What is race? Epistemic ambiguity and liberal international order

Abstract

There is increasing interest in how anticolonial actors advanced a norm of racial equality in mid-century formations of liberal international order (LIO). Less attention, however, is afforded to simultaneous epistemic conflicts over the scientific object of ‘race’ and their political effects. During postwar order-building and alongside political struggles for racial equality, there was wide and deep scientific debate on the analytical utility of race as a means to categorize human diversity. Race, I demonstrate, was rendered as epistemically ambiguous, caught between social scientists and philosophers who understood it as a social construct akin to ethnicity and natural scientists who maintained a biological basis. This split was not confined to academic debate but shaped political and normative struggles over the institutionalization of racial equality in LIO. Adopting an object-oriented approach, I argue that the epistemic ambiguity of race generated political effects, at once permitting the reproduction of colonial logics in LIO as well as providing latitude for strategies of resistance. Rather than a linear causal effect, I empirically map the work that epistemic ambiguity performed in the creation of mid-century international order.