 Welcome everyone and good afternoon. My name is John Shorchiari, and I'm pleased to welcome you to this event on race and the development of the international relations discipline. It's the third in our series of winter and spring events on race and international politics, part of a broader initiative led by the Ford School Center for Racial Justice on Racial Foundations for Public Policy. I wanna thank Celeste Watkins Hayes, the Center's Director, as well as Ambassador Susan Page and Dominique Adam Santos for their leadership in putting together this series. I also wanna thank our co-sponsors, the International Policy Center and Wiser Diplomacy Center here at the Ford School and the African Studies Center at our International Institute for enabling us to explore themes this term, including America's engagement with the colonial project, how race impacts the foreign policy profession and more. Today we'll delve into the role of race in the international relations discipline with an outstanding scholar in the field, Kile Buhile Zvoggo. She is an Assistant Professor of Government at William and Mary College. She's also a faculty affiliate at the Global Research Institute and the Founder and Director of the International Justice Lab there at William and Mary. Much of her work is on the institutions created to address serious violations of human rights and humanitarian law, including truth commissions and international criminal tribunals. She's published in leading journals like International Studies Quarterly and the Journal of Human Rights, as well as popular outlets such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy and the Washington Post. Dr. Zvoggo has also won prestigious awards from the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association. She got her PhD in political science and international relations from the University of Southern California. So we're delighted to welcome her to the Ford School today. I'll start and then we'll have some, I'll start with some questions for Dr. Zvoggo. And then I will give some time for audience questions, which you can enter into the chat function. So first, Kile, if I may, welcome to the Ford School. We're delighted to have you here. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure. Great. So we're here today to talk about race and the development of the international relations discipline. I thought a good way to start is to talk about how you got into the field. You entered this field that's very well known for being dominated by mostly male white people from the United States and UK, even more narrowly from a handful of universities. What made you choose to enter this field and what helped to make your journey possible? Thanks for the question. I was born into an academic family actually. So I always saw academia as a potential career path. Admittedly, it was not the first career path. I thought of pursuing. When I was small, I wanted to be a pediatrician because I have the best pediatrician, Dr. Jlamini. But then discovered that kids are really gross and actually I didn't wanna do that. So in middle school and high school, I wanted to be a diplomat. So I started learning French and I kept on with that and into college. We're at Pomona College, where I majored in international relations and French language and literature. So at that point, I was either gonna go to law school and become an attorney or pursue a PhD in French literature and become a professor. Clearly, I am neither of those. Political Science and IR was an 11th hour decision, very much the dark horse candidate. But yeah, so definitely credit my parents in inspiring the academic dream, even though my path to hear me entered. Great. Well, we're certainly glad that you chose international relations and you've done very valuable work, as I mentioned a moment ago on issues surrounding transitional justice and international criminal justice. But you also co-authored a very widely read and influential piece in foreign policy some time ago on race as a neglected factor in international relations theory and why we need to bring it back into our understanding. And you argue that race is not just one perspective on world politics. You describe it as, and I think this is a quote, a central organizing feature of IR. So what are some of the main aspects of world politics in which we can see race as a central organizing feature and not just as another element? That's a great question. Thank you. So I see myself definitely as a new entrant into this area, political science and international relations. Some of my current research on transitional justice actually is trying to bring global insights to the US context. But it was in the midst of racial justice protests in the summer of 2020, following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and earlier, the killing of Famaat Arbery, Fiona Taylor and so many others that we were invited by then editor in chief of foreign policy, Jonathan Tepperman to talk about the role of race in international relations. My co-author, Meredith Logan, who you mentioned, she is a critical scholar and so had been talking about how she teaches international relations and bringing in critical perspectives, such luminaries and voices as Errol Henderson and Robbie Shilliam, Odie Klotz, Bob Vitalis and countless others. And so she had, she'd been talking about this and that came to Jonathan's attention and also for me on the teaching side and on the mentoring side and the professional organization and association side had had some things to say. And so we kind of came together to