Images, Racial Hierarchy, and Critical World Order Studies

This essay contributes to the forum by pivoting from three themes in Debrix’s classic text, Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping — visibility, purity, and order. Specifically, it calls attention to ‘world order’ and its hierarchical features. The racial hierarchical features are always embedded both within contemporary Western discourses and more specifically in the US as a political community that was founded upon, and reinforced by, white supremacist violence. This essay examines the transnational manifestations of racial hierarchies. It also explores via Debrix the role of what is visible in upholding (through performative cruelty) but also challenging such racial hierarchical (dis)orders. It therefore points the way towards confronting world order’s racial hierarchical features. A number of contemporary international relations (IR) and global political developments provide a collective springboard for this critical world order studies approach to racial hierarchy, including the contemporary populist ‘moment’. I specifically focus on work in Historical International Relations, and the detailed scholarship by Robbie Shilliam in rediscovering ‘anticolonial antifascist’ responses in global politics.