Prospectus Proposal Draft - pages.ucsd.edu
Transcript of Prospectus Proposal Draft - pages.ucsd.edu
Prospectus Proposal Draft
Racial Hierarchy, Law, and Intervention in
International Relations
Bianca Freeman
Prospectus Draft for the IR Retreat
UC San Diego Political Science
May 21, 2021
Plan for book chapters
1. Introduction
2. Literature
- Intervention (DV) - Racial Hierarchy (IV) - Law (mechanism)
3. A Theory of Racial Hierarchy, Law and Intervention in IR
PART I: Status of Forces Agreements (SOFA)
3. Racial Discrimination and Jurisdiction in Status of Forces Agreements
- DV: SOFA jurisdiction - IV: Racial Discrimination - Theory: Petition for Change in Trial Venue
4. Race and SOFA Jurisdiction Waivers
- DV: 1) United States applies for jurisdiction waiver; 2) Host country grants jurisdiction waiver.
- IV: 2) Racial identity of U.S. soldier in host custody. - Theory: Voir Dire (jury selection)
5. Case Study
PART II: The Responsibility to Protect (R2P)
6. R2P in Principle and Practice
7. Race and the Decision to Intervene
- DV: Legislator’s support for a pro-intervention proposal - IV: 1) Legislator’s racial identity; 2) Legislator’s substantive representation
8. Case Study
9. Conclusion
Note to Reader:
Recently, I have decided to shift the framing of my prospectus and proposed dissertation from international law to intervention in world politics as the dependent variable of interest. This change is reflected in the Plan for Book Chapters above.
Moving forward, the project will attempt to explain the selective, uneven decision to intervene in other states, both militarily (R2P) and otherwise (SOFA). As a result, I will be changing the introduction and literature chapters to better reflect this shift and clarify the puzzle (DV) upfront. My chapter on SOFA jurisdiction (hopefully) captures my intent to explain intervention, where race does (some of) the explaining and international law is a mechanism.
I have sincere thanks to express:
Thank you Thomas Flaherty and Branislav Slantchev for serving as discussants at the 2021 IR retreat.
Thank you David Lake, LaGina Gause, Emilie Hafner-Burton, Christina Schneider, Stephan Haggard, Marisa Abrajano, members of the Race and Ethnic Politics (REP) Workshop, members of the International Organization (IO) Workshop, members of the IR workshop, participants of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS), Richard Maass, and many others for their generous insights. They have been a great support in my developing this project.
Contents
1 Introduction 2
2 Literature 6
3 A Theory of Racial Hierarchy, Law, and Intervention in IR 9
I Status of Forces Agreements (SOFA) 12
4 Racial Discrimination and SOFA Jurisdiction 13
5 Race and SOFA Jurisdiction Waivers 33
II The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) 35
6 R2P: Principle and Practice 36
7 Race and the Decision to Intervene 37
8 Discussion and Contribution 39
1
Chapter 1
Introduction
At the 2020 Republican National Convention, then-President Donald Trump lauded the success of
his administration in redressing the mistreatment of Americans imprisoned abroad, declaring that
he was “very pleased to let everyone know that we brought back over fifty hostages from twenty-
two di�erent countries,” (Clark 2020). This “no American left behind” campaign, along with the
assertion that America treats all of its citizens equal regardless of race, were common themes throughout
the convention, though both in stark contrast to the ongoing detention of U.S. soldiers and military
contractors in “far-o�” prisons by foreign governments. At the time of Trump’s remarks, twenty-eight
American contractors, twenty-five of them Black and none of them white, had been held in Kuwaiti
custody over the last five years. While the contractors helped Kuwait outsource its defense as a host
state to the U.S. military, they risked personal exposure to common prejudices toward Black people in
Kuwaiti society. Sometimes, this translated into egregious overcharging of crimes committed, wrongful
convictions, or the lack of due process under Kuwaiti law.
However, the twenty-eight contractors found no recourse in their American citizenship. Despite a
norm of responsibility to the welfare of all citizens imprisoned abroad—an obligation that the Trump
administration would regularly exceed— the United States had overlooked the twenty-eight contractors.
Ambassador Alina Romanowski denied that race played a role in the contractors’ treatment, describing
their cases as “high priority,” (ibid.). On the other hand, another American o�cial explained that the
accused were often assumed to be, “picked up for some sort of just cause.” The o�cial went on to say
that “racism is on such a subconscious level. These guys are so much easier to forget about.” Doug
Bock Clark, a journalist for the New York Times, argued that under the “give-and-take” of diplomacy,
U.S. e�orts to e�ectively address systemic Kuwaiti mistreatment of Black Americans were severely
ine�cient compared to the lengths taken for white Americans imprisoned overseas. In similar fashion,
the opening video of the convention showed Trump at the White House accompanied by six recently
2
freed Americans, five of them white. Not long before this, Navy veteran and one of the twenty-eight
contractors, Nicodemus Acosta, recalled his incarceration in Kuwait. Sentenced to twenty-five years
in prison for a crime he did not commit, Acosta would often struggle to find sleep in his cell without
windows, reconciling his standing in Kuwait and in America.
This project examines the role of racial hierarchy in international politics by exploring strategic
contradictions within the application and enforcement of international law in intervention. Why does the
United States refrain from exercising extraterritorial jurisdiction when a Black servicemember is accused
of violating host country law? Why is humanitarian intervention under the Responsibility to Protect
often invoked within the African context? These questions implicate the notion that legal regimes
within the international liberal order are “race-neutral.” Previous scholarship assumes or implies that
interactions between states lack any formal manifestations of race. This assumption is often reinforced
by the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and similar fora that
are designed to signal states’ commitment to upholding norms against racism. Recognition of this
principle de jure, however, does not indicate racial equality in practice. The questions posed above help
animate this tension.
Recent literature on international law examines the relationship between de jure racial equality and
de facto racial inequality. Contributions by critical theorists elucidate similar patterns in international
law that mediate between two conflicting goals: the projection of norms as neutral and universal on
the one hand, and the application of those norms as a function of alterity based on race on the other.
However, it remains unclear how such normative dissonance shapes state interaction. In addition,
though scholars have carefully considered the ways in which international norms are constrained by
racism embedded at the domestic level, a theory of racial hierarchy in contemporary international
politics remains obscure.
My primary goal is to explain how race helps determine the application and enforcement of
international law and its e�ect on the decision to intervene in other states. Racism has long hidden
behind the principle of equality before the law. Though widely disavowed, racialized inequality becomes
instantiated into the law when application and enforcement vary by race. This process is not unique
to American justice, nor is it confined to politics within states. Race also functions as an important
constitutive component of international hierarchy and interstate interactions. The following proposal
assumes this point of departure and considers how contradictions within the application and enforcement
of law by race help determine the ways states manage their relationships with each other and advance
their interests.
Therefore, to understand the strategic use of race by states in international legal regimes, I propose
a theory of racial inequality that draws from studies on hierarchy in international relations. Specifically,
3
I theorize the interactive e�ects of contractual hierarchy and racial hierarchy in order to examine
important contradictions between equality de jure and racialized inequality de facto. We know that
legal agreements are both the product and site of political struggle between actors that contest at the
margins the rights and duties in their relationship (Lake 2017). While international law appears to
preserve a level of racial and ethnic tolerance through the language of equality and universality, I argue
that this negotiation is nonetheless underwritten and reinforced by a deeper normative structure that
is profoundly hierarchical and racialized. I hypothesize how such normative dissonance implicates the
application and enforcement of international law along dimensions of military intervention.
Thus, this project consists of three main sections designed to answer the following questions:
1. What is racial hierarchy in international politics?
2. What are the interactive e�ects of racial hierarchy and contractual hierarchy? What are the
normative contradictions that result?
3. How and under what conditions do states shape and leverage these contradictions in the decision
to intervene in other states?
In order to answer these key questions, I propose a combination of statistical and case study
analyses. After a review of relevant literatures, I develop a theoretical framework for thinking about
the interactions between racial hierarchy, law, and intervention in world politics. I apply this framework
to two substantive areas of intervention: Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs) and the Responsibility
to Protect (R2P). First, I examine SOFAs, a legal arrangement that regulates the terms of interaction
between the United States and its military partners. I consider how these agreements vary by race
and racialized prejudice, ultimately shaping the extraterritorial application of American law in nations
that host U.S. servicemembers. Next, I show how R2P, an emergent principle in international law, is
implicitly racist in its conception and limited application.
This proposal contributes to the growing body of positive theories that shift the debate from if
race matters to when and how race matters in international politics. While postcolonial critique and
the Global IR project appropriately disrupt the practice of eliding race in the study of international
relations (IR), it is not enough for scholars to simply acknowledge or denounce this omission. Moreover,
limiting questions of race to the era of imperialism further obscures the “color line” that W.E.B. Du Bois
discerned as shaping the modern world. Global uprising in response to the killing of George Floyd by
a Minneapolis police o�cer, as well as the ongoing transnationalism of Black Lives Matter and Rhodes
Must Fall, reveal the international implications of racialized prejudice and violence. Similarly, the story
of Nicodemus Acosta and other military contractors illustrates how agreements between states can vary
4
by issues of race and discrimination. Thus, my goal is to move beyond an awareness of the ‘absence’
of race in IR—what Vitalis calls the ‘norm against noticing’—to empirical research that motivates
questions and explanations about a world that remains discernably racialized.
