Recently, a major concern of International Relations (IR) has been the need to ‘decolonise’ the discipline as a remedy for ‘Eurocentrism.’ This article argues that Decolonial IR is at risk of developing and perpetuating notable blind spots and making mistakes similar to those that it rightly berates Eurocentric IR for. First, while pointing at problematic binaries that undergird Eurocentric IR, Decolonial IR fails to escape the use of identity-based binaries of its own when justifying its project. Second, the use of these binaries allows Decolonial IR to decouple its task from the actual historical events of decolonisation, allowing for the marginalisation of communities that are not easily categorised. This decoupling enables exclusion and exposes Decolonial IR to the criticisms that it levels at Eurocentric IR. The article supports this argument through a discussion of Decolonial IR’s rationale, objectives, and strategies that are inflected with binary thinking. It then presents the Indo community as an example of marginalisation that follows from this thinking, highlighting the many contributions that attention to communities like the Indos can bring to the discipline. Finally, the article suggests a four-step approach through which Decolonial IR can improve and avoid the pitfalls that the article observes.

An analysis of two diverse landscapes—the partial electrification of villages and homes in rural central Tanzania and the disproportionate electricity bills that consume people’s paychecks in the US South’s Black Belt—highlights the role of energy infrastructure in “organized abandonment” (Gilmore 2008). The triaging of racialized places and people distributes and extracts energy resources, enhancing life and labor for some, while rendering others more vulnerable to premature death. The ongoing reactivation of infrastructural sedimentations of inequality constitutes “race-making,” so that it is not only infrastructure that is racialized; racemaking also becomes infrastructuralized.

Drawing on insights from critical race theory, this article analyses the subtextual parameters of race in Ben Judah’s This is Europe: The Way We Live Now. I argue that the book effectively marginalises the racialised dimensions of everyday life. By essentialising non-European ‘Others’ and eclipsing the perspectives of Black Europeans and Europeans of colour, the narrative in This is Europe perpetuates a notion of whiteness as the default European identity. This critique contributes to the symposium by highlighting that a nuanced engagement with race is fundamental for conceptualising the ‘everyday’ in European law. First, it affirms race and anti-racism as urgent critiques in a discussion on European law of the everyday; second, it calls for recognition of everyday resistance by racialised people in Europe who are countering structural discrimination and racialised violence and neglect, and asserting their own history and identity as Europeans.

How we measure racial bias matters. Previous literature demonstrates that direct questioning leads to unreliable responses. Scholars have thus developed a number of techniques to uncover racial bias without cuing a defensive response. I investigate the performance of text- and image-based factorial experiments in the case of racial motivation for opposition to new housing development relative to a more traditional list experiment. My results demonstrate that these often-used methods yield substantially different conclusions about the importance of racial biases in opposition to new housing construction. While the factorial experiments suggest little evidence of racial bias, the more traditional list experiment reveals that the potential for racial change in their neighborhood is a concern for a meaningful share of respondents.

A Kantian reconstruction of racialized moral psychology can illuminate the late Charles Mills’s account of white complicity. Unfortunately, philosophers have comparatively less to say about the incentive structure of the oppressed to participate in the systems that oppress them. Drawing on W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness, this article argues that the oppressed might participate in injustice out of a misguided sense of self-respect that rationalizes their disregard of the unmet claims of fellow oppressed people. Self-respect gone too far is, in effect, the normative basis of Du Bois’s critique of the black middle class’s failure to forge intragroup black political solidarity.

This tribute about William (Bill) Labov is focused on his work on AAVE (African American Vernacular English), establishing his career-long commitment to social and educational justice for the Black community. The title (“His Life is His Message”) are the words of Mahatma Gandhi and reflects Bill’s work and spirit—his words, his principles, and the motivation he instilled in others to act with authenticity and integrity. Although society continues to generate false and negative stereotypes about Blacks, his voluminous work about AAVE—which began in the 1960s—dismantled many harmful myths about its speakers and Black people generally. His work on AAVE and its speakers ultimately led to wider work in the field and established him as the icon of variationist sociolinguistics. He bestowed prestige on his students, making us proud to claim professional and social identity among those he taught and mentored.

