Abstract
In my contribution, I want to show that Henderson’s essay opens a crucial reexamination of the nexus between histories of racial violence, genocide and the social imaginary of the West. Rather than taking for granted the idea that the formation of, and institutionalization of, the modern European/Western state-system constituted as a rational political and legal order—insofar as it circumscribed violence within a certain juridical framework—we need to better understand the consequences how such an order founded on white supremacy unleashed a racialized genocidal violence within itself. My argument here focuses on the concept of race war as way of making intelligible how state strategic action comes to be racialized in what I’ve called, the “global racial imaginary.” I conclude with a gesture towards Afro-pessimism structural understanding of modernity and anti-Blackness.
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Notes
See especially, Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American Political Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Jessica Blatt, Race and the Making of American Political Science (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).
Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979), 103. Emphasis in the original.
One of the striking features of Wendt’s social constructivist engagement with Waltz is precisely the removal of any concern with the question of imperialism, which does not figure in his Social Theory of International Politics. See, for example, Barder, A. D., & Levine, D. J. (2012). “The World Is Too Much with Us”: Reification and the Depoliticising of Via Media Constructivist IR. Millennium, 40(3), 585–604.
See Charles Mills, The Racial Contract, 18–19.
Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 23; See also, Alexander D. Barder Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 17; See also my discussion in, Barder Global Race War, Chapter One.
Barder Global Race War, 17.
Alfred Mahan, “A Twentieth Century Outlook,” Harper’s Magazine 95, no. 568 (1897); Barder Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy, 50.
Cited in Barder Global Race War, 67.
See, for example, Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos Press, 2006).
Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983 [2000]), 39.
Ibid., 27.
Ibid., 2.
Cited in Alexander D. Barder, Empire Within: International Hierarchy and its Laboratories of Government (New York: Routledge, 2015), 81.
Ibid.
See, for example, Chris Manias, “The Race prussienne Controversy: Scientific Internationalism and the Nation” Isis, 100, No. 4 (December 2009): 733–757 at 742–743.
Cited in Ian Ousby, The Road to Verdun: World War One’s Most Momentous Battle and the Folly of Nationalism (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 30.
See, for example, John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001), 217.
Cited in Barder, Global Race War, 118.
Dale C. Copeland, The Origins of Major War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 120. My emphasis.
Michael Geyer, “German Strategy in the Age of Machine Warfare 1914–1945,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age ed. Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Penguin, 2008).
Barder, Global Race War, Chapter Five.
Saidiya Hartman “The Burdened Individuality of Freedom” in Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction (Minneapolis: racked & dispatched, 2017), 34.
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Barder, A.D. Global War and the Racial Imaginary. Int Polit 61, 465–472 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-023-00534-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-023-00534-9