combine these into one piece because the intellectual foundations of international relations, which we argue are raced and some of them racist definitely shape then the theories that emerge from international relations, the policies that are recommended to international affairs practitioners and also who's at the front of the classroom in IR classrooms who is in the student audience, who persists to pursue majors in international relations at an undergraduate level and at a graduate level and very importantly at the PhD level to become the next, part of the next generation of scholars and then once they're there, to what extent are they effectively retained? But speaking more, and so that's kind of the background on the essay and forum policy, but as we wrote, things like anti-Japanese sentiment guided and sustained US engagement in the Second World War and broader anti-Asian sentiment influenced the development and structure of NATO, right? So it very much being the US and Europe at the center. And again, going back to anti-Japanese sentiment, we see and this is, this connects to my work on transitional justice, including in a US context, the relocation and internment of an estimated 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II from 1942 actually through 1946. And there was later a truth commission on this, the commission on wartime relocation and internment of civilians, which found that there had been no instances of sedition or espionage, all of these accusations that had been leveled against the Japanese American community and that this was actually driven by racial animus. And so there were recommendations about educational curricula reflecting this and then also reparations among other measures. We can think also about during the Cold War, when racism and anti-communism were inextricably connected to the containment strategy that shaped Washington's agenda and approach to Africa, Asia, Central America, the Caribbean, South America and more. Just these last few days, there's been this great short series on President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his decision to put in more troops into Vietnam because we couldn't lose another country to communism, but it was also we couldn't lose to this Asian nation, right? In terms of the conflict in which the United States was engaged. And certainly today, race shapes who we consider threats and how we respond to violent extremism and to terrorism inside and outside the war on terror so-called. And so thinking even about how the security landscape changed after September 11th, the terrorist attacks, suddenly our shampoo bottles became threats to national security. Meanwhile, we don't see that same energy to make us more secure after the January 6th, 2021, insurrection attack on the US Capitol. And so we just see variation in response. More heavy-handed here, less heavy-handed there and clearly race permeating all of these issues, all of these areas and decision-making. It's very compelling that, yes, race clearly permeates this wide range of issues and that then begs the question which you address in that piece and elsewhere about how this affects our core conceptions of international politics. Most of the people who are listening in, if they studied IR, they started off with realism and liberalism, realism about power politics in a relatively anarchal environment that privileges the position of the nation state and its interactions with others. Liberalism, more about the power of interdependence and incentives to cooperate and multilateral institutions to shape and constrain international behavior. How does bringing race into the center of our understanding of IR cause us to reconsider the core assumptions of those two dominant paradigms? I wanna start off just by asking rhetorically, who says what the state is, right? And so when a lot of these theories are being developed, these concepts are being developed, most of the world is under European imperial rule, right? And so you are Rhodesia and not Zimbabwe, right? You are Betwana land and not Botswana, all of these different ways of ordering the world. And so there wasn't many ways self-determination was not necessarily captured in those early conceptions of the state, right? And we were not interrogating who under whose sphere of influence or whose rule most of the world was. And again, that was European colonial powers. Another issue about the state that's related to self-determination is recognition, right? And so there are many groups within states then and today that are not recognized by the state thinking of indigenous nations in some countries that they do not, including this very country, right? That do not have recognition. So just first starting off with this like metacriticism of what the state is and who says it is and often it's those with power with over a particular territory. And then in terms of just domestic politics and then in terms of international politics, right? It's these self-appointed great powers, major powers, not coincidentally powers or majority white nations, right? But I'll get more into that. So let's talk about the main IR paradigms, the big three. Acknowledging that a lot of scholars don't use paradigmatic analysis in their work, but as you say, we were taught it and some of us still teach it. And so there's realism, liberalism and constructivism. These frameworks for thinking about global politics, like I said before, are built on raced and racist intellectual foundations. So core concepts like hierarchy, right, are raced. They center in favor Europe and the West, which