5
Chapter 2
Literature
International Hierarchy: A New Opening1
In its broadest conception, hierarchy is any ordered ranking of states, most often conceived in terms of
status (Mattern and Zarakol 2016; Renshon 2017; Larson et al. 2014). Broad structures of di�erentiation
organize actors into vertical relations of super- and subordination (Zarakol 2017). Unlike narrow or
contractual forms, these orders are not bargained, nor are they typically open for renegotiation though
frequently contested. Alternatively, broad hierarchies show up and reinforce themselves as deep patterns
of inequality. Approached as such, this type of hierarchy is socially ingrained, manifesting in states’ role
perceptions and repertories for action. Importantly, hierarchies create the conditions of possibility in
which actors exist and interact in world politics. By positioning actors in relation to each other, broad
hierarchy demarcates who and what belongs, ascribing to all a superior or inferior status within the
international system. IR scholars that center broad definitions explain imperialism, hegemony, and other
projects of domination through the ordering principle of racial inequality and its material consequences
(Shilliam 2010, 2014; Shilliam and Tilley 2018; Maass 2020; Bell 2019; more cites). Across these
accounts, inequality transcends political domains, shaping interactions between actors at the domestic
and international levels (Buzas 2018, 2020; Resu-Smit 2018; more cites). As social constructs, ascriptive
orders imbue existing norms that are sometimes instantiated into law and institutions– hierarchies that
are more narrow in design.
Di�erentiation by race also inhabits bargained orders in world politics. In this narrower conception,
hierarchy is the exercise of authority by one state over another, and can take varying degrees and forms.
When understood narrowly, international hierarchies are theorized as functional, intentional solutions
to collective problems of global governance (Lake 2009, 2017; Ikenberry 2012; Zarakol 2017; more
cites). Bargained orders are assumed to structure subsequent interactions between actors that contest
at the margins the rights and duties in their relationship. However, this narrow conception generalizes1. excerpt from Freeman, Kim, and Lake commissioned for the Annual Review of Political Science.
6
European colonialism— which clearly rested on racialized beliefs— as but one form of international
hierarchy that was contingent on a peculiar historical time and place (Acharya 2018; Acharya and
Buzan 2010; Kang 2008; more cites). Whether held as discrete or mutually constitutive, narrow and
broad conceptions allow for race to be theorized as a hierarchy in and of itself. Orders constructed
along norms of racial di�erence may thus influence law and policy, thereby justifying or normalizing an
unequal assignment of rights and responsibilities between states.
While hierarchy opens the door to studying race and its e�ects on international relations, few
have walked through it. One of the most prominent collaborative volumes on hierarchy in IR includes
chapters on empire (Phillips 2017), gender (Sjoberg 2017), paternalism (Barnett 2017), military bases
(Cooley 2017) and more, not one contribution focuses directly on race (Zarakol 2017).
Race as Hierarchy
As the Howard School knew, race is a social construct that categorizes or classifies humans along
contrived di�erence. Its categories— races— are always and everywhere contested, a manifestation and
product of social struggle. As such, race is nearly always stratified, entitling members of the ranked
categories di�erent rights and privileges within society. The resulting racial hierarchy is embattled,
reflecting contention at any moment in time. Omi and Winant center this idea of hierarchy in their
theory on racial formation. They explain that hierarchy is established and sustained as a racial
project such that, “everyone knows the rules of racial classification and of her racial identity. . . thus
we are inserted in a comprehensively racial social structure. . . it becomes common sense— a way of
comprehending, explaining, and acting in the world,” (Omi and Winant 1994). Fanon early perceived
this process in the language of colonial domination. To interiorize the expressive norms of the colonizer
was to participate in one’s own oppression and to reflect the very hierarchical structures of your
alienation (1952). Once racial stratification is established and its “racial logics” internalized (Hobson
and Sharman 2005), race becomes an independent criterion for vertical hierarchy in a society. As E.
Bonilla Silva suggests, racialization— the process by which groups are attributed racial meaning—
conditions how actors relate to the social structures and institutional systems they inhabit. As an
organizing principle of subordination and superordination, it orders race hierarchically and engenders
behaviors and interests to fit the position of the groups in the racial regime (1997; 2015). To be sure,
race as hierarchy is international (Barder 2021; 2019). Sylvia Wynter argues that a globally expanding
West used race to define and order the human. The Color Line encoded “deserving” and “undeserving”
status to function for the nation-state and other imperial orders of the Western bourgeoisie (2003).
Already posited by scholars before, race remains a source of ascriptive power.
7
Racial Hierarchy and International Law
International law reflects a set of constitutive norms that inhere within the modern law of nations.
It is not objectively derived, nor are its values and ordering principles universal. As Siba Grovogui
suggests, international law emerged from certain circumstances reflecting dynamics of power that
influenced the content, interpretation, and application of law (Grovogui 1996). Scholars have similarly
challenged the notion of a “Westphalian commonsense,” which purports an objective morality of state
sovereignty as the basis for international order. Antony Anghie (2006) critiques “good governance” as
a universally held principle— jus gentium— and its strategic promotion in the non-European world.
Across these critiques, international law proceeds from normative structures that are determinate
and implicated by racial hierarchy. Legal constructs mediate between two conflicting goals: the
projection of western law and jurisdiction as objective and universal on one hand, and the suppression
of non-western legal institutions and juridical capacity on the other. For example, U.S. SOFAs regulate
the delegation of legal authority between military partners. However, the agreement almost always
applies uneven constraint on host jurisdiction, particularly for countries in the global south. Racial
hierarchy intensifies this contradiction. If international law is to become truly ubiquitous, then alterity
based on race has to be overcome by the assimilative influence of international law and its derivative
norms. According to Anghie, “the concept of race is inextricably connected with one of the defining
characteristics of international law: its universality.” Grovogui similarly notes that non-Europeans,
though incorporated into the international order, are perceived as “not ready” for full subjectivity
or sovereignty. Though this contradiction is reproduced and reenacted in ways that lack any formal
manifestations of race (though this pattern can change), law is a form of racialized power that reflects
the broader structural norms of racial hierarchy. Another, more stark contradiction is the application
of di�erent rules to select countries and peoples. Grovogui’s reinterpretation of the history of the ’law
of nations’ is particularly pertinent:
Europeans hegemonic powers applied di�erent combinations of legal norms to di�erent peoples
and regions, for the purposes of political domination and economic exploitation. Far from being
neutral, the juridical postulates o�ered as a means to resolving the other’s “ills” (i.e., heathenness,
backwardness) have been propositions for intervention and domination. In addition, the constellation
of principles and rules that applied to non-Europeans was part of a generative process dependent
upon a tradition of alterity and erasure, of silencing the rights, claims, and interests of non-
Western communities.
Grovogui makes plain that sovereignty is not uniform across space and time but reflects di�erent yet
concurrent legal norms that prescribe and legitimize specific patterns of actions in each region of the
world. International legal norms give form to the rules and standards of behavior that are disparate
but complementary across di�erent countries and held together by historic power relations.
8
Chapter 3
A Theory of Racial Hierarchy, Law, and Intervention in IR
A Framework1
Racial hierarchy has direct implications for intervention. Depicted in Figure 3.1, racial hierarchy
conditions how any actor perceives its interests, interprets the position and interests of racial others,
and acts accordingly. As a broad order, it engenders deep patterns of inequality that inhabit beliefs,
social norms, and systems of governance. Racial hierarchy assumes di�erent ideological and structural
forms. White supremacy (Bell 2013, 2014, 2020; Henderson 2013; Vucetic 2010; Sabaratnam 2020;
Watson 2001; Rutazibwa; Maass 2020; Watson 2001) paternalism (Sampson 2002; Getachew 2018,
2019; Baker 2015; Pratt 2013), and other racisms stratify to advantage the dominant actor. Racism
can be conscious and intentional, directly a�ecting how an individual or group interacts with others,
or latent, as unconscious but nonetheless real bias. Conscious or not, it a�ects police on patrol,
shopkeepers, employers, jurors, and myriad others whose choices a�ect civic life. Racial hierarchy,
then, is both reinforced and challenged by the actions and reactions of people in ongoing social
struggle. Such interactions are commonplace because racial hierarchy often imposes itself implicitly
and comprehensively through norms. World politics— its problems and proposed solutions— heavily
feature this normative construction of racial order.
IR scholars argue that hierarchies are composed of norms— widely held principles of acceptable
behavior — that rank actors according to some often implicit but broadly understood rule (Lake 2017;
Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; many more cites). Norms are so deeply woven into the fabric of social
life that they appear “natural,” “neutral,” and are thus taken for granted. Though often disembodied
(Bicchieri 2006) and decentralized, norms constrain behavior through promotion and codification. The
integrative framework above illustrates this interaction. In an e�ort to establish or reify racial categories,
dominant groups often seek to transform racial stratification into law. Since race and racial hierarchies
exist only if a su�ciently large portion of society accepts the categories and their stratification, those at1. excerpt from Freeman, Kim, and Lake commissioned for the Annual Review of Political Science.
9
Figure 3.1: Interactions of Racial Hierarchy, Law, and Intervention in International Relations
the top of the racial hierarchy attempt to constrain rights and privileges by law (1a). In doing so, they
aim to harness the enforcement powers of the state to the maintenance of the racial hierarchy (1b). As
law guides the decision to intervene in other states (2a), it leverages broader processes of legitimation
to naturalize and reproduce unnatural di�erences. The translation of racial hierarchy into law can be
direct, as in the laws governing slavery or the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 in the United States. It can
also be indirect, as when law is written in general terms but with racist intent or e�ect, as with literacy
tests for voting at a time when Blacks in the United States were excluded from education. Georgia’s
2021 ban on the provision of food and water to citizens waiting in long lines to vote similarly targets
jurisdictions with large populations of Black voters and other voters of color. Uneven application of
law by race also plagues contemporary international politics. Uneven application of law by race also
plagues contemporary international politics. Below, I consider how interventions like Status of Forces
Agreements (SOFAs) and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) are, if not explicitly in intent, then
in practice, highly racialized. By defining certain behaviors and practices of racial subordinates as
“unlawful,” racism constrains and produces the system of law and, in turn, authorizes and promotes
the racial hierarchy.
