ways, first, the analytical marginalization of non-Euro/American practices, the uncritical extrapolation of Euro/American-generated critical theories to non-Euro/American contexts, and the negation of non-Euro/American agency, especially the agency of perpetration. With the case of
China-Africa interactions, this article argues that the twin issues of analytical binary and practical essentialism cause three analytical and normative hurdles, i.e., the over-simplification of reality, the compromising of the strength of critiques, and the constraining of emancipation potentials.