sit atop that hierarchy, right? Other concepts implicitly and explicitly position or pit developed against undeveloped, modern against primitive, civilized, uncivilized. And in many of these instances, you can substitute all of these with white and non-white, and also in terms of undeveloped or underdevelopment, it's as if it's exogenously given, right? That the nature created, at the beginning of the world, they were developed and underdeveloped nations or developing nations conveniently leaving out the fact that countries were underdeveloped, right? That is a verb and not a state of being. So it was European powers going to global South countries, extracting wealth, exploiting labor, subjugating peoples, right? That made the West or the North's wealth, right? And the South's comparative lack of wealth or even poverty. So and what is more at these manufactured dichotomies have been used to justify and explain subjugation and exploitation around the globe. And there hasn't been enough, in terms of the mainstream, critical engagement with these issues. And in many ways, and we can get into this more, IR has tended to prefer theorizing and theory to empirics. And so some of different arguments under these theories have been tested and don't always make the grade or don't always explain international relations outside of Europe. Yeah, I think one thing that's interesting to me about your response is you rightly pick up on the fact that these paradigms that we study or teach have a blend of descriptive, explanatory and normative components to them. And that the normative components of them are particularly relevant, I think, to this critique that they are suggestive of orders being legitimate or certain policies being appropriate based on these sort of characterizations of different societies as developed or underdeveloped. I do wanna ask you about concepts like hierarchy or anarchy. Now, if I were to play devil's advocate, I might say, these are descriptive and they are analytic concepts that we use to try to describe and depict the world as it functions. We're not saying anarchy is a good thing or some scholars do say hierarchy is desirable like hegemonic stability theory, others don't. So on that score, we're happy to engage with critical scholars and they might agree with us on our depiction of how the world is. What do you think about that? Is there ample common ground for scholars working through these sort of more traditional modes to meet critical scholars and have common understandings of the nature of the problem? In other words, is the issue here really the sort of extension into the normative space or is the description being given of international politics in those traditional paradigms itself, inaccurate? Yeah, so I think there is definitely room to converge. So hegemonic stability theory is one theory that's been advanced within IRs, particular the realist camp. And that is not to say that it's an inaccurate depiction of the world, but I think the issue with IRs that we just take these concepts as given that this is just the way it was without acknowledging the role of race in shaping hierarchy because you don't get, you know, Western nations at the top, right? And other countries at the bottom by chance or by something inherent, right? To the peoples of the West or the North, right? And those in the South. So I think it's that critical reflection that is necessary. So there is some space for convergence, but also for, it's really important that even in addressing the normative dimensions of these issues, also the empirical dimensions, right? So something that Meredith and I talked about is that some of the arguments that forth, like the balance of power are not always supported by the evidence outside of modern Europe. Let's think about, you know, democratic peace theory. There's the monadic peace, right? Which is that democracies are less likely to fight, period. And then there's the dyadic peace that democracies are less likely to fight each other. And so then when we see democratizing states having conflicts like in the Middle East and North Africa, we kind of scratch our heads and say, oh, those countries are so strange, right? But it's really that these theories developed in Europe are not neatly extending to empirical cases outside of Europe. Another scholar, I don't think he considers himself a critical race scholar in this way, but whose work I've admired for years was at my training institution, University of California, and that's Dave Kong. And so instead of, you know, a very Charles Tillian war made the state and the state made war, right? That it is interstate conflict that enabled the creation of the modern nation state in East Asia, he finds actually it was internal strife that led to the consolidation of power within centers in countries like China. And then you see state development in the region more broadly as through emulation, right? So kind of setting aside this bellicent understanding of state formation, right? To this other approach, which is by emulation. And then if you consider, you know, Africa or South America it's like those borders were of many modern states in those regions were just drawn, right? So it wasn't an issue of states fighting each other or states fighting within themselves, but just of invaders and occupiers setting the geographical terms of nations. And in many cases dividing lands where we now see groups, the same group, but on two national frontiers experiencing domestic politics and also international relations in fundamental and qualitatively different ways. These are great