Abstract
In his essay, Errol Henderson argues that bringing race and racial supremacism into explanations for war enables us to better generalize about the causes of war. He focuses in particular on realist theorizing, which, in all its variants, has tended to dominate the study of war in mainstream IR. He uses Waltz’s and Gilpin’s theorizing about the function of anarchy and power distributions in accounting for war to show how the “norm against noticing” leads to an incomplete understanding of great power war. I look at another key concept in realist (and contractual liberal theorizing) about the origins of conflict — the security dilemma — to theorize how racism can generate insecurity spirals between countries. The security dilemma has typically been characterized as an insecurity spiral between two security-seeking states, generated by uncertainty about the intentions of others which, in turn, is generated by anarchy. To get from anarchy to uncertainty to insecurity spirals, however, requires fear of Other, an emotional and social psychological state. But, in fact, as Jennifer Mitzen and Randall Schweller have argued, security dilemmas are mainly characterized by inaccurate certainty about Self and Other’s intentions. Perhaps the most inaccurate certainties that groups can have about Self and Other are beliefs about racial supremacy, and expressed in racial stereotypes. Racism is a worldview that is certain and incorrect about the allegedly inherent traits and characteristics (including malign intent) of a racialized Other. Re-conceptualizing security dilemmas as rooted in Self's development of inter-group identity difference, and certainty about these differences, opens the theoretical door to examining how one such source of perceived identity difference — racism — affects the probability of war. This essay, draws on social psychological and social neuroscience theories, and on empirical evidence of concepts of racial and ethnic difference in the United States and the People's Republic of China to explore how racialized identity differences may drive the life-cycle of a security dilemmas.
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Notes
I want to thank D.G. Kim for his pioneering work on the effects of racism in US-China relations (Kim 2022) and for pushing me to think harder about the relationship between race, identity difference and security dilemmas. I also thank him for introducing me to the literature on “introspection illusion”. I am also grateful to Mina Cikara for alerting me to the social neuroscience literature on attribution, infrahumanization and metaperception. I was inspire by Booth and Wheeler to work backwards from how security dilemmas end to unpack the factors that make this so difficult. I ended up at identity difference, one type of which is racism. I am also grateful to the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs for financial support to work on this project. Thanks, too, to Robbie Shilliam for his feedback on an earlier draft. And of course thanks to Errol Henderson for the opportunity to work on this note. Errors of fact or interpretation are all mine.
Schweller (2010: 302) first suggested that intense security dilemmas can evolve from uncertainty to “misplaced certainty”. I am suggesting that, from an identity difference perspective, inaccurate certainty is always present, but can spill into a wide range of assessments of the nature of the Other.
Herz’ theorizing is more complicated and innovative, though perhaps contradictory. Although in many places he essentially starts from anarchy and uncertainty as the source of security dilemmas, the totality of his work on what he called political realism imply that the certainties about the nature of Self and Other generated by ingroup ideologies like nationalism or racism could also be drivers in a security dilemma. I thank Robbie Shilliam (forthcoming) for making me rethink Herz along these lines.
Booth and Wheeler (2008) do cutting edge work in unpacking the key components of a security dilemma. These could be turned into a set of measurable indicators so that frequency and life-cycle of security dilemmas could tracked empirically. I am not aware of any scholars who have done so, however.
Mitzen (2006) pioneered the theorizing about security dilemmas and certainty by focusing on how states stress the certainty of the malign intentions of other states in order to maximize their own ontological security. I try to pick up from her point to explore the social psychological mechanisms by which maximizing identity difference, including through racism, generates certainty.
Here I will hide behind the oft-invoked claim in rationalist arguments that it doesn’t matter if assumptions about reality are wrong as long as they are useful for theorizing and testing novel hypotheses. In future work with D.G. Kim we want to explore whether anarchy provides a permissive environment for identity differentiation.
On the effect of the intentionality bias in creating certainty about Other’s intentions see Kertzer et al. 2022.
https://twitter.com/MarshaBlackburn/status/1334510812552163328. This racial essentialization undermines the claim often made by US nationalist hawks that their characterizations of China distinguishes between the Communist Party and the Chinese as people.
See also Barry (2019)
See also Tan et al. (2021).
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Johnston, A.I. Racism and security dilemmas. Int Polit 61, 451–464 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-023-00531-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-023-00531-y