Racial hierarchy also implicates the decision to intervene in other states (3a). Intervention, like
law, is constrained by a countervailing structure of inequality that produces both the actors and their
set of possible actions within international order. Though obscured by the notion of neutrality and
prevention, the decision to intervene is negotiated from an intersubjectively defined constraint that
preconditions states and locates di�erence among them. The act of humanitarian intervention has long
been assumed to reflect racialized beliefs about “at risk” populations. More recently, similar claims
have been theorized and empirically tested in political science literature on foreign aid (Baker 2015).
As a source of embedded inequality, race stratifies countries and attributes to them legal status and
rights that reflect social position within the racial hierarchy. Intervention made legal through laws that
are themselves racialized reinforces the legal grounds to intervene (2b) and the racial order from which
10
the decision inheres (3b).
(Not finished with theory, still contemplating and will extend parts).
11
Chapter 4
Racial Discrimination and SOFA Jurisdiction
Introduction1
Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs) have long been scrutinized as a form of intervention in world
politics. A common framework between the United States and its military partners, SOFAs designate
the legal status of U.S. servicemembers in a foreign country.2 In particular, SOFAs regulate when and
how the domestic laws of host governments are applied to American soldiers.3 While status agreements
stop short of immunizing U.S. personnel from criminal sanctions, SOFAs e�ectively constrain the legal
authority that host countries may exercise over U.S. forces within their own territories. Central to
these agreements is an attempt to reconcile the extraterritorial application of American law in foreign
countries. Although policymakers and legal scholars heed the balance of rights and obligations between
sending and receiving states— SOFAs as a shared sovereign prerogative— the division of legal authority
remains the most important and frequently contested issue.4 Since the onset of the Cold War, this
question of jurisdiction has proved crucial to the forward-deployment of U.S. troops and other strategic
interests around the world.5
Despite the ubiquity and salience of SOFAs in defense partnerships, few studies have examined
status agreements. Most consider SOFA negotiation within larger patterns of basing politics, military
agreements, or other trade-o�s between security and sovereignty involving U.S. forces overseas. While
some scholars account for the legal constraint SOFAs place on host governments and populations, the1. Abstract conditionally accepted for a special issue on race and security. Will present paper on panel at APSA 2021.2. Yeo, Andrew I. "Security, Sovereignty, and Justice in US Overseas Military Presence." International Journal of Peace
Studies 19.2 (2014).3. Mason, R. Chuck. "Status of forces agreement (SOFA): What is it, and how has it been utilized?." LIBRARY OF
CONGRESS WASHINGTON DC CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE, 2009.4. Yeo 2014; Mason 2009; Eichelman, M. E. (2000). International criminal jurisdiction issues for the united states
military. Army Lawyer, 2000(8), 23-32. Norton, W. J. (1975). United States Obligations under Status of ForcesAgreements: A New Method of Extradition. Ga. J. Int’l Comp. L., 5, 1.
5. Rosenfeld, Erik. "Application of US status of forces agreements to article 98 of the Rome Statute." (2003): 273.Prugh, George S. "The Soviet Status of Forces Agreements: Legal Limitations or Political Devices." Mil. L. Rev. 20(1963): 1.
13
literature has yet to provide a systematic evaluation of SOFAs or a comprehensive test of jurisdiction.
Typically, such work has been anecdotal.
At their core, SOFAs reflect assumptions about potential bias within the legal system of the host
country. I develop this claim by examining SOFAs as a petition for change in trial venue. Before a
SOFA is created, host countries retain primary right to adjudicate violations of host country law. In
order to protect American soldiers from foreign courts, the United States pro�ers a status agreement.
In particular, SOFAs allow the United States to select it its own jurisdiction as the “venue” in which
criminal cases are brought against U.S. soldiers. Similar to the logic of home-court advantage, the
United States petitions for a change in jurisdiction in attempt to gain legal leverage over its host
partner. However, a transfer in venue also anticipates the likelihood that host jurisdiction will deliver
verdicts against American soldiers for reasons other than a conviction of justice. If SOFAs are a response
to factors that render an impartial jury improbable in the original host country venue, then bias on the
basis of ethnicity and race could matter for the decision of jurisdiction.
I argue that the terms of U.S. extraterritorial law are informed by how racial and ethnic minorities
are treated within host states. Like a defendant that petitions for change in trial venue on the grounds of
racial discrimination, I suggest that the United States gauges similar bias when negotiating jurisdiction.
Notwithstanding its own prejudice, the United States attempts to ensure impartiality of judgement
through the SOFA. Since selecting a jurisdiction is analogous to selecting a trial venue—in essence,
a jury— the United States is more likely to see host states that exhibit domestic racism as unable
to provide a ‘jury of peers.’ Similar to the well-documented ways that discrimination based on race
justifies a change in trial venue, I suggest that racial discrimination within the host country matters
to the United States when negotiating who prosecutes American defendants. I test this theory of
SOFA jurisdiction by examining the e�ect of racial discrimination within host countries on the United
States’ decision to share legal authority over its soldiers. I find that the United States is less likely to
share jurisdiction with host partners that exhibit high discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity,
controlling for other plausible explanations.
Considering the often-overlooked role of race in international relations (IR) has important theoretical
and empirical implications for the study of security. By accounting for race as a constitutive component
of interstate interaction, this study implicates the notion that foreign policy within the international
liberal order is “race-neutral.” I argue that status agreements illuminate this tension. Although SOFAs
solve collective action problems through the regulation of legal authority between states, they are
simultaneously conditioned by expectations about race and racial discrimination. Thus, in addition to
the analysis outlined above, this paper seeks to establish a broader conversation about how race and
racism shape the extraterritorial application of American law under the status agreement. Importantly,
14
existing work on SOFAs has near-excluded the principle of extraterritoriality, a key source of legitimation
that was racial in its early conceptions and uneven applications. Historians have long studied status
agreements as race-based colonialism in international law. IR scholars have made the similar point
that foreign basing contracts like SOFAs—a bargained concept of hierarchy—are not beyond prevailing
symbols of subordination that reinforce pathologies of colonial legal regimes. Therefore, I extend this
study by explicating the various ways that SOFA jurisdiction, a form of intervention in international
politics, reflects beliefs about race that are hierarchical.
After reviewing the literature on SOFAs, I theorize jurisdiction as a petition for change in trial
venue on the basis of racial discrimination within the host country. I o�er a straightforward test of
jurisdiction that examines the United States’ decision to either share or retain legal authority over
its soldiers hosted in foreign territories. Then, I extend this discussion by analyzing SOFAs as a
form of extraterritorial law. Specifically, I consider how status agreements are shaped by race and
racism in world politics. This article contributes a systematic study of SOFAs to the literature on
international law and intervention generally. In addition, this study contributes a positive theory to the
growing body of work that is shifting the debate from if race matters to when and how race matters
in international relations. Scrutinizing the often implicit assumption that security is “race-neutral”
enhances our understanding of foreign policy and the biases that permeate its study and practice.
What are Status of Forces Agreements?
In the aftermath of World War II, the United States entered into Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs)
with nations it envisioned sustaining an indefinite military presence. These agreements have remained
an integral feature of U.S. force projection beyond their initial use in containment policy. SOFAs
designate the legal status of U.S. servicemembers in a foreign country. They establish when and how
the domestic laws of host governments are applied to U.S. personnel. In general, SOFAs constitute a
framework of legal protections and privileges for American soldiers deployed to host states. The United
States has been party to more than 350 SOFAs with over 46 percent of states in the international
system. Figure 4.1 illustrates the growth of SOFAs since 1951. While the majority of existing status
agreements involve the United States as sending state, several other states authorize and maintain
similar arrangements with various partners. South Korea, Mozambique, France, Russia, Kyrgyzstan,
the United Kingdom, and Germany among others have negotiated comparable basing contracts.
SOFAs are generally broad in scope and cover a range of administrative and operational issues. As
a legal framework for the conduct of U.S. military installations overseas, status agreements regulate daily
practices like the carrying of weapons, taxation, jurisdiction, the wearing of uniforms, import and export
rights, drivers’ licenses, supply procurement, and services rendered by sending and receiving states.
15
Figure 4.1: Growth of Status of Forces Agreements, 1951 - 2020.
While SOFAs exhibit common rules and authorizations between the host government and the United
States,6 the agreements vary in substance, length, and title. This quality allows for ultimate flexibility
in tailoring the SOFA to specific personnel needs. Moreover, SOFAs vary in who they cover. Members of
the U.S. Armed Forces, civilian employees at the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), and those under
contract to the DoD can be protected by a status agreement when stationed overseas.7 According
to a U.S. Department of State report in 2000, SOFAs help protect the rights of about 246,504 U.S.
military personnel, 48,000 American civilians, and approximately 180,770 dependents. Legal coverage,
and the substance of SOFAs in general, is largely determined by the nature and duration of U.S.
military activity within the host country. The status agreement can be designed for limited objectives
or for longterm engagement. Some SOFAs are written as standalone while others are designed within
a more comprehensive security arrangement like Defense Cooperation Agreements (DCA). SOFAs may
be entered into based on executive order, congressional action, or authority from previous treaties.
In addition, the characteristics of status agreements often reflect the quality and maturity of the
relationship between the host country and the United States. The politics that emanate from U.S.
military presence in host communities further shape the revision of SOFAs in base renegotiation.
