We were at a workshop hosted by a first-tier research university in Fall 2015 and I had just presented my paper. It argued for a shift from Westphalia’s definition of power as coercion to a post-Westphalian one of co-creativity. This approach, I suggested, could address territorial disputes like that between China and Japan in the East China Sea by redefining “sovereignty.” The Distinguished Professor guffawed at the notion. “Reality” on the ground, he could barely contain his amusement, would never allow such a shift. Asians are simply too wedded to the international order led by the US-West. Please, let’s move on.

I found myself suddenly short of breath. Anger and a profound sense of sadness pulled at any possibility for speech, leaving it deeply inside. In effect, this Distinguished Professor was erasing the two-thirds of humanity who happen to live on that vast stretch of geography known as “Asia.” Despite their access to thousands of years of history, politics, development, and culture, these people—to the Distinguished Professor—cannot think in any terms other than those given to them by the West. Indeed, they worship blindly, mindlessly at the feet of the Westphalian God. Meanwhile, the West remains ever dynamic even in self-critique. So “we return to Europe”—not the diverse, multi-cultural continent of today but yesterday’s preserve of colonial-patriarchal whiteness. It remains the center of all action and thought.

I understood, in that instant, why so many have joined terrorist organizations. I, too, wanted to bomb the hell out of this smug, white-male world politics. Let’s kill the bastards! But the moment passed, for I knew that was exactly what these smug white-males wanted. After all, there is no greater justification for the Self than when Others mirror it.

Bob Vitalis salves these epistemic wounds by exposing them. In White World Order, Black Power Politics, he gives us precious insight into the basics of IR: that is, who was in charge (white males), what they propagated (power politics), where they operated (elite institutions), how they rationalized their control (patriarchal, white privilege), and why they did what they did (colonial administration). This is IR as we know it, now globalized to the rest of the world. In so doing, Vitalis assures dissidents, subalterns, and post-Westphalians like myself that we are not simply misfits in the discipline. There is reason for our discontent.

Note, for example, an address by John W. Burgess (1844–1931) at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Burgess was “the best-known, most influential political scientist in the country, the founding dean of Columbia’s School of Political Science, and the founder of Political Science Quarterly” (Vitalis 2015: 35). The beauty and virtue of America, Burgess declared, was in its role as an exemplar for all Others:

Slightly more than a century separates Burgess from the Distinguished Professor above, but their outlook remains remarkably consistent. Both agree that Others have no agency—all the more’s pity, lamented Kipling, since the white man must bear all the burdens of Civilization.

Such presumptions about Civilization included oppressions of internal Others like women. A case in point was one African-American IR scholar, Ralph Bunche, who opposed hiring the only African-American female scholar in IR at the time, Merzce Tate. She was seeking a position in the Department of Political Science at Howard University. Tate worked within disciplinary norms and methods but, somehow, Bunche saw her as less-than. But she was too-much elsewhere. Relocated to the History Department, Tate was later branded a “personality problem” (Vitalis 2015: 165) for her vocal objections to gender discrimination at the university.

One could say things have improved. After all, an African-American female IR scholar, Condoleeza Rice, became US Secretary of State (2005–2009). But let us not celebrate too soon. What Vitalis chronicles in this history of American IR is a tale of epistemic hegemony. Mere bodies do not matter as long as the episteme of colonial-patriarchy whiteness stays intact. This is a cautionary tale for both Self and Others, internally and externally.