points. And it brings us back to a question that you've already started to answer. But if race is so prominent a part of world politics why has it gotten so little attention in the IR discipline? So this is a criticism for IR, not only for IR but also for political science. And I would say for a lot of areas in the social sciences and academia writ large and that's that reflexivity is not a common practice that is interrogating how who we are shapes what we see what we don't see what we take as given what we take for granted and how we interact with the world that there's no critical engagement with those things. And especially mainstream IR, it is not reflexive and it is not self-aware. And that's at best. That's if we're being extraordinarily charitable that there is an accidental amnesia or neglect. And I really think that it is this there is what Sankran Krishna calls a systematic politics of forgetting a willful amnesia on the question of race. And again, it's easy to whitewash world politics if you are centering perspectives that favor the West trying to explain the rest of the world with theories developed in the West. And if there is a focus on theory and not always on empirics beyond a certain beyond a certain geographic scope. And so, one thing that I tease some of my colleagues about and it's all in good jest is like, oh, you don't study international relations. You study the comparative politics of Europe, right? Which of course, some people are more prickly about but it wasn't like, is it truly international relations or is it the relations of Europe and North America? And yeah, it just makes me wonder that. And we've seen in recent years in the International Cities Association, for example, this move to create a section and just even just the idea of global international relations. And that redundancy should show us that international relations is not global if one of the major professional associations, the largest professional association of international studies scholars from political science, economics, sociology, history, et cetera, have to put global before international relations or critical international relations. That shows you that I are as currently constituted the mainstream is neither global nor critical that we have to say that these are perspectives on the thing rather than the thing itself. Yeah, I like that point that you're making global IR and I think you and I both understand very much what that means. I study Asia like your friend Dave Kong and for a long time, the scholarship on Asia was dominated by people who looked like me. And more recently, there's been a concerted effort as you're noting to ensure that there's a range of views not just white or Asian but people from all different backgrounds to comment on what they think is happening in Asia and how to interpret it. So these are great points. I wanna turn now to asking you a little bit about how we should understand the contemporary world order in light of this insight that race is central to international politics. If we look at the world order today, how would you describe the major racial fault lines? Are we mainly looking at a kind of a North South issue here? Is it equally true to say that there's an East West issue in defining the contemporary order with race at its center? Ooh, so this is an interesting question and it makes me realize that I've even had some verbal if not conceptual slippage in my remarks. So when we say global North, right? We mean countries like the US, the UK, France. And when we say global South, we mean countries like Zimbabwe, for example, where I'm from, I always have to shout out Zimbabwe or India, right? We don't necessarily mean countries that are geographically in the Southern Hemisphere, for example, Australia and New Zealand. So it sounds like one funny thing. So even if I'm saying global North, I'm somehow relocating Australia and New Zealand into the North in the hour. Likewise, there are other countries that are geographically in the Northern Hemisphere that I don't think will consider the global North, China, for example. And considering also, you mentioned what East, right? Is that a stand-in for the Middle East and Asia or Russia too? Or just sometimes when do we and don't we count these countries in that way, right? But I would say to the central question, the fault lines, I think are diverse, right? And they are increasingly globalized. So I'll give you an example from foreign policy. So Russia's misinformation campaigns to interrupt and to disrupt US elections in recent years have included misinformation campaigns meant to depress the political participation of black, indigenous and people of color in the United States. So that's taking advantage. So that's another white majority nation taking advantage of racial cleavages in another country. And so there will be posts that basically suggest that it can't really trust the government. So what's the point of participating in elections? There were several examples from 2016 of these posts that were generated in racial, in Russian troll farms. And so I think it's much more complicated than white majority countries against non-white majority countries, right? There is this interplay. And also we see, for instance, the globalization of indigenous politics, right? And so it's not always now indigenous people trying to assert their rights within their state, but internationally as well. That's not quite race, rather, that's group and ethnic identities, right? And so I think things are changing. Certainly, I don't get it becoming more and more