As a bargain between states, status agreements involve particular actors and interests. Before
SOFAs are signed and entered into force, they are often developed over an exchange of diplomatic notes
between the countries’ embassies. Within this process, U.S. interests in obtaining and maximizing
status protections for its deployed forces are represented by the O�ce of Negotiations and Agreements6. Text of Global SOFA template provided at the end of the International Security Advisory Board (ISAB) external
review in 2015.7. See U.S.-El Salvador SOFA (2007) for example.
16
(SNA) in the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Political-Military A�airs (PM).8 As the principle
link to the DoD, PM/SNA negotiates international agreements to meet U.S. security requirements.
Individuals in SNA draft the necessary cables and memos to facilitate SOFA deliberation between
foreign governments and the Department of Defense (DoD). SNA leads the dialogue and conclusion
of SOFAs and other deployment-related status protections in consultation with other State and DoD
o�ces.9 Once an agreement is reached, the SOFA is signed by an o�cial envoy of each state. It is
common for the U.S. ambassador accredited to the host state to sign the agreement. Although a similar
delegate authorizes the SOFA for the host state, the o�ces and actors that facilitate its negotiation at
prior stages may vary across host countries.
SOFA Jurisdiction
The most important and contested issue in SOFAs is jurisdiction. At their core, status agreements
attempt to reconcile the application of American law in foreign territories. When a U.S. soldier is
accused of breaking host country law, the SOFA in place determines whether the host government
or the U.S. government exercises jurisdiction over that soldier. Before the terms of jurisdiction are
bargained, the United States and the host country first determine that a SOFA would be beneficial for
both parties. Upon mutual consent, the parties enter negotiation from the proposition that jurisdiction
is held exclusively by the host country. It retains legal authority over its territory and the persons within
it unless a SOFA grants the United States exception to that authority. Typically, SOFAs are designed
to reestablish when and how the domestic laws of the host country are applied to U.S. personnel. Thus,
status agreements e�ectively transfer legal authority to the United States. The particular division of
jurisdiction between signatories can vary in two distinct ways that are outlined below.
Exclusive Jurisdiction
SOFA jurisdiction mainly falls under one of two categories: exclusive and concurrent. SOFA
jurisdiction is exclusive if the United States has sole legal authority over is personnel in a host country.
Under an exclusive arrangement, the host government agrees to surrender its jurisdiction over American
forces within its territory for the duration of the SOFA. When an American soldier breaks host country
law, the United States gets to decide what, if any, disciplinary action to take. Some legal scholars have
noted that exclusive jurisdiction allows discretion for downplaying or dismissing violations in question.
As Mason suggests, the right to exert legal control can provide U.S. servicemembers complete immunity
from laws of the receiving state. This is the case despite common language across SOFAs obliging U.S.
personnel to respect host country sovereignty. The United States still enjoys significant latitude in its8. https://www.state.gov/bureau-of-political-military-a�airs-o�ce-of-security-negotiations-and-agreements-pm-sna/9. DoD O�ce of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, the O�ce of the General Counsel, the Joint Sta�, Combatant
Commands, the Department’s regional bureaus and Embassies, and the O�ce of the Legal Advisor.
17
Figure 4.2: SOFA Jurisdiction Types
exclusive legal rights within the host country. Exclusive jurisdiction is generally bestowed in two ways.
First, SOFAs may include a provision that accords U.S. personnel a status equivalent to that of the
administrative and technical sta� at the U.S. Embassy in the host country. This particular privilege
comes from the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961, an international treaty that grants
diplomatic immunity from criminal jurisdiction of the receiving state. Second, SOFAs may also include
a provision that authorizes exclusive control by the United States over its personnel within the host
territory. This clause may be provided in addition to or in place of the Vienna provision within the
status agreement. Figure 4.2 outlines these features of exclusive jurisdiction.
Concurrent Jurisdiction
When jurisdiction is shared between sending and receiving states, the status agreement is concurrent.
Under this type of arrangement, the SOFA divides jurisdiction according to which nation’s laws have
been violated: U.S. law, host country law, or both. Violations of U.S. law fall strictly under U.S.
jurisdiction. Violations of host country law are subject to host country jurisdiction. However, when
the crime in question is in violation of both laws, a formula exists to allocate jurisdiction between
states. The host country has primary jurisdiction unless two exceptions are met: 1) when the violation
18
Figure 4.3: SOFA Jurisdiction, 1951 - 2020
is committed inter se (by Americans against Americans), and 2) when the o�ense is carried out by
Americans during performance of o�cial duties (defined unilaterally by the United States). In these
situations, the United States assumes primary jurisdiction. This type of SOFA is intended to ensure
a legal framework of checks and balances that guards against excessive claims while also preserving
good relations between sending and receiving states. Under concurrent jurisdiction, U.S. personnel are
protected by fair trial guarantees that are comparable to those provided by the American justice system.
However, in cases that violate both countries’ laws, the right to prosecute can be ambiguous and often
conditional on the details of the alleged crime committed. For these cases, the United States often seeks
its own jurisdiction pursuant to its request of the host country, which is typically granted. Concurrent
SOFAs can become problematic when the United States chooses to assert its legal authority in cases
that are dubious or that clearly fall under host jurisdiction. Ambivalence by the United States toward
the primary right of host countries can undermine the cooperative nature of SOFAs. Host countries
have criticized the terms of jurisdiction as “unequal” or “colonial.” Subsequent renegotiations of SOFAs
have involved concerns over a deprivation of host sovereignty. SOFA jurisdiction type by country is
illustrated in Figure 4.3.
The Strategic Use of Racial Discrimination in Status of Forces Agreements
SOFAs are often a strategic response to asymmetric jurisdiction between sending and receiving states.
Prior to a SOFA, the host country as a receiver of foreign military personnel retains the exclusive right
to adjudicate violations of host country law.10 Thus, without a SOFA in place, American soldiers10. Mason 2009.
19
are subject to the jurisdiction of the receiving state. In order to minimize this prospect, the United
States as sending partner pro�ers a SOFA to limit legal exposure of its forces to host country courts.
Specifically, SOFAs grant the United States either exclusive right or shared right over U.S. troops
stationed overseas. In doing so, the agreement transfers legal authority from the host country to
the United States, legitimating its enforcement options against the host country when an American
soldier breaks the law.11 Under the SOFA, U.S. interests in intervening through status protections are
vindicated.
However, the United States’ decision to share or withhold jurisdiction under the SOFA is not
always explained by a preference for unbridled influence, even if consented to by the host government.
Variation in the division of legal authority suggests that intervention through the SOFA is motivated by
additional factors. Importantly, competition over jurisdiction as a disputed good between the United
States and host countries bears certain costs. Though the United States would prefer to keep sole
jurisdiction over its servicemembers whenever and wherever they are deployed, it designs the SOFA to
simultaneously constrain its own extraterritorial reach. Concurrent, or shared jurisdiction reflects this
decision. To an extent, the trade-o� of exclusive jurisdiction signals U.S. commitment to international
norms of territorial sovereignty.12 Such a concession incentivizes host partners to adopt more favorable
policies toward its American counterparts. Not surprisingly, shared jurisdiction has been associated with
greater demands for authority by host states. As Yeo suggests, the salience and scrutiny of sovereignty
in basing relationships were closely linked to norms of decolonization during the 1950s and 1960s.13
By implication, the terms of SOFA jurisdiction began to amplify ideas of statehood and territorial
integrity. Increased media coverage and better reporting of tragic incidents or crimes committed by
foreign soldiers in receiving states may also help explain compounding assertions of sovereignty by host
governments. 14 Notwithstanding, variation in the terms of SOFA jurisdiction has yet to be theorized
or examined systematically.
At their core, SOFAs reflect the United States’ assumptions about potential bias within the legal
system of the host country. The agreement anticipates the likelihood that host jurisdiction will render
verdicts against American soldiers for reasons other than a conviction of justice. According to the
International Security Advisory Board (ISAB), a Federal Advisory Committee tasked with reviewing
U.S. negotiation of SOFAs, the United States’ key interest in jurisdiction is preventing exposure of11. Nettleton, Sophie. “Asymmetric Jurisdiction Clauses and Multiple Related Agreements.” Allen Overy LLP, JD
Supra, 2020, www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/asymmetric-jurisdiction-clauses-and-53779/12. Colonel Richard J. Erickson, Status of ForcesAgreements: A Sharingof Sovereign Prerogative,37 A.F. L. REV. 137,
140 (1994); Yeo 2014.13. Yeo 2014; Davis, Sasha. "The US military base network and contemporary colonialism: Power projection, resistance
and the quest for operational unilateralism." Political Geography 30.4 (2011): 215-224.14. Allen, Michael A., et al. "Outside the wire: US military deployments and public opinion in host states." American
Political Science Review 114.2 (2020): 326-341; Willis, Charmaine, The Right Frame of Mind? An Analysis of GlobalAnti-US-Military Protests (September 1, 2019); Koo, Jimmy H. "The uncomfortable SOFA: Anti-American sentiments inSouth Korea and the US-South Korea status of forces agreement." Nat’l Sec. L. Brief 1 (2010): 103; Gage 2013.
