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.

Applying a social-constructivist approach to her richly detailed case history, Audie Jeanne Klotz demonstrates that normative standards such as racial equality can serve as much more than a weak constraint on fundamental strategic concerns. Norms can play a crucial role in the formation of global policy. After forty years of protest against apartheid, the world celebrated Nelson Mandela's inauguration as South Africa's first democratically elected president. Klotz considers why racial discrimination in South Africa became a global concern and why—in a remarkable change of practice—nations and international organizations adopted sanctions against the Pretoria regime. By explaining how the world community actively came to condemn apartheid, Norms in International Relations contributes to broader debates on the role of norms in global politics. Klotz rehearses a fascinating history, combining the power politics of economic sanctions and the normative politics of racial equality. She reenacts the events that resulted in the United Nations decision to oppose apartheid. The author also analyzes anti-apartheid activism in the British Commonwealth and in the Organization of African Unity, and she documents changing attitudes toward South African racial separateness in the United States, Britain, and Zimbabwe.

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.

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.'

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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.