Fear, Hierarchy, and Violence: The Global Racial Imaginary in Barder’s Global Race War (2021)

Traditional theories of international relations utilize discourses of power politics and state interests to account for interactions in the global sphere, as most clashes are explained away by notions of relative power or military might. What these theorists have ignored, argues Alexander Barder in his 2021 work Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy, is the critical nature of racial violence to the development and proliferation of the global order. In his critical engagement with the conception of anarchy as the defining theory of international relations, Barder’s detailed historical analysis paints a picture of a hierarchical global system that stands in stark contrast to traditional ideas of anarchy and statehood.

Tracing key intellectual and political historical moments from the late 18th to the 21st century, Barder fundamentally challenges previous notions of Western ontology, arguing that racial conflict and the resulting hierarchy were crucial in making even the idea of the global intelligible. As a result, race-based violence has proliferated in the defense of this highly racialized global order at key moments of crisis, changing in shape from scientific racism to colonial violence to racial genocide. Through his conception of a “global racial imaginary”, which he defines broadly as the Western idea of global order based on the maintenance of racial supremacy through racial violence and genocide, Barder convincingly argues for a historical construction of identity around race and the defense of “civilization” as justification for violence. The resulting narrative is one that manages to shock no matter the example, and makes tangible the constant anxiety of Western decline that has permeated throughout every corner of the global order.

Barder begins his analysis with a discussion of the Haitian Revolution, which he argues was a crucible for the development of the global racial imaginary. Prior to the beginning of the Revolution in 1791, a critical European assumption that underpinned both native subjugation and the establishment of the Atlantic Slave Trade was that of political subjectivity being exclusive to the European or white race. Native populations were assumed to be inferior or savage, but particularly in the sense that they were seen as unable to form political or civil unions, and thus could not be considered anything but a “multitude” or “swarm”.¹ The Haitian Revolution, however, turned this assumption on its head with the “violent manifestation of Black individual autonomy”²: a violent revolt of slaves against their supposedly superior masters, codifying their own emancipation and declaring an independent state. As becomes the most recurring theme throughout Barder’s work, the reaction of the Europeans to the assumed racial order being thrown into a state of crisis was unadulterated violence – “Black fear”, or fear of a genocide of the white European at the hands of their slaves, not only justified the “total war” waged against the Haitians by the French military, but launched the broader European imagination into a state of extreme anxiety. Thus, the “ontological insecurity” caused by the “unthinkable” revolt created the discursive justification for genocidal race war in defense of white supremacy.³ This notion of race war as inevitable and/or necessary was, from this moment forward, embedded into the Western approach to global relations.

Barder continues to develop Western fear and the increasing stakes of defending white supremacy throughout the remainder of the text, beginning with the development of biological or scientific racism, particularly throughout the 19th century. Through extensive textual analysis, he tracks the growing fear of race war alongside a rapidly developing field that sought to justify racial difference – a field, interestingly, much more concerned with the puzzle of race and the threat of racial conflict than with an anarchical power struggle between states. Scientific racism, aligned closely with social Darwinism, aided in the construction of an initial assumption that “inferior races” would “die out” as a result of their lack of biological fitness in contrast to the white race. This fantasy of extinction was widely accepted, even among those individuals who did not support the colonial violence such theories justified; inherent in the European genocide of Native Americans, among other acts of imperial racial violence, was the assumption that these races were doomed, always already extinct. As a result, mass genocide was seen as a marker of progress, a fulfillment of an ordained mission and the inevitability of racial inferiority.

Moving through the history of settler colonialism on the U.S. frontier and the 1915 Armenian genocide, Barder demonstrates the progression of theories of extinction to a broader colonial project that was critical in developing identity – and, ultimately, continues to make racial violence intelligible through the development of the global racial imaginary. In the cases of the Native American genocide and U.S. occupation of the Philippines, imperial violence both aided in and depended upon the construction of the Natives as “savages” who would only respond to abject, systemic brutality. The line between “civilization” and the “barbarian” was reinforced by the imperial project, and so expanded an imaginary of the global that idealized a constant war between races. This incommensurability, the construction of the white as superior and the “other” – first Black or native, then Asiatic – as inferior and inherently violent, built racial identity around the existential fear of destruction. This fear of the collapse of white supremacy, coupled with anxieties surrounding Western societal decline as a result of miscegenation, was the primary justification for genocidal violence, peddled as the only way to ensure Western survival against the ever-racialized foe.

This dialogue remains consistent surrounding the Armenian genocide, which develops Barder’s notion of unrestrained violence or “total war” as a crucial element of the global racial imaginary, particularly the point that “the very notion of race war is a form of violence that cannot be accounted for by a political or social set of relations that mediates or restrains violence”.⁴ In race war, as the incommensurability of races is assumed, the result can only be complete victory or defeat. State survival, synonymous with racial survival and given meaning through the association of the state itself with racial purity and cultural maintenance, depended entirely on the ability to eliminate the “enemy” entirely. Thus, the slaughter of 600,000 to 1 million Armenian Turks, followed by the expulsion or conversion of those who remained, was explained by the West through racial rather than military ends; the organizing principle of race determined the accepted mode of violence. In this case, genocide was made intelligible by an imaginary of racial survival and the maintenance of the supremacy of the dominant race internally (within state borders) as well as externally (colonial projects).