20
its personnel to “an inherently unfair system. . . that departs fundamentally from U.S. concepts of
basic procedural fairness.”15 Some agreements are explicit about prejudicial judgement by publicity,
demographic factors, or the content of host country law itself. In a 1998 revised supplementary
agreement to the NATO SOFA16 , authorities of the Federal Republic of Germany (receiving state)
consented to refrain from enactments that, by application, would cause injustice or inequality toward
visiting forces from NATO member states. In particular, the SOFA prohibits the German judiciary
and police from discriminating against any person by reason of her race or nationality, among other
attributes. Concerns over racial discrimination have also surfaced in highly contested cases of foreign
custody. In a 2020 report on the detention of American military contractors in Kuwait, a U.S. o�cial
suggested that negative stereotypes of Africans and African Americans in Kuwaiti society played a
role in the frequency of Black contractors’ arrest and prolonged detention compared to that of their
white counterparts.17 While few SOFAs cover U.S. contractors, this case helps to illustrate how
interactions between host country legal systems and American personnel are implicated by racial bias
and discrimination. Those familiar with the Kuwaiti case intimated that Black contractors would have
likely received comparatively light sentences if covered by a SOFA.
A Theory of SOFA Jurisdiction: A Petition for Change in Trial Venue
This argument implies that the terms of U.S. extraterritorial jurisdiction are informed by how racial
and ethnic groups are treated within host states. Such reasoning is developed by examining SOFAs as
a petition for change in trial venue. At their core, SOFAs are a contract designed to settle disputes
over jurisdiction between sending and receiving states. The agreement rendered sets the “venue” in
which violations of host country law will be adjudicated. In the way that clients petition for a change in
trial venue to increase their “home-court” advantage, the United States drafts the SOFA as a petition
for change in jurisdiction in order to maximize its advantage over the host state when allegations are
brought against an American soldier.
Recall that before a SOFA is created, host countries retain primary right to make and enforce
decisions that are legally binding, including over U.S. servicemembers within their territory. To prevent
foreign custody and prosecution of its forces, the United States writes the SOFA as a motion to change
the venue that such cases are decided. In doing so, the United States selects its own jurisdiction to
adjudicate crimes committed by its soldiers in host countries, e�ectively shifting legal authority towards15. International Security Advisory Board, “Report on Status of Forces Agreements.” 2015.16. Revised Supplementary Agreement (RSA) To Amend the Agreement of 3 August 1959, as Amended by the
Agreements of 21 October 1971 and 18 May 1981, to Supplement the Agreement between the Parties to the NorthAtlantic Treaty regarding the Status of their Forces with respect to Foreign forces stationed in the Federal Republic ofGermany.
17. Clark, Doug Bock. “Arrested, Tortured, Imprisoned: The U.S. Contractors Abandoned in Kuwait.” The New YorkTimes, The New York Times, 28 Oct. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/10/28/magazine/american-prisoners-kuwait.html
21
itself. Just as petitions for change in venue are filed by counsel to protect their clients from potential
bias, the United States pro�ers a SOFA to constrain the terms of jurisdiction in ways that protect its
interests from foreign courts. This transfer of legal authority through the SOFA endows the United
States with key benefits. For example, U.S. military and civilian courts o�er American soldiers and
counsel the advantage of familiarity with the law, the judges, and the norms of particular circuits of
jurisdiction.18 Venue clauses grant similar leverage. When a party petitions to choose the court where
its legal case will be decided, that party typically selects the jurisdiction where its counsel are located.
This choice reflects its incentives to reduce potential litigation costs and to obtain advantages over the
opposing team that resides outside of the proposed court’s jurisdiction.19
Like venue transfers, SOFAs are employed in response to factors that render an impartial jury
improbable in the original host country venue. When an American soldier is under indictment overseas,
she is not necessarily entitled to due process or guaranteed trial by a fair cross section of the community.
Further, even if jurors are impaneled in accord with common law practice (voir dire)20, their composite
may nonetheless fail to constitute a jury of the defendant’s peers. In particular, American soldiers that
are accused of violating host country law are subject to the collective judgement of a community for
which they lack membership. Perceiving the limits of representative jurisdiction within the host country,
the United States considers additional factors to determine if impartiality is compromised. Implicit in
this assessment is the abstraction of ‘a jury of peers.’ Since a fair cross section— “peers”— depends on
the status or attributes of the defendant and community in question, the United States relies on the
characteristics of the host venue to evaluate the potential for bias against its soldiers. Building on the
criminal defense literature, if the analogy of a change in trial venue holds, then grounds for a SOFA
may also confront the problem of discrimination on the basis of race.
This argument suggests that the terms of SOFA jurisdiction vary by how racial and ethnic
minorities are treated within the host country. Just as venue transfers anticipate discrimination on
the basis of race in the community of the precedent court,21 the United States may gauge similar bias
when selecting a jurisdiction. Despite its own prejudice, the United States seeks to ensure impartiality
of judgement through the SOFA. In order to protect American soldiers from prosecution by foreign
courts, I argue that the United States attempts to limit exposure of its racially heterogenous forces18. LeVine, Mary. “What Is a Contract Venue Clause and Why Is It Important to Me?” Blalock Walters, P.A., 28 July
201519. Brown, Darryl K. "The role of race in jury impartiality and venue transfers." Md. L. Rev. 53 (1994): 107; Brown
cites: See, e.g., Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522, 528 (1975) ("Selection of a petit jury from a representative cross sectionof the community is an essential component of the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial."); see also 28 U.S.C. § 1861(1988) ("All litigants in Federal courts entitled to trial byjury shall have the right to grand and petitjuries selected atrandom from a fair cross section of the community in the district or division wherein the court convenes.")
20. Van Dyke, J. M. (1977). Jury selection procedures: Our uncertain commitment to representative panels. Cambridge,MA: Ballinger.
21. Brown 1994; Underwood, B. D. (1992). Ending race discrimination in jury selection: Whose right is it anyway.Colum. L. Rev., 92, 725; Fukurai, H., Butler, E. W., Krooth, R. (1993). Race and the jury. In Race and the Jury (pp.3-11). Springer, Boston, MA.
22
in host countries that exhibit higher levels of racial discrimination within their legal systems. Thus, I
hypothesize the following:
H1: The United States shares jurisdiction in host countries with lower discrimination towards racial
and ethnic groups.
Data and Research Design
I utilize a Department of State online archive of SOFA transcripts. I also refer to the department’s
Treaties in Force: A List of Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States in
Force 22 and the RAND Dataset of U.S. Security Treaties and Agreements23, both of which record the
universe of SOFAs among other treaties. I estimate the determinants of SOFA jurisdiction using logistic
regressions. Standard errors are clustered on the host country to account for possible autocorrelation.
Since some SOFAs are written to update or override a previous SOFA, but are signed and implemented as
standalone agreements, they are not isolated and thus occur within the context of a coherent, established
relationship between sending a receiving state. Analysis is conducted at the country-year unit.
Dependent Variable
The dependent variable, Jurisdiction, measures the division of legal authority over American
soldiers stationed in host countries. I code the jurisdiction clause of 254 SOFAs between 1951-2020 as
a dichotomous indicator which records concurrent jurisdiction, coded “1” if legal authority is shared
between the host country and the United States, and exclusive jurisdiction, coded “0” if legal authority is
held exclusively by the United States. When coding this variable, I make a set of important assumptions.
Although the RAND dataset counts over 350 SOFAs in existence, I code 254 status agreements based
on the public availability of the transcript and additional archival sources that suggest the status of
jurisdiction.24 The data for Jurisdiction are coded at the level of national jurisdiction since SOFA
terms, including the delegation of legal authority, are bargained and specified at the country level. I
address important measurement validity questions about asymmetry between legal authority de jure
and de facto in the discussion section.
22. United States. Department of State. Treaty A�airs Sta�, and United States. Department of State. O�ce of theLegal Adviser. Treaties in Force: A List of Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States in Force on. Vol.6346. US Government Printing O�ce, 1982.
23. Kavanagh, J. (2014). US Security-Related Agreements in Force Since 1955: Introducing a New Database. RANDPROJECT AIR FORCE SANTA MONICA CA.
24. List of additional sources used in SOFA jurisdiction coding in Appendix.
23
Independent Variables
Ethnic Civil Liberty Equality: I proxy for racial discrimination by including the indicator Ethnic
Civil Liberty Equality from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem).25 This variable comes from the civil
society participation index (v2clsocgrp) and records the extent to which social groups are able to enjoy
access to justice, property rights, freedom of movement, and freedom from forced labor.26 The measure
relates to the question, “Do all social groups, as distinguished by language, ethnicity, religion, race,
region, or caste, enjoy the same level of civil liberties, or are some groups generally in a more favorable
position?” V-Dem’s measure ranges from 0-4, where “0” corresponds to low ethnic civil liberty equality
while “4” relays the converse. Data coverage extends from 1789 to 2019, and I include observations
from the 1951-2019 time period. This proxy is intended to capture the extent to which discrimination
on the basis of race and ethnicity permeates societies within host countries.
Sharia and Judicial Corruption: Several potential confounders may also explain SOFA jurisdiction.
First, I include Sharia and Judicial Corruption to proxy for host country legal systems. The delegation
of jurisdiction could be driven by the quality of law within the host state. Due process, individual
liberties, and protection from state interference likely matter to the United States when selecting the
level of potential exposure American soldiers will have to foreign courts. Sharia is coded “1” for host
countries that exhibit Islamic legal traditions and “0” for host countries that exhibit no Sharia.27 As a
majority common law country, the United States may be less inclined to surrender its political authority
to host countries that diverge in legal dimension and possibly legal protections. Judicial Corruption
from V-Dem relates the question, “How often do individuals or businesses make undocumented extra
payments or bribes in order to speed up or delay the process or to obtain a favorable judicial decision?”
This indicator ranges from 0-4, where “0” corresponds with “always” while “4” relays the converse.