complex, but some of the more traditional foreign policy racism we can see with the former administrations framing of the coronavirus pandemic, right? So playing into tropes of people from Asia, harboring disease or not being honest within terms of the sharing of COVID health data and trying to track the origins of the pandemic and that it's not just some mutation of coronavirus which exists everywhere, right? But it's this Chinese virus as if there's any particular trait about it other than where it seems to have emerged, right? That it is that we are being infected and invaded by this non-white other. And so we have some of this more traditional pitting against white majority nations and non-white majority nations, but then also the interplay of non-white peoples asserting their rights in international fora and also white majority nations taking advantage of racial cleavages and other white majority nations to advance particular policies and preferences of that international organization and cooperation and security. Yeah, and I'm thinking as we're speaking that I agree that the fault lines are very complex. You referenced earlier rightly the counter-terrorism campaigns and Islamophobia. So there's religion here. There can be ethnicity as well as race. There can be gender. There can be other forms of cleavage or discrimination. And so one question that then arises is should we think of this as a call to look at world politics through a lens of identity in its various forms? And is race a prominent part of that, but would it be most appropriate for us to be thinking in terms of identity, not just of race? Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think it'd be very helpful to consider, for example, gender alongside race, right? When we think about all of the major outcomes that we care about in international relations and in comparative politics, world politics to put it simply, from migration to nuclear proliferation or non-proliferation development, human rights, climate change, all of these outcomes just statistically are more likely to influence a woman of color in the global South, right? And so I think it's helpful to have an intersectional approach when considering world politics. And so not just race, certainly, but other dimensions as well. Some people might think also about wealth and the distribution of wealth and how that also shapes outcomes. So for example, you mentioned religion and the role and its connection with race and also with the war on terror makes me think also of the various travel bands that were established under the previous US administration. That didn't affect all Muslim majority nations or even Muslim majority nations known to harbor and to support terrorists, right? It conveniently left off Muslim majority nations that are wealthy and from which the US benefits from their resources and diplomatic and economic and security relationships. And so just as with people, we might look at the double bind of race and gender or race and religion or race, religion and gender and migration, we can be thinking about countries in the same way. Also thinking about the travel ban on certain African countries, right? Those tended to be Muslim majority African countries. And so there are layers upon layers. And there are some like class-based or economics-based accounts of IR, but just as with people, again, so kind of I'll go the opposite way. There can be the concern about reducing to class or reducing to wealth and that's dangerous as well. I don't think we can really comprehend world politics by making these economic considerations or national wealth considerations without addressing race and also racism. I don't think we can talk about development, for example, and globalization without talking about historical and contemporary slavery, right? Land expropriation, resource extraction, and exploitation of the same. And this also makes me think going back to the example about how it's not so clean cut with the Russia example of a white majority nation trying to enact preferred policies in another white majority nation using racial cleavages. I'm thinking also of how developing nations, so-called or global south nations can also have some of these exploitative relationships with each other. So thinking of China, for example, and the enormous power it is gaining over large segments of the African continent and also of South America. And so you can see similar patterns of exploitation even among so-called global south countries or among non-white majority countries. And so yes, I think we can take into consideration different identities, not only race, but also gender and also, like I mentioned earlier, status as indigenous, right? Which is a contested, lived experience because again, some states will not provide recognition and how all of these interact and overlap. Great observations. I was going to ask you next about a topic you just raised and that is about how this relates to economic class-based models of national relations and some of our viewers may be familiar with an older generation of critical thought of dependency theory in the 70s and 80s, the so-called layer cake model, that there's a global class at the top with capital and then there are larger numbers of people who are at the bottom and your notion of intersectionality sort of points us some of the limitations of those models that are based solely on class and not also on race and other forms of identity. I have a few more questions, but I wanna let the audience know that you should be thinking of yours and putting them in the YouTube chat