Decades of research document persistent gender and racial gaps in political knowledge. However, a growing literature shows that these gaps depend on the content of political knowledge batteries. Building on these insights, I introduce a measure of welfare-state knowledge that captures understanding of what welfare programs do, whom they serve, and how political authority is organized. Using an original survey in the United States, I compare welfare-state knowledge with canonical political knowledge and find pronounced shifts in group-knowledge patterns. Women score lower on canonical items but outperform men on welfare-state knowledge, thereby reversing the gender gap. The racial gap narrows substantially in the welfare domain, with racial minorities scoring indistinguishably from white respondents. These findings challenge prevailing narratives about group-knowledge deficits by revealing domains of political expertise that canonical measures overlook and underscoring how measurement choices shape whose political experiences are represented in the study of public opinion.

This article advances the debate on race and hierarchy in international politics. It explores the continued salience of racial hierarchies in maintaining or elevating a state’s status within the international system and examines how ‘racial social fields’ operate in the contemporary international community to do so. Specifically, the article examines the so-called ‘Japan Threat’ discourse in the United States (US), which enjoyed a period of attention in the late-1980s and early-1990s. The ‘Japan Threat’ thesis was not necessarily about an imminent material threat to US survival emanating from Japan; rather, it was a discourse in which Japan was recast as a ‘non-Western’ state with a fundamentally ‘alien’ civilisation – and, on this basis, seen not only as threatening the US’s hegemonic position but also as unqualified for, and incapable of, replacing American global leadership. The article demonstrates that the ‘Japan Threat’ discourse serves as an important example of how race can be invoked to protect or improve a state’s status within a supposedly ‘decolonised’ international community, a topic that has remained under-explored in the study of International Relations. It also adds to the debate on international hierarchy by shifting the analytical focus towards actors who occupy a superior rank in the social pecking order as they attempt to shore up their position.

This article interrogates the politics of global humanitarianism and its entanglement with racial oppression during Africa’s decolonization by examining the International Committee of the Red Cross’s (ICRC) first prison visits to Apartheid South Africa in the 1960s. Using newly available archives from liberation movements, anti-Apartheid collections, the Apartheid state, and the ICRC itself, it shows how a global humanitarian organization was appropriated as a legitimating façade in the governance of a late colonial global order. Rather than scrutinizing Apartheid policies or safeguarding prisoners of colour, the ICRC’s prison visits reframed collaboration as humanitarian neutrality, thereby enabling White minority rule. Afro-Asian critics, however, articulated alternative legal and humanitarian visions that challenged the Red Cross’s claims to impartiality, neutrality, and universality. The article unsettles triumphalist accounts that portray Red Cross humanitarianism as neutral, leading, and/or inherently progressive, and instead emphasizes its structural incorporation into Apartheid’s political order. In doing so, it contributes to a global history of humanitarianism and international organizations that calls for a more critical reckoning with how international organizations instrumentalize and memorialize their pasts.

This article examines the ways Black women and girls in Detroit, Michigan, were criminalized and punished as they encountered criminal courts, indeterminate sentences, women’s reformatories, and police brutality from the 1870s to the early 1900s. Detroit was uniquely situated as a border city and a major destination in the Great Migration in the early twentieth century. Black women and girls fled vigilante violence, poverty, and segregation. Women sought new opportunities in the urban North. This article argues that criminal justice institutions laid the foundation for the criminalization of Black women and girls by the early twentieth century. Drawing on archival records, annual prison reports, and historical newspapers, the article traces the ways Black women were categorized and punished in criminal courts, women’s prisons, and encounters with police. The article brings together histories of the reformatory movement, urbanization, industrialization, and segregation to examine how the treatment of Black women and girls in Detroit put in place practices that expanded the carceral reach of the state and excluded people from freedom and opportunity along racialized and gendered boundaries.