Judicial Corruption covers 1789 to 2020. I include observations from the 1951-2020 time period. When
a host country indicates high levels of judicial corruption, the United States may be less likely to share
jurisdiction.
National Capability: SOFA jurisdiction may depend on the capabilities of host countries. In
particular, the degree of legal control a host country cedes to the United States may reflect the bargaining
power of that host country, as indicated by their level of international power. I use the Composite
Index of National Capabilities (CINC) from the Correlates of War (COW) project,28 which contains
six dimensions of international power: military spending and personnel, total and urban population,25. Coppedge, Michael, et al. 2021. ”V-Dem [Country–Year/Country–Date] Dataset v11.1” Varieties of Democracy
Project. https://doi.org/10.23696/vdems21.26. Webster, Kaitlyn, et al. "Ethnic and Gender Hierarchies in the Crucible of War." International Studies Quarterly
64.3 (2020): 710-722.27. Data. World Legal Systems. JuriGlobe Research Group. University of Ottawa.28. Greig, M., Enerline, A. J. (2017). Correlates of War Project, National Material Capabilities (NMC) Data
Documentation (Version 5.0) period covered: 1815-2012. Department of Political Science, University of North Texas.
24
iron/steel production, and energy consumption. These data have been used widely and cover 1816-2000.
I use the CINC score for each state’s capabilities for the 1951-2000 time period.
Defense Pact: It is reasonable to expect alliances to a�ect the United States’ decision to share
legal authority over its servicemembers in host countries. As a particularly strong defense pact, I use
NATO Membership as a control. I include observations from the 1951-2020 time period.
U.S. Troops Deployed: SOFA jurisdiction may reflect the size of U.S. troop deployment to host
countries. I include a control from R package troopdata for the 1951-2020 time period.29
Ethnic Fractionalization: Ethnic heterogeneity is commonly used to proxy for tension along ethnic
lines. In a country that is ethnically homogenous, the level of prejudice by ethnicity or race may be
lower than that of an ethnically heterogenous country where the potential for prejudice is present. I
include Ethnic Fractionalization (EFindx) from the Historical Index of Ethnic Fractionalization (HIEF)
dataset,30 which covers each country for all available years between 1945 to 2013.
U.N. Voting Similarity: Delegation of jurisdiction could depend on how aligned the host country
is with the United States. I use the voting similarity index (agree2un) in the United Nations General
Assembly Voting dataset, which records the total number of votes where both states agree on an issue
divided by the total number of joint votes. U.N. Voting Similarity Index covers 1946-2011 and ranges
from “0” to “1”, where “1” represents total a�nity between the United States and the host country.
Table 4.1: Descriptive Statistics
Variable N Mean St. Dev. Min MaxJurisdiction 254 0.748 0.435 0 1Ethnic Civil Liberty Equality 228 2.960 0.863 0.644 3.910Judicial Corruption 227 2.720 0.910 0.540 3.920U.S. Troops Deployed 247 5,071.000 13,637.000 0.000 83,462.000Sharia 254 0.039 0.195 0 1National Capability Index 208 0.008 0.011 0.00000 0.057NATO Membership 241 0.432 0.496 0.000 1.000Ethnic Fractionalization 175 0.305 0.263 0.000 0.889UN Voting Similarity Index 189 0.565 0.290 0.000 1.000Non-European Majority 254 0.291 0.455 0 1
29. Allen, Michael A., Michael E. Flynn, and Carla Martinez Machain. 2021. “Global U.S. military deployment data:1950-2020.” Working Paper; Kane, Tim. 2005. “Global U.S. troop deployment, 1950-2003.” Technical Report. HeritageFoundation, Washington, D.C.; Vine, David. 2015. “Base nation: How U.S. military bases abroad harm America andthe World.” Metropolitan Books, Washington, D.C.; Michael A. Allen, Michael E. Flynn, and Carla Martinez Machain.2020. “Outside the wire: US military deployments and public opinion in host states.” American Political Science Review.114(2): 326-341.
30. Laitin and Posner.
25
Descriptive statistics for the variables are listed above in Table 4.1. To address missing observations
in some of the independent variables, I use a multiple imputation method.31 A correlation matrix and
missing data plot is provided in the appendix.
Results
Table 4.2 reports estimates of the determinants of SOFA jurisdiction. Each model represents an
imputation for a total of five imputations (I plan to combine imputations). Taking into account the
imbalance of exclusive SOFA jurisdiction in the sample, I implement a logit model that accommodates
rare events.32 Standard errors are clustered on the host country to account for possible autocorrelation.
The results show that discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity within the host country has
a strong e�ect on SOFA jurisdiction. The estimates on the ethnic civil liberty equality indicator
are always positive and statistically significant. In other words, the United States is more likely to
share jurisdiction with host countries that exhibit higher levels of equality. When considered to proxy
for racial discrimination, this result suggests that the delegation of legal authority over U.S. soldiers
stationed overseas is determined, in part, by how the host country treats racial and ethnic minorities.
The direction and significance of the ethnic civil liberty indicator hold in other model specifications,
including Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), in addition to
coding jurisdiction only by country instead of country-year.
Figure 4.4 provides a graphical representation of the marginal e�ect of racial and ethnic discrimination
on SOFA jurisdiction. When examined against the control variables, it is clear that racial and ethnic
equality is associated with shared jurisdiction, though to a lesser extent than UN voting similarity,
national capability, and NATO membership. This is not surprising. The United States is more likely to
share legal authority with host partners that wield greater military capabilities, that share strong defense
pacts, and that are aligned on important international issues. However, controlling for these likely
explanations, the results show how discrimination on the basis of race matters for the extraterritorial
application of American law.
31. Multiple imputation has been shown to reduce bias and increase e�ciency compared to other remedies like listwise deletion and mean imputation. I perform five imputations for each missing cell in the data matrix, creating five“completed” data sets in which the observed values are the same, but the missing values are filled in with a distributionof imputations that reflect uncertainty about the missing data. See Honaker, J., King, G., Blackwell, M. (2011). AmeliaII: A program for missing data. Journal of statistical software, 45(7), 1-47.
32. MLEs such as logit with very rare events can yield biased coe�cient estimates if one or more covariates come closeto perfectly separating positive and negative cases. See Andrew Gelman et al., “A Weakly Informative Default PriorDistribution for Logistic and Other Regression Models,” Annals of Applied Statistics 2, no. 4 (2008): 1360–83; andGartzke and Lindsay 2020.
26
Racism and U.S. Extraterritoriality
Concerns over the impartiality of host jurisdiction are only one side of the coin however. While SOFAs
solve collective action problems through the regulation of legal authority between states, they are
simultaneously conditioned by expectations about race and racial discrimination. This paper also seeks
to understand how race and racism shape the extraterritorial application of American law under the
status agreement. Existing work on SOFAs has near-excluded the principle of extraterritoriality, a key
source of legitimation that was racial in its early conceptions and uneven applications. Historians have
long studied status agreements as race-based colonialism in international law. IR scholars have made
the similar point that foreign basing contracts like SOFAs—a bargained concept of hierarchy—are not
beyond prevailing symbols of subordination that reinforce pathologies of colonial legal regimes. Below,
I extend this study by explicating the various ways that SOFA jurisdiction reflects beliefs about race
that are hierarchical.
As a form of intervention, SOFAs legitimate the extraterritorial application of U.S. law. Applied
to individuals, extraterritoriality describes a foreigner’s state of being exempt from local jurisdiction,
typically as a result of diplomatic negotiation.33 Though the legal implications of extraterritoriality
in status agreements have been considered, IR research has largely ignored its historic application as
non-territorial colonialism under international legal frameworks. At its core, extraterritoriality reflects
a set of beliefs about host countries that derive from explicitly civilizational constructs of 19th and early
20th century international law. In particular, the notion that non-Europeans lack “government suited
to the white man” was embraced by imperialist states as ‘just cause’ for extraterritorial jurisdiction, and
in some cases, capitulation.34 As a modern project of Western extraterritoriality, SOFAs may engender
“civilized” and “less than civilized” notions of host country type that are inherited from a policy of
domination based on race. Intervention through extraterritoriality has long been the norm, a hallmark
of Western policy that, “declare[s] the rest of the planet to be in a state of exception— a kind of state of
emergency where ‘normal’ rules [do] not apply.”35 It is therefore problematic to analyze SOFAs devoid
of their contextual tradition in colonial extraterritoriality. Understanding SOFAs as a mere postwar
invention obscures extraterritoriality in current world politics.
While its origins extend back to Roman and Greek antiquity, extraterritoriality is a prominent
feature in both classical colonial projects and what Ruskola calls the “non-territorial imperialism”
of U.S. jurisprudence overseas. For Ruskola, race was front and center in the application of U.S.
extraterritorial law. Legal history of the U.S. Court in China helps illustrate this point. The “unequal33. Cassel, Pär Kristo�er. Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China
and Japan. Oxford University Press, 2011.34. Grovogui, Siba N’Zatioula. Sovereigns, quasi sovereigns, and Africans: Race and self-determination in international
law. Vol. 3. U of Minnesota Press, 1996.35. Ruskola, T. (2008). Colonialism without colonies: on the extraterritorial jurisprudence of the US Court for China.
Law and Contemporary Problems, 71(3), 217-242.