function so we can hear your voices as well. Before we get to your questions, let me ask this one. You talked about the Russian perception of U.S. vulnerability that they could exploit racial tensions in the U.S. too to their advantage. On the flip side, what advantages do you think that racial diversity has for the United States or for Britain or Canada or other countries that have relatively diverse domestic populations if not always diverse foreign ministries? So this makes me think of a book by one of my mentors at USC, Ben Graham, which came out recently with the University of Michigan Press and that's this idea of investing in the homeland and how the migrants can be effective brokers in his area in trade and finance and in the establishment of firms and being able to kind of navigate two countries to political, economic or more realities. And so I think that diversity, including due to migration and immigration is incredibly valuable also for all of the talent and wealth of knowledge and expertise that comes from having groups and organizations that don't just look all the same way where people are coming from different backgrounds that shape how they think about self and of other and of the nation and of the world and relations among nations in the world. And so I think diversity is not a liability, it's an asset. I think often it is viewed as the former rather than the latter, but I think that's because of our own poor imagination and being able to really consider in its fullness the benefits of having people from all over the world from different backgrounds with different identities and lived experiences contributing to the economy, to politics, to culture, to society writ large. And so I think we should be considering that. Another example from the summer of 2020 is the chairperson of the African Union criticized the United States after the killing of George Floyd and just making this critique about, you are treating people who look like us in your country poorly and kind of thinking about how Africans have been treated by white majority nations and particular European nations. And so that's an opportunity to, I've written also in foreign policy in the 50th anniversary issue that came out at the beginning of last year that foreign policy begins at home. And so if we get our own house in check, that can definitely assist with our relationships with other nations, especially, let's say Muslim majority nations against whom there were, the people in Muslim majority nations against whom there were these bands or that were discussed disparagingly with a label that I would not discuss or an African nations and so on and so forth. And so by being more unified, by embodying and shining in daily practice and perspective, E Pluribus Unum out of many one, I think that can help us not only domestically in a U.S. context, but also internationally in our dealings with other nations. Good, thank you, Kelly. I'm tempted to ask many more questions myself, but I see them coming into the chat and I wanna share. So I'm gonna turn to a few of the audience questions of the first one, you're an excellent person to answer given your prominence now in this conversation. How would you describe the intellectual landscape today of international relations? Is there a growing consciousness or a pushed and more seriously considered race, anti-racism and racial justice in the field? Oh, this is a most excellent question. So one of my many professional hats that you mentioned at the top is that I am founder and director of the International Justice Lab, which is based at the Global Research Institute at William & Mary. Now, there are several other labs at the Global Research Institute or GRI and one of them is TRIP, the Teaching Research and International Policy Project. And they conduct these regular surveys of international relations scholars across the U.S. and they have a database of nearly 5,000 IRR scholars in across the country, differing academic rank, personal background, et cetera. And so both last year, last summer in a follow-up, one year later, since the essay with Meredith in foreign policy where race matters in international relations, I together with or using recent TRIP data, I was able to look at one of these issues directly. To what extent had scholars increased time and attention paid to race in their classrooms? And you'll be perhaps surprised to know that nearly half of scholars reported dedicating more time and attention in class in their international relations courses to race and racial justice. Now, I don't know how many people are on the call who are streaming at home know how slowly and episodically professors change their syllabi and just their approach to teaching. And it's also interesting, again, speaking about the importance of identity and how we see the world and how we interact with it, women were much more likely than men to do this. Democrats were more likely to do this than Republicans and constructivist scholars were a lot more likely to do this than realists. But the fact that even realists, some among them, we're taking class time to address race and racial justice is notable because there is nothing in realist ontology, right? That creates space for these types of discussions. And the thing is we don't live out purely our paradigms if we have them. And so I think this is really a credit to colleagues around the country. And I would expect around the world as well, but we can only speak up the data from the US. That's where the sample was drawn, really making strides to meet issues of the day and address them in