Political Science 390R - Race & International Relations

How should we understand race and its significance to the study of international politics? Race as an object of inquiry has been at once foundational to, and also marginalized from, the field of International Relations (IR). The flagship publication Foreign Affairs is in fact an evolution of the initial journal of the field, the Journal of Race Development, founded in 1910. Yet in the latter half of the 20th century, race was also largely absent from "mainstream" approaches to core topics in the field - security, political economy, human rights. This course draws from both historical and contemporary scholarship to re-center race and racialization as social structures of great consequence to making sense of global politics. We will examine the ways that race informs and shapes multilateral institutions, military conflicts, global economic flows, as well as global political movements. Along the way, we will consider how this close attention to race invites us to rethink core concepts in the field of IR including the nature of sovereignty, and the parameters of the state as the basic unit of participation in the international political order.

Open to Senior, Junior and Sophomore POLISCI majors & minors.