Description
The mid-20th century was a crucial moment for international order that saw both decolonization and the rise of multilateral cooperation to manage interstate relations during the Cold War. In particular, a number of cooperative frameworks – from the 1959 Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty – relied on science as the legitimating focus. This paper interrogates the relationship between global racialized hierarchies and narratives of scientific progress that enabled the creation of these multilateral agreements at the height of the Cold War. It examines multilateral cooperation in Antarctica and early outer space exploration to trace how science – as both a moral goal of a collective humanity and as a legitimating practice of geopolitical engagement – was celebrated as a unifying force that helped actors overcome fractious international politics and work together towards a common cause. At the same time, scientific narratives of progress depended on the material and ideational infrastructure of imperialism, including racialized civilizational discourses and racialized sites of scientific knowledge production that relied on colonial infrastructure around the globe. In doing so, I show that rather than a clear break with racial hierarchies that informed the imperial global order of the early 20th century, these scientific multilateral frameworks established in parallel with decolonization rearticulated and reinscribed racial hierarchies through the grammar of science.