their classrooms. Also, just very recently, this month actually, yes, this month, I wrote in foreign policy on how race or how real world, the real world shows up in the IR classroom. So this time I got to design a few more questions with Trip and got to analyze them and found that for a substantial chunk of the population of IR scholars, more than half said that the 2020 US racial justice protest movement in the United States somewhat or significantly influenced how they teach IR. And as many as 10% said that it's significantly influenced how they teach IR. Certainly again, identity played a role. So women and younger scholars were more likely to report this event as most influential relative to other major world events in recent decades, like the end of the Cold War and fall of the Soviet Union, the 9-11 terror attacks, also the Arab uprisings, et cetera. So there is movement. And I would be lying if I said I wasn't surprised because I am, but happily so, happily surprised at how much has moved so quickly. Because again, there can be this lag between what's happening in the world and how we are teaching, but for a big chunk of scholars, of professors, there is this agroness to move. Also just that foreign policy created a platform not only for our essay, but for a whole series of essays on race and international relations from 2020 onwards, that the Journal of Security Studies has a special issue that's coming out soon on race in security studies in a major peer review journal in the IR field, likewise at security dialogue. And so there really is, I think, a groundswell of attention to these topics and very importantly, that they are becoming or that they are entering and being engaged in the mainstream, not just standing at the margins as has woefully been the case for so long, for far too long. And the next question from the audience gets perfectly to this when you talk about special issues in security dialogue or security studies. The questioner asks, thinking back to your discussion of IR and the tendency to privilege the theoretical of vis-a-vis the empirical, what kind of research interventions would support a critical understanding of race in IR? Ooh, that's a big one. There are so many. I'll give an example. So for me in my training department, there weren't really critical race IR people and Tickner had retired at that point. She's a legend in terms of feminist IR. And so I learned about critical approaches to IR. Like after I'd already completed my qualifying exams and was working on my dissertation. So basically too late to move the train, at least in the art to re-steer the ship, idioms are hard in terms of my dissertation. And so I definitely think having recruiting and retaining faculty who have critical perspectives on IR and who engage in this work and have been doing so is really important on the recruitment side, also on the retention side. That's a very, that can be a very big problem. And also recruiting and training students who will follow in these critical traditions, right? I've seen a lot in the last couple of years and I think this is a move to be applauded. It's definitely a first step, not the end to be sure, but there being lines in transnational, racial politics, right? Or politics of, or a line in diaspora politics or in black politics or in indigenous politics. And not only in the American politics subfield but very importantly compared to politics and international relations as well. So creating opportunities for scholars to emerge and to thrive and to not have those arguments and perspectives, they advanced to be just sidelined or shuttled to the side as other. And I definitely think journals that maybe have not dedicated enough space in their pages, right? To these issues being aware of these gaps and going ahead and submitting or sending works that maybe the editor might not be well positioned to evaluate, but that maybe peers in the field may be positioned to evaluate, right? So if you're a mainstream IR scholars and editor, maybe don't just discreject the article because it doesn't seem like it would appeal to a broad audience, right? That's one of the arguments that can be used for journal fit, right? So just reconsidering what we think fits and what will be of broad interest and also of what is meritorious in terms of the academic research and sending it to people who are well positioned to evaluate it. So whether it's at journals or in undergraduate institutions or graduate institutions or among colleagues and hiring or how we organize the ISA and the APSA and others, there's so many ways to intervene on these issues. And one of them that you mentioned is of course to train young scholars or students who are gonna go out and part of this conversation. Another audience question asks, what advice would you give IR scholars to meaningfully integrate race and anti-racism into their curricula? So at risk of a self-plug, go and read why race matters in international relations. Not because we say anything that hasn't been said for the first time, at least in terms of the top piece of the top third, which was on the intellectual foundations, right? I think what we brought that was novel was really about how this then affects who's at the front of the classroom, who's in the classroom, who persists in the field, et cetera. But Adi Klotz, who is one of my favorite critical scholars, she's at Syracuse University. She lovingly calls the essay The Syllabus because we link to so many works and scholars whose work is phenomenal, who have been talking about these subjects for years, if not decades. And so