28
treaties” imposed on Qing dynasty China up until the 20th century institutionalized di�erential legal
treatment of Western merchants and local Chinese populations based on ethnic identity. Though the
United States never formally colonized China and received formal consent for its extraterritorial legal
presence— “even if only at gunpoint”— the practice of Western extraterritoriality emerged as a key
technology of non-territorial imperialism, a “colonialism without colonies.”36
Crucial to the rationale for extraterritorial privileges retained by powers of the global North was
the denial of non-European capacity to govern. According to Grovogui, extraterritoriality and native
capitulation were reconciled by the belief that indigenous peoples possessed inferior social habits, moral
sentiments, and political structures.37 Since native populations were assumed to lack appropriate civil
institutions and notions of rights, their conquest was deemed justifiable. Consequently, European
settlers, and later American traders, unilaterally imposed the rules that governed interactions among
themselves and between Europeans and indigenous peoples. This colonial perspective energized the
discursive structures of extraterritorial jurisprudence in host countries around the world. For example,
during the congressionally sanctioned tenure of the U.S. Court in China, the court held that, “‘China
in so far as the administration of the estates of Americans decedent therein is concerned, is a separate,
distinct and complete jurisdiction, similar to that of an unorganized territory belonging to the United
States’— a comparison that paid equally little respect to Chinese sovereignty.”38 Eurocentric and
racist rhetoric in American popular discourse frequently conflated U.S. extraterritorial jurisdiction
with the legal status of colonies. In addition, American judges assigned to extraterritorial courts
throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries were not uncommonly selected from U.S. territorial
colonies. Understanding the American extraterritorial regime within its imperial legacy is necessary for
evaluating SOFA jurisdiction as an extraterritorial project. The underlying principle of extraterritoriality
over which SOFAs and colonial practices overlap may translate similar racialized beliefs about host
societies.
As a legal contract, SOFAs are the product and site of political struggle between host countries
and the United States. Both actors contest at the margins the rights and duties in their relationship.39
In this narrow conception of hierarchy, status agreements legitimate power by solving collective action
problems and enhancing human welfare. However, I suggest that SOFAs are simultaneously conditioned
by broader norms of racial hierarchy. Figure 4.5. illustrates the interaction of broad and narrow
hierarchies as mutually constituted laws and norms. Racial inequality, as a social norm, has direct
implications for SOFA jurisdiction (1). Racial hierarchy legitimates the United States as “most”
sovereign and, in turn, its authority to set the terms of SOFA jurisdiction in accord with the normative36. Ruskola 2008.37. Grovogui 1996.38. Ruskola 2008.39. Lake 2017.
29
Figure 4.5: Interactions of racial inequality, extraterritoriality, and SOFA jurisdiction.
beliefs and expectations that advantage it. From a prevailing norm of racial inequality, the United States
selects western signatories for shared jurisdiction, while pressuring non-European states to relinquish
their juridical sovereignty. Since this authority is conferred de jure on the United States by host
governments, the racialization of SOFA jurisdiction becomes normalized.
Racial hierarchy also conditions rules of behavior, or principles, that can be strategically translated
into law and policy. These interactions are depicted by arrows two (2) and three (3). Extraterritoriality—
foreigners‘ exemption from the law within in a host country— is a principle that extends back to
antiquity and embraces the expectation that (certain) people are “immune” from the laws of another
territory after they enter that territory. The principle of extraterritoriality has persisted across space and
time because it is implicitly framed by the existing social norm of racial inequality. Since extraterritoriality
relies on the notion of inherent di�erence between people, it “fits” or a�rms prevailing beliefs about
race. Despite international recognition of the norm against racism— articulated as a human right by the
International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination at the United Nations
in 1965— scholars maintain that the enduring significance of race continues to shape the character of
international law. While it is not easy to identify any area of international law where distinctions of race
are overtly maintained, racial inequality is “silently” sustained and reproduced through principles and
their codification into law. In this framework, racial inequality dresses extraterritoriality with a language
that lacks any formal, socially objectionable manifestations of race. However, this framing is no less
racialized. Extraterritoriality, borne of racial inequality, is readily translated into the SOFA agreement
(3). This transmogrify is crucial for the United States as a primary entrepreneur and benefactor
of racial inequality, extraterritoriality, and the terms of jurisdiction. When translation occurs, law
normalizes behavior and reinforces its interior principles and norms— making the cyclical nature of
these interactions complete (4). Racialization of host countries through the law of SOFA jurisdiction
feeds back into its initial principle of extraterritoriality and its underlying norm of racial inequality.
Drawing from this theory of racism and extraterritoriality, I hypothesize the following:
30
H2: The United States withholds jurisdiction from host countries with non-European majority populations.
In order to test this argument, I use the Ethnic Dimensions (EPR-ED) dataset and the Ethnic
Power Relations (EPR) dataset to create a dichotomous indicator which records Non-European Majority,
coded “1” if a host country has a predominantly non-European population, and "0" if a host country is
majority-European. The data cover 1946-2017. I use data from the 1951-2017 time period and impute
2018-2020 observations.
The results reported in Table 4.3 suggest that the United States is less likely to withhold shared
jurisdiction from host partners that have non-European majority populations. The estimates on the
Non-European Majority indicator are always negative and statistically significant. This result suggests
that the delegation of legal authority over U.S. soldiers stationed overseas varies by the racial/ethnic
makeup of the host population. Figure 4.6 illustrates the marginal e�ect of a racial and ethnic majority
in the host country on SOFA jurisdiction. Controlling for other likely explanations, the results show
that shared jurisdiction is denied to non-European host partners and is reserved for countries that are
co-ethnic to the United States.
Discussion
Under construction
31
Chapter 5
Race and SOFA Jurisdiction Waivers
Abstract
Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs) delegate jurisdiction over American soldiers deployed overseas.
If a U.S. soldier violates host country law, the United States may apply for a jurisdiction waiver of
which the host country may grant. When does the United States request a jurisdiction waiver from the
host government? When does the host government agree to waive its primary right to indict a U.S.
soldier accused of committing a crime? I examine how this interaction between SOFA signatories is
conditioned by race. Since SOFA jurisdiction waivers are applied for and granted on an individual case
basis, I argue that the racial identity of the U.S. soldier in question matters for waiver activity between
the United States and the host country. I use individual-level data of U.S. soldiers in host custody to
test the e�ect of race on the decision to apply for and grant SOFA jurisdiction waivers. This article
aims to show how the extraterritorial application of American law is uneven by race. In addition, this
article seeks to demonstrate how the racial identity of a U.S. soldier a�ects host jurisdiction waivers.
Considering the often-overlooked role of race in foreign policy has important theoretical and empirical
implications for the study of international politics and security.
Theory
Voir Dire (jury selection)
Plan on Data and Design
Dependent Variables: 1) United States applies for jurisdiction waiver; 2) Host country grants jurisdiction
waiver.
Independent Variable: Racial identity of U.S. soldier in host custody.
33
Unit of analysis: Individual-country-year
I will estimate a model using multilevel Bayesian logistic regressions. Multilevel modeling will
allow me to treat observations as nested within groups—for this study, individual servicemembers
nested within countries. For example, it is possible that Japan is generally more willing than Turkey to
grant a jurisdiction waiver to the United States. With this approach, I will also address within-cohort
homogeneity of American soldiers based on race. Since expectations of soldiers likely vary by race at
the group level, a multilevel model allows for between-racial-group di�erences by treating group-level
intercepts as a random variable for the model to estimate. I will use individual-level data to test
the e�ect of race on the decision to apply for and grant SOFA jurisdiction waivers while controlling for
crime type, foreign imprisonment, military branch, rank, base, and other demographic and host country
attributes that can influence waiver activity.
34
Chapter 6
R2P: Principle and Practice
Under construction
Descriptive analysis and theory
DV: UN invokes R2P (UNSC, HRC, UNGA)
IV: Ethnic majority
36
Chapter 7
Race and the Decision to Intervene
This chapter will consider how race a�ects the pledging or withholding of support for humanitarian
intervention abroad by members of Congress. Though studies of congressional voting behavior on
foreign policy tend to focus on partisanship, ideology, and constituency interests, I argue that the
racial identity of congressional members matters when making voting decisions on humanitarian action
under R2P. Since there is also reason to believe that various aspects of interventions themselves may
influence a legislator’s support for the policy, I will also examine the influence of race against this
alternative explanation. Multivariate logistic regression models will be estimated to understand which
factors— party politics, public opinion, the features of intervention, and race— are important for driving
congressional votes on humanitarian intervention.
The dependent variable (DV) in each vote choice model is the odds ratio that a member of
Congress supports a measure promoting humanitarian intervention. I follow Hildebrandt, Hillebrecht,
Holm, and Pevehouse (2012) in coding the DV as a dichotomous variable of a legislator’s support
for a pro-intervention proposal on the House or Senate floor since this action is observable. The
unit of analysis is the member-vote, coded “1” for a vote in favor of intervention, and “0” otherwise.
The data (Hildebrandt, Hillebrecht, Holm, and Pevehouse 2012; Poole 1997) cover votes on measures
relating to humanitarian intervention in Somalia, Kosovo, Haiti, and Bosnia. Worth noting is the
coverage of these data relative to the onset of R2P as an emergent, highly contest norm in international
politics. U.S. interventions in Somalia, Kosovo, Haiti, and Bosnia occurred before the formal adoption
of the Responsibility to Protect principle at the UN World Summit in 2005 and its first invocation
by the Security Council in Libya 2011. However, the legal principle surfaced from debates about
humanitarian intervention in the 1990s. R2P was pro�ered in response to atrocities considered failures
of the international community (8,000 lives in Srebrenica and 800,000 lives in Rwanda). Thus, I follow
Hildebrandt et. al. in assuming that decisions to intervene after R2P’s initial creation are made with the
37
responsibility to protect in mind. The data cover 24 votes (13 in the House, 11 in the Senate) between
1993 and 2000 for a total of 6,758 observations. In addition to modeling congressional members’ support
for humanitarian intervention in the four cases, I will extend the data by including congressional votes
on interventions in Libya, Sudan (Darfur), and Syria. I select these cases based on data availability
and the explicit reference of R2P by the Security Council, of which the United States is a permanent
member.1 I use data from GovTrack, which reports congressional member votes by ideology in the
house and senate, as well as position statements on R2P in each instance. For the independent variable
(IV), I code the racial/ethnic identity of each lawmaker. I rely on data from the Congressional Research
Service (CRS).
