Race in the Ontology of International Order

Abstract

The current world order is characterised by profound global inequality, depicted through reference to the developed and developing world. The racialised character of global inequalities in power is rarely acknowledged, however. Explicit racial discourse has been removed from the institutional form of the modern world order, and this apparent transcendence of race is mirrored in the lack of attention to race within mainstream scholarship in International Relations (IR). This is in part because of the empiricist assumptions underlying much IR scholarship, which reflect the non-racialised appearance of the modern world order. While the question of race has been exposed by critical strands of IR scholarship, such critiques have focused largely on discursive dimensions of race. This article argues that critical analysis of global racism and racial oppression must go beyond the limits of discursive critique. It is necessary to grasp the non-discursive dimensions of racial power, in order to explain the reproduction of racial inequality by an international order formally committed to racial equality. This, in turn, requires an expanded theory of social ontology. Critical realism develops a theory of social ontology which provides a basis for differentiating between various dimensions of racial oppression. The critical realist theory of social ontology highlights the significance of the relations structuring societal interaction with nature, which are fundamental in determining distributions of social power within society. A survey of the long global history of colonialism reveals that the relations structuring societal interaction with nature on a global scale have been built upon a basis of racialised dispossession. The article argues that the racialised structures of social power produced through centuries of colonial dispossession remain entrenched, despite the formal transcendence of racism in modern institutions of international order. Thus a realist ontology provides the basis for revealing the endurance of race in the structures of international order.