"Racism and security dilemmas" by C&WP co-director Alastair Iain Johnston
In his essay, Errol Henderson argues that bringing race and racial supremacism into explanations for war enables us to better generalize about the causes of war. He focuses in particular on realist theorizing, which, in all its variants, has tended to dominate the study of war in mainstream IR. He uses Waltz’s and Gilpin’s theorizing about the function of anarchy and power distributions in accounting for war to show how the “norm against noticing” leads to an incomplete understanding of great power war. I look at another key concept in realist (and contractual liberal theorizing) about the origins of confict — the security dilemma — to theorize how racism can generate insecurity spirals between countries. The security dilemma has typically been characterized as an insecurity spiral between two security-seeking states, generated by uncertainty about the intentions of others which, in turn, is generated by anarchy. To get from anarchy to uncertainty to insecurity spirals, however, requires fear of Other, an emotional and social psychological state. But, in fact, as Jennifer Mitzen and Randall Schweller have argued, security dilemmas are mainly characterized by inaccurate certainty about Self and Other’s intentions. Perhaps the most inaccurate certainties that groups can have about Self and Other are beliefs about racial supremacy, and expressed in racial stereotypes. Racism is a worldview that is certain and incorrect about the allegedly inherent traits and characteristics (including malign intent) of a racialized Other. Re-conceptualizing security dilemmas as rooted in Self’s development of inter-group identity diference, and certainty about these diferences, opens the theoretical door to examining how one such source of perceived identity diference — racism — afects the probability of war. This essay, draws on social psychological and social neuroscience theories, and on empirical evidence of concepts of racial and ethnic diference in the United States and the People’s Republic of China to explore how racialized identity diferences may drive the life-cycle of a security dilemmas.
Accepted: 29 September 2023 - International Politics - https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-023-00531-y
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2023
Alastair Iain Johnston (PhD University of Michigan, 1993) is the Gov. James Albert Noe and Linda Noe Laine Professor of China in World Affairs in the Government Department at Harvard University. He has written on socialization theory, identity and political behavior, and strategic culture, mostly with application to the study of East Asian international relations and Chinese foreign policy. Recently he has become interested in the effects of social media on inter-state security dilemmas. Johnston is the author of Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton 1995) and Social States: China in International Institutions, 1980-2000 (Princeton University Press, 2008), and is co-editor of Engaging China: The Management of an Emerging Power (Routledge 1999), New Directions in the Study of China’s Foreign Policy (Stanford 2006), Crafting Cooperation: Regional Institutions in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge 2007), Measuring Identity: A Guide for Social Scientists (Cambridge 2009), and Perception and Misperception in American and Chinese Views of the Other (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 2015).
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