In addition to examining the e�ect of race on commitments to R2P in Congress, I will also consider
how substantive representation—congressional members working for minority interests— may predict
willingness to intervene. I adopt Stout’s and Garcia’s (2020) approach to substantive representation
as a measure of perceived empathy toward racial/ethnic groups that are underrepresented in American
politics. A politician’s incentives for protecting minority interests can vary from “other-oriented”
emotional responses to someone’s welfare to electoral ambitions (though these are not mutually exclusive).
Whether empathetic or strategic, substantive representation may signal a level of fidelity to the issues
racial/ethnic minorities face. I argue that congressional members’ commitment to working for minority
interests matters when voting on humanitarian action. While substantive representation directly
involves actors and incentive structures in domestic politics, I suggest that its empathy mechanism
translates into decisions about R2P. This claim hinges on important assumptions about the welfare of
the populations in question, underlying beliefs about those populations, the nature of the proposed
intervention on the table, and how it is perceived. I plan to theorize the e�ects of substantive
representation on commitments to R2P in Congress. I will derive hypotheses to test econometrically.
1. South Sudan, Sudan, DRC, CAR, Mali, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and South Sudan, Great Lakes Region, Sudan(Darfur), Liberia, Libya, Yemen, Cote d’Ivoire are countries referenced in the context of R2P at the UNSC according tothe Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (2021). I need to investigate further if there were U.S. congressionalvotes on intervening in these crises.
38
Chapter 8
Discussion and Contribution
The Norm Against Noticing Race in International Relations1
IR is grappling with a renewed call to reform its longstanding elision of race, manifested most recently in
Foreign Policy (Zvobgo and Loken 2020; Shilliam 2020; Bhambra et al. 2020) and Foreign A�airs (Blain
2020). These interventions on race and racism in IR have since been amplified and complimented by
various public speaker series (GPEP-R 2020), webinars (Henderson 2020; Bridging the Gap 2020), and
discussion forums (Shilliam 2020), each retrieving important contributions that criticize IR scholarship
as silent on race. Those that expose and contest this silence aptly describe it as particularly tenacious
in mainstream IR. Robert Vitalis (2000), citing Toni Morrison (1992), calls this the ‘norm against
noticing’, the practice of overlooking and denying race and racism as determinants in world politics.
While new e�orts are being made to take race seriously, like Zoltan Buzas’ piece in the 75th anniversary
special issue of International Organization (2020) and the special issue call on race by Security Studies
(2020), IR scholars are still coming to terms with a discipline that is historically less disposed to
questions of race. Some have appropriately discerned the collective intellectual deficit incurred by IR
for its willful oversight (Krishna 2001; Shilliam 2013). Calls to engage race in theoretical and empirical
inquiry, however, have intensified in response to the transnationalism of racial justice and decolonizing
movements like Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall (Sabaratnam 2020). As interest in race
and IR swells and more scholars begin to acknowledge the norm against noticing, I seek to center
scholarship that evaluates and helps change this norm. In doing so, I recognize that such critiques
inherit contributions from earlier work dating back to the field’s inception.
Scholars have long interrogated the notion that IR is colorblind. Seminal critiques of this notion,
of which the ‘norm against noticing’ is a contemporary interpretation, lay bare the centrality of race
and racism in the making of an intellectual and professional discipline. The mythology of a colorblind
tradition in American IR (Füredi 1998; Vitalis 2000) was rendered explicit by early disciplinary work1. excerpt from Freeman, Kim, and Lake commissioned for the Annual Review of Political Science.
39
on the role of white supremacy in world-making. To the forebears of this critique, what was often taken
to be ‘race neutral’ was, in practice, silence and evasion about the African presence in world politics
(Doty 1993; Krishna 2001; Sampson 2002; Persaud and Walker 2007; Hobson 2007; Henderson 2013).
As Sankaran Krishna explains, race constitutes a crucial epistemic silence around which modern IR is
continuously made and coheres. For Krishna, contemporary IR discourse is predicated on a systematic
politics of forgetting, an abstraction from the central role of racialized violence in the construction of
nation-states and the system in which they inhere. Despite former disciplinary preoccupations with
colonial administration and ‘race development,’ IR scholarship had largely absolved itself from issues
of race (Vitalis 2000; Rutazibwa 2020; Sabaratnam 2020).
The ‘timeless problems’ of anarchy and the security dilemma had come to occupy the core questions
of IR in line with Cold War imperatives, making race irrelevant for many scholars. Relations between
states, where material power and national interest, however defined, shape behavior, were assumed to
occur independent from or above the ‘domestic’ issue of race. Intellectual commitment to the assumption
of anarchy in world politics, however, was coterminous with the discipline’s ‘willful amnesia’ about race
(Krishna 2001). Indeed, while implicitly assuming that anarchy meant “primitive” and equated the
resulting state of nature with supposedly violent peoples outside Europe, scholars stripped anarchy of
any notion of race and racism. For some, the norm against noticing reflects a common di�culty in
accepting the idea that the ‘international’ in international relations was imagined along the color line
(Vitalis 2015).
For critical theory and cognate fields, forgetting race cannot be reduced to discomfort, disinterest,
or unawareness among scholars (Sabaratnam 2020). By implication, the ‘invisibility’ of race in IR was
not accidental but designed. Similar observations have been made about the professional makeup of IR
as mostly white and male, an institutionalized feature that produces and reproduces itself (Krishna 2001;
Vitalis 2000, 2015; Henderson 2013; Shilliam; Lake 2016; Zvobgo and Loken 2020; Sabaratnam 2020;
Klotz 2020). Notwithstanding a collective avoidance of the epistemological grounding of American IR,
the norm against noticing race in world politics was crucial to the recasting of a discipline that sought to
detach itself from its racist past while preserving white-centered accounts of the world. That which was
made most visible in IR— its distinguishing intuitions and methodologies— is also that which conceals
race, denying the possibility of its explanatory power.
A Critique on the Silence of a Discipline
To understand the critique of IR’s ‘race blindness’ is to begin with the Howard School. The tradition
of unveiling the modern world from its racialized origins was pro�ered by Howard University-based
African American IR scholars dating back to the late 19th century discipline (Henderson 2013, 2017;
Vitalis 2015; Shilliam 2020). Arguably path-breaking as amplified by Robert Vitalis, the contributions
40
associated with the Howard School highlight IR’s systematic failure to appreciate race and its inscription
into world order. Silence about racism in the study of IR, evoked in part by the exclusion of work
that advanced its critique (Vitalis 2000; Krishna 2020), obscured race as an orienting worldview in
the emergent field. Despite various adaptations of publications like Foreign A�airs — previously the
Journal of Race Development from 1910 to 1919 — its genealogy implies what early scholars deemed the
subject of IR to be (Reeves 2004; Blatt 2004). This veneer of substantive change in the discipline was
counterpoised by W.E.B. Du Bois’ seminal thesis on the color line (1903). Later extended in “The Color
Line Belts the World” (1906), Du Bois states that, “the most significant fact of the opening century,
viz.: The Negro problem in America is but a local phase of a world problem. ‘The problem of the
twentieth century is the problem of the Color Line.’” For Du Bois, white supremacy and anti-blackness
were organizing principles of U.S. expansionism. Similarly, other scholars of the Howard School made
plain that theorizing the international required careful scrutiny of its imperial, colonial, and neocolonial
foundations (Tate 1943; Locke 1916; Bunche 1936; Frazier; Logan; Williams). Notwithstanding, mid-
century debates in the field over stability, dependency, and territorial sovereignty were underpinned
with racial ontologies, willfully or otherwise, that privileged whiteness in its assumptions about the
social world (Vucetic 2016; Sabaratnam 2020).
This early critique of IR’s ‘race blindness’ was also elaborated in opposition to the incipient field’s
essentialist notions of race. For Alain Locke and Ralph Bunche, race was sociological— or what we
recognize today, a ‘social construct’ based on phenotypic characteristics that are themselves socially
constructed (Stewart 1992; Omi and Winant 1994; Bonilla Silva 1997). By advancing this argument,
Locke and Bunche removed race from its Darwinist biological and anthropological moorings, e�ectively
rejecting the ‘hierarchy of races’ assumption that anchored the developing field of IR (Henderson 2013).
Locke’s sociological thesis of race as a product of culture (1916) informed Bunche’s subsequent analysis
in A world view of race (1936). For Bunche, race was arbitrary. Devoid of any scientific meaning, race
was a device of national policy that shaped bargaining in class conflict during the interwar period. The
Howard School also anticipated much of the postwar scholarship on race and racism in IR. To be sure,
it developed some of the earliest theory for modern war as an outcome of imperialist and other racial
projects (Du Bois 1915; Tate 1943; Bunche 1936), a point delivered in Henderson’s critique (2017) of
Vitalis’ apparent disassociation of these scholars from the formulation of IR theory. Though met with
scant regard, the insights developed by the Howard School unveiled an IR that not only noticed race,
but also retained it as a prominent axis of inquiry and theory-building. To the extent that IR was race
blind, it embraced a fiction that hovered outside of its own history (Henderson 2013; Krishna 2001;
Biswas 2020).
Will discuss contribution to intervention literature (under contribution)
41