Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line

International Relations, as a discipline, does not grant race and racism explanatory agency in its conventional analyses, despite such issues being integral to the birth of the discipline. Race and Racism in International Relations seeks to remedy this oversight by acting as a catalyst for remembering, exposing and critically re-articulating the central importance of race and racism in International Relations.

Focusing especially on the theoretical and political legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of the "colour line", the cutting edge contributions in this text provide an accessible entry point for both International Relations students and scholars into the literature and debates on race and racism by borrowing insights from disciplines such as history, anthropology and sociology where race and race theory figures more prominently; yet they also suggest that the field of IR is itself an intellectually and strategic field through which to further confront the global colour line.

Drawing together a wide range of contributors, this much-needed text will be essential reading for students and scholars in a range of areas including Postcolonial studies, race/racism in world politics and international relations theory.

Alexander Anievas is the Anna Beigun Warburg Junior Research Fellow at St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford. He is the editor of Marxism and World Politics: Contesting Global Capitalism (Routledge, 2010) and author of the forthcoming manuscript Capital, the State and War: Class Conflict and Geopolitics in the Thirty Years’ Crisis, 1914-1945 (University of Michigan Press). He is a member of the editorial collective Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory.

Nivi Manchanda is a PhD candidate at the department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation looks at Anglo-American representations of Afghanistan. She is also the editor in chief of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.

Robbie Shilliam is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. He publishes widely on issues to do with race, colonialism and international relations. He is author of The Black Pacific: Anticolonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections (Bloomsbury Academic Press, Forthcoming 2014); and editor of International Relations and Non-Western Thoughts: Imperialism, Colonialism and Investigations of Global Modernity (London: Routledge, 2010). He is chair of the Global Development Section of the International Studies Association (2012-2013), and on the Advisory Board of the Transnational Decolonial Institute.