South Africa Race And The Making Of International Relations

This book offers readers an alternative history of the origins of the discipline of International Relations. Conventional, western histories of the discipline point to 1919 as the year of the ‘birth of the discipline’ with two seminal initiatives – setting up of the first Chair of IR at Aberystwyth and the founding of the Institute of International Relations on the side-lines of the Paris Peace Conference. From these events, International Relations is argued to have been established as a path to create peace in the post-War era and facilitated through a scientific study of international affairs. International Relations was therefore, both a field of study and knowledge production and a plan of action. This pathbreaking book challenges these claims by presenting an alternative narrative of International Relations. In this book, we make three interconnected arguments. First, we argue that the natal moment in the founding of IR is not World War I – as is generally believed – but the Anglo Boer War. Second, we argue that the ideas, methods and institutions that led to the making of IR were first thrashed out in South Africa – in Johannesburg, in fact. Finally, this South African genealogy of IR, we show in the book, allows us to properly investigate the emergence of academic IR at the interstices of race, Empire and science.

Why and how has race become a central aspect of politics during this century? This book addresses this pressing question by comparing South African apartheid and resistance to it, the United States Jim Crow law and protests against it, and the myth of racial democracy in Brazil. Anthony Marx argues that these divergent experiences had roots in the history of slavery, colonialism, miscegenation and culture, but were fundamentally shaped by impediments and efforts to build national unity. In South Africa and the United States, ethnic or regional conflicts among whites were resolved by unifying whites and excluding blacks, while Brazil's longer established national unity required no such legal racial crutch. Race was thus central to projects of nation-building, and nationalism shaped uses of race. Professor Marx extends this argument to explain popular protest and the current salience of issues of race.

How did the Union of South Africa come to be dominated by a white minority? That is the obvious but haunting question addressed in this remarkable historical survey which documents and analyses the chain of events that led up to the passing in 1909 of the South African Act' by the British Parliament.'

This volume chronicles the volatile history of the resurgence of South Africa, once an international pariah, as a respected and influential African state. Once an international pariah, South Africa has emerged as a respected and influential African state, projecting its economic and political power across the continent. South Africa and the World Economy: Remaking Race, State, and Region chronicles the volatile history of this resurgence, from the nation's rise as an industrialized, white state and subsequent decline as a newly underdeveloped country to its current standing as a leading member of theGlobal South. Departing from much of the latest scholarship, which examines South Africa as a discrete national case, this volume places the country in the global social system, analyzing its relationships with the colonial powersand white settlers of the early twentieth century, the costs of the neoliberal alliances with the North, and the more recent challenges from the East. This approach offers a bold reinterpretation of South Africa's developmental successes and failures over the last century -- as well as clear yet contentious lessons for the present. William G. Martin is chair of the Department of Sociology at Binghamton University, coeditor of From Toussaintto Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution, and coauthor of Making Waves: Worldwide Social Movements, 1760-2005.

South Africa may be situated in an outlying corner of the world but it has been an important factor in world politics for more than three centuries. The antecedents of the Republic of South Africa go back to the planting of a colony by the Dutch East India Company on Table Bay at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. Long before the establishment of Cape Town, Dutch and English ships had stopped with increasing regularity at the Cape to break the long voyage to and from the East and to take on a supply of fresh water.

International Relations, as a discipline, does not grant race and racism explanatory agency in its conventional analyses, despite such issues being integral to the birth of the discipline. Race and Racism in International Relations seeks to remedy this oversight by acting as a catalyst for remembering, exposing and critically re-articulating the central importance of race and racism in International Relations. Focusing especially on the theoretical and political legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of the "colour line", the cutting edge contributions in this text provide an accessible entry point for both International Relations students and scholars into the literature and debates on race and racism by borrowing insights from disciplines such as history, anthropology and sociology where race and race theory figures more prominently; yet they also suggest that the field of IR is itself an intellectually and strategic field through which to further confront the global colour line. Drawing together a wide range of contributors, this much-needed text will be essential reading for students and scholars in a range of areas including Postcolonial studies, race/racism in world politics and international relations theory.

An examination of families and schools in South Africa, revealing how the marketisation of schooling works to uphold the privilege of whiteness.

This exciting new textbook challenges the implicit notions inherent in most existing International Relations (IR) scholarship and instead presents the subject as seen from different vantage points in the global South. Divided into four sections, (1) the IR discipline, (2) key concepts and categories, (3) global issues and (4) IR futures, it examines the ways in which world politics have been addressed by traditional core approaches and explores the limitations of these treatments for understanding both Southern and Northern experiences of the "international." The book encourages readers to consider how key ideas have been developed in the discipline, and through systematic interventions by contributors from around the globe, aims at both transforming and enriching the dominant terms of scholarly debate. This empowering, critical and reflexive tool for thinking about the diversity of experiences of international relations and for placing them front and center in the classroom will help professors and students in both the global North and the global South envision the world differently. In addition to general, introductory IR courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels it will appeal to courses on sociology and historiography of knowledge, globalization, neoliberalism, security, the state, imperialism and international political economy.