Did America’s Racial Awakening Reach IR Professors?

Nearly half of international relations scholars spent more time in class on race and racial justice—but with key demographic differences.

Students march in a racial justice protest in Baltimore on April 29, 2015. WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES

JUNE 25, 2021, 2:45 PM

A year ago this month, Meredith Loken and I wrote “Why Race Matters in International Relations” in Foreign Policy as protests for racial justice rippled in city streets, in town halls, and on college campuses across the United States following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. In our world of academia, there were parallel calls to contend with race and racism in the profession, including underrepresentation of faculty of color and the marginality of critical perspectives. The discipline of political science and its subfield of international relations (IR) were no exception.

To meet the moment, several scholars curated resources for teaching about race, racism, and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. One excellent example is the BLM micro-syllabus created by Nadia E. Brown, Ray Block Jr., and Christopher Stout, which draws on articles from Politics, Groups, and Identities, a peer-reviewed journal with a focus on U.S. politics. With last year’s essay in Foreign Policy, we wanted to start something similar for IR, where there is what Sankaran Krishna calls a “systematic politics of forgetting, a willful amnesia, on the question of race.”

Our essay proceeded in three parts. We first discussed how race and racism have for centuries shaped world politics, including U.S. foreign policy, and how mainstream IR thought is “built on raced and racist intellectual foundations that limit the field’s ability to answer important questions about international security and organization.” Next, we discussed how mainstream IR’s inattention to race has knock-on effects for the profession, including who is standing at the front of IR classrooms, whose work makes it onto course syllabuses, and who pursues undergraduate and advanced degrees in IR and, ultimately, careers in academia and policy. Finally, we laid out recommendations for addressing race and representation in the classroom, academic departments, and IR professional associations. One year later, have meaningful changes been made in IR?

Discussions about the role of race and racism in IR, as both an academic field and a policy area, have certainly grown. Our analysis on the state of play was quickly followed by excellent essays in Foreign Policy including “When Did Racism Become Solely a Domestic Issue?” by Robbie Shilliam and reflections from nine experts on race and IR. The peer-reviewed journal Security Studies issued a call for papers for a special issue on race and security studies, and the Bridging the Gap Project convened virtual workshops on strengthening inclusion efforts in the profession and rethinking how we teach race in undergraduate and graduate programs—our essay’s main goal. The International Studies Association, the preeminent professional association for international studies experts, also organized a roundtable at its flagship annual convention based on the essay, featuring thought leaders in the study of race in IR such as Adom Getachew, Audie Klotz, Sithembile Mbete, and Robert Vitalis.

While there is a growing conversation on race and racism among scholars, have IR professors changed how they train undergraduate and graduate students? Over the past year, my co-author and I were encouraged to hear from colleagues at more than 90 universities in 20 countries that “Why Race Matters” was now required reading in bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs—from Oxford and Pretoria to Seoul and Bogotá. The Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) Project at William & Mary’s Global Research Institute provides further insight into shifts in IR instruction at U.S. colleges and universities over the past year.

 

Time will tell how much the developments of the last year affect not only teaching but also IR scholarship, hiring, and retention of diverse faculty.

Between April 28 and May 3, my colleagues at TRIP surveyed approximately 800 U.S.-based IR scholars in a snap poll covering a range of issues related to foreign affairs, the Biden administration, and the IR profession. One question asked respondents if they had increased, decreased, or not changed “the amount of time spent in class on race as a category in IR and/or on issues of racial justice.” Before moving on to what the data reveals, it is important to note that I do not attribute any reported changes to “Why Race Matters” alone. No single essay, article, conference, or workshop could ever on its own change how the field operates. Moreover, globally consequential events like Floyd’s death and the subsequent summer protests likely influenced how IR faculty approached their teaching. That said, I hope that our work played some small role in shifting the conversation.

To provide a brief overview of the sample, 784 of 812 scholars responded to the question about teaching. Of these, 87 percent were in tenured positions (i.e., associate, full, and chaired professors) or tenure-track positions (i.e., assistant professors), 29 percent were women, and 68 percent identified as Democrats. Respondents’ race was not recorded. However, 70 percent of them had participated in the 2017 TRIP Faculty Survey, so we were able to use these respondents’ names to match their racial identification from the 2017 survey to the 2021 data. Of the 552 respondents whose data we were able to match, 88 percent identified as white. Taken together, the sample generally reflects the broader population of U.S.-based IR scholars (approximately 4,800 people).

We were also able to match 563 respondents’ theoretical perspective from the 2017 survey. Just over half of these respondents (55 percent) subscribe to one of the “big three” paradigms in mainstream IR: realism, liberalism, or constructivism. (See “Why Race Matters” for a brief overview and our discussion of how each approach generally ignores race.) Realists made up 21 percent of the sample, liberal theorists made up 15 percent, and constructivists made up 19 percent. The biggest grouping of respondents, 34 percent, said they do not use paradigmatic analysis. A minority of scholars indicated using other approaches like feminist IR.

Now, to see reported changes in IR instruction over the past year. Approximately 48 percent of respondents to the snap poll said they dedicated more time to teaching race in IR and/or racial justice, less than 1 percent dedicated less time, and 51 percent reported no difference. But does this constitute a significant change? That’s a difficult question to answer. It’s certainly more than I, my co-author, or our colleagues at TRIP expected. Professors generally change their syllabuses slowly and episodically; we pass down the received wisdom of the field. So we don’t change our courses, especially introductory courses, on a whim. This tendency explains, as we reported in our essay last year, why even IR scholars who do not subscribe to the big three paradigms still teach them.