Abstract
From Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, to the horrors of Aleppo and the global migrant crisis, 2016 was a year that seemingly hardened the global colour line. In the United States, the Black Lives Matter movement struggled against domestic racism and police brutality, punctuating the myth of a post-racial and colour blind America. In the Mediterranean, migrant deaths hit a record high as Europe increasingly slammed its door shut. In Cape Town and Oxford, students called for a decolonisation of the university campus and curriculum, as well as the immediate removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes.
In the field of International Relations (IR), these events took place within the context of a growing conversation on the role of race and racism in the constitution of world politics. The annual Millennium Conference, held 22–23 October 2016 at the London School of Economics and Political Science, aspired to push these debates further by interrogating and theorising what it means to live in a racialized world. Where is race in IR theory and why is it so rarely addressed? How do racial differences, cultivated by transatlantic slavery, colonial conquest, and genocide, continue to inform debates on democracy, good governance, military intervention, and liberal empire? How can studying the practices of anti-colonial revolutions, feminist struggles, and anti-racist social movements in different sites of resistance help inform, interrupt, or destabilise the discipline of IR? By asking these and similar questions, the Millennium Conference sought to open up new and creative ground for scholarship that takes seriously the many afterlives of historical and ongoing colonialism.
The articles in this special issue offer tentative answers: Examining the many racialized realities in world politics, they highlight and probe a variety of problematiques, ranging from racism in the theory canon and pop culture, to the racial origins of modern finance, the displacement of religion in critiques of Eurocentrism, the politics of whiteness in the settler colonial city, and the possibility of a decolonial IR. With over 100 excellent papers presented at the 2016 Millennium Conference, and limited printing space available in this special issue of the journal, it was difficult, but also exciting, to select the final pieces. These articles, to us, represent the most innovative and inspiring thinking in the field of IR and beyond, and we hope they will push the discussion forward, not only in diagnosing the problem, but also in tackling it.
We would like to thank everyone who participated in the conference, presented and discussed papers, submitted to this special issue, and helped put it together. Thank you to our authors, for being ever patient with all our comments; to the peer reviewers, whose often very quickly needed feedback was invaluable; to our Deputy Editors for helping us in the editorial process. A very special thank you also goes to the whole Conference Team, especially our brilliant Conference Organisers and all the Stewards who made everything run so smoothly – we really could not have done it without you.
We hope this collection of articles will be as enjoyable and thought-provoking to read, as it was for us to edit.