Description
Theories of “global democracy” are often practically situated within Western-led globalization and post-Cold War liberal international order. However, in the first half of the twentieth century, “Howard School” theorists were invoking democracy in their critiques of white supremacy and imperial relations, thereby building an account of global democracy as the inscription of racial equality on a global scale. Democracy, for these scholars, was less a domestic institution that needed to be scaled up but a form of equality that could only be realized by transforming racial hierarchies at home and abroad. Returning to the work of Alain Locke, I intend to do two things: (1) theorize a notion of global democracy severed from liberalism, as neither institutions nor values, but a practice of inscribing equality in the international system and (2) reorient the historiography of IR such that questions of democracy and equality in international politics become central to the field.