Barder expands upon the developments of identity, global order, and the racial imaginary described above to invert traditional narratives regarding the Nazi regime and World War II. He argues that rather than fighting a war of territorial control and military domination with an explicitly racist undertone, the Nazi war was in fact primarily a race war, aimed at restructuring Westphalian notions of the nation-state by reorienting the global system based on race. Barder discusses Hitler’s idea of “Lebensraum” (living space) as predicated on Darwinian conceptions of competition between races for resources, before emphasizing the Schmittian construction of the enemy around Jewish Bolshevism, which Barder argues is a part of the ever-present fear of an “Asiatic onslaught” in Western racial discourse. These fears would remain present in the Western consciousness throughout World War II and the Cold War, with the persistent racialization of the Japanese by the United States during the Second World War moving into a much broader “Yellow Peril” that weaponized orientalism against China, Japan, and the Soviet Union. Here, the idea of protecting Western civilization – an “Occident-under-siege” – from the threat of a malicious East or Orient becomes the primary objective of the global racial imaginary. This demonstrates how the fascination of the Western imaginary has changed over time, introducing new or recycled forms of violence as the enemy is constructed and reconstructed within specific historical context. If white supremacy, or the purity and/or hegemony of Western society, is constantly in crisis from an external (and, with discourses surrounding immigration increasingly grounded in fear of cultural destruction, internal) enemy, the expansion of colonial and imperial violence is necessarily perpetuated. In a situation where the only options are absolute victory or racial destruction, race war is self-sustaining and self-constructing, constantly reimagining racial conflict while utilizing the same principles of dehumanization and racial threat in its justification.

Chapters 7, 8, and 9 barrel towards the current state of the global racial imaginary, and can be categorized as a progression of increasingly devious racial dialogues in the pursuit of all the more violent Western hegemony. Barder continues his engagement with the Cold War era, exploring the intersections between economic and racialized narratives that not only constructed the Soviet Union as an ideological enemy, but also as a civilizational enemy. Communism was further racialized in reference to the USSR through the development of Domino Theory. The imperial violence perpetuated by the United States throughout the mid to late 20th century was certainly in pursuit of American hegemony, but the degree of said violence was explicitly justified by racial threat. As communism expanded, the ideological combined with the racial to create an imaginary of enemy civilizations that posed a direct threat to American white supremacy; thus, the line between military combatant and civilian ceased to exist, part and parcel with the indiscriminate violence justified by race war. The use of Agent Orange and the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam were not military pursuits according to the racial imaginary, but rather the only form of defense against an Asiatic, communist civilization that had to be wiped out in order for the West to survive, racially and ideologically.

These discourses of civilizational incommensurability continued through the end of the 20th into the 21st century. Barder engages Samuel Huntington as well as other authors who contributed to the construction of the modern day racial “other”, particularly through the demonization of Islam and “Muslim anger”.⁵ Throughout the 1990s, but particularly after 9/11, Western society developed the narrative that Islamic societies were unable to modernize or adapt, unchangeable and inherently violent, lying in wait to unleash a caliphate against the West. President Bush’s justification for the War on Terror pulled directly from historical notions of “civilization” versus the “barbarian”, characterizing the conflict as a war for liberal democracy against those who “despise freedom”.⁶ This discourse draws on several of Barder’s previously established points: Islamic society/the Muslim is characterized as inferior, barbaric, and violent, similarly to early colonial dialogues; the racial is fused with the ideological, creating an enemy that poses an explicit threat to white Judeo-Christian tradition. Notably, this constructed enemy is entirely monolithic and necessitates total elimination in pursuit of survival. Throughout this period, security dispositifs and the construction of the global racial imaginary in terms intelligible to a 21st century world order worked together to recreate a hierarchical global order with white supremacy at its head. This order, constantly victimized and under siege, feels that it is forced to utilize the full scope of its brutality to ward off inferior races and civilizations whose very existence cause a state of permanent crisis and threat to survival.

In his final chapter, Barder describes the impact of each historical development above in the culmination of current global racial imaginaries, which are largely grounded in theories of “The Great Replacement” and threats to Western/white cultural tradition and racial purity from mass immigration, miscegenation, and invasion. These dialogues of “white genocide” have been used by Western white nationalists in numerous manifestos in order to justify horrific acts of racially motivated terrorist violence. Migration in particular invokes an ontological crisis, one which assumes “a world where human life is valued beyond the privilege of male whiteness, is a world of nothingness, a dystopian world of cultural nihilism”.⁷ The development of these fears, politically and historically as well as within the world of fiction, is well documented by Barder in the chapters preceding, and his final warning that these justifications of racial violence must be resisted at all costs is a poignant end to what is ultimately a brilliant but bleak analysis of the global world order.

The effectiveness of Barder’s intervention into previous theories of international relations is paralleled by the stand-alone value of his process tracing. At its conclusion, one cannot help but wish for its extension despite the already wide temporal scope of the project. Barder mentions internal European politics of racial exclusion as a point of origin for imperialism and racial hierarchy; can we, then, trace the global racial imaginary back further than the Haitian Revolution? While reading, I could not help but think of other examples of historical analysis such as Ladelle McWhorter’s Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America (2009), which explores gender, sexuality, and class in relation to broader racialization and Western racism. These genealogies are fundamentally different in their scope, yet one must ask whether there are developments and historical examples that would aid – or, perhaps, complicate – Barder’s overall argument, including those of gender and sexuality, but even racialized economics/class dialogues beyond the ideological or civilizational? In the other direction, what comes next? How has the global racial imaginary continued to rapidly morph as Western discourse and political events have become increasingly racialized? Is there an imaginary to be grasped that does not rely on white supremacy as the primary organizational principle of the global world order? Barder calls upon his readers to understand the racial imaginary in order to create such an alternative, but how will this materialize? In any case, one would hope that Barder’s next work will confront some of these questions, strengthening his already compelling framework and challenge to traditional international relations theory. Given the effectiveness of Global Race War, I eagerly await Barder’s next project.