they tell my students, start there with those works that are hyperlinked. We hyperlink directly to journal articles or to scholars, faculty webpages or at their universities or to books via Google Books. And so start there and kind of follow the citation train for more opportunities to engage with these issues. And so yeah, it's The Syllabus we give you a nice place to start, but certainly not a place to finish. So that's the first thing in terms of what content, but then also this question, and also I'm thinking of Ann Tickner and Arlene Tickner, excuse me, and her many IR textbooks that are helpful. So if you, designing like an IR class from scratch, any classroom scratch is really hard, but textbooks can help, right? And so think about those resources. Robbie Shilliam has this great book called Decolonizing Politics that came out last year with polity, lots of resources. That's on the what, but then on the how, not have a really, cannot emphasize enough that these critical perspectives should be integrated into the IR curriculum. There should not be a segregated week on critical race approaches to IR or feminist approaches or queer approaches or decolonial or post-colonial approaches. And I use that language segregated intentionally, right? So if you, if you read our essay, we say don't do that. So it's been kind of funny. I've seen some syllabi where our essay is included on like one week on like race and IR. And I was like, you read the whole piece because you would know that we said is a no, no. But these are ways that scholars of all stripes can meaningfully integrate race into their curriculum and hopefully anti-racism as well. How about ordinary people, viewers who are watching at home who are not in an academic program who aren't gonna pick up a textbook. Our next audience question asks, how can everyday people who wanna learn about IR from a non-Western standpoint get acquainted with this material? What are some resources that you would recommend? So this is technically an academic book, but it's written exquisitely that it makes for easy reading and just really gives you so much from, you know, past and present work and, you know, opportunities for future engagement with this topics. That's Bob Vitalis' White World Order Black Power Politics. And so just from the title, that does not sound like, you know, one of our dry monographs published by Ex University Press. That'll be like, you know, grand strategy, the seventh sequel or something, anyways. But Bob's book is great and I think would be one that can be, you know, easily read and digested by non-academics, by non-IR folks. I do think also that popular press outlets like foreign policy have done a really good job of sustaining this conversation on having a critical perspective on the IR, not only IR on the academic side, but also on the international affairs practitioners and practice side. And so I think those would be some good places to some good places to look. And more generally, you know, we say all politics is local and I think in a way international relations does have some local dimensions as well. So just becoming more familiarized with issues of race and racism in domestic politics, because as I've been discussing, they're connected in many ways to things happening in international politics. And so the Washington Post Monkey Cage, which features a lot of political science research that has been translated specifically for a non-political science audience for a mainstream audience, they have lots of topic guides around different issues. And there is a race and politics topic guide. And so that's one area that people can read pieces that are a thousand words, 1500 words, not a 300 page monograph by ex-university press or a 40 page peer reviewed article. But also, you know, if we're doing a good job and we're writing well, those should be accessible also. But some of these other ones, yeah. Robbie Shilliam's decolonizing politics too. And even, oh, I'm thinking now of Amy Atchison's political sciences for everybody, which I think embodies pretty clearly its, or it states very clearly in upfront, its objectives and soon comparative politics for everybody that'll be coming out with the University of Toronto Press. And right now working on, and I'm excited to be a contributor to international relations is for everybody. Great. Our next question, and it'll be our second to last before we get to the top of the hour is from an audience member who asks about some of the headwinds that you spoke about the encouraging evidence from the trip survey about the number of faculty who are teaching more about critical issues in IR classes. But this questioner asks, how do we talk about race and IR or critically interrogate the global racial order at a time in the US when folks are trying to position critical race theory and anti-racist pedagogy as threats to democracy? Hmm. Yeah, I say we do it anyway. Those of us who are fortunate to not be in positions of precarious employment, i.e. where tenure is not currently the state legislature to be repealed. I mean, Texas and the states are really doing some wild stuff is to just do it anyway, right? I see very much teaching as this wonderful opportunity to make good citizens, right? And a good citizen and a good citizenry is educated. And it's our role to be helping to make that happen, being exposed to multiple perspectives and being exposed to resistance, right? If students aren't learning to resist and to pursue truth in American colleges and universities, then we are in bigger trouble than we even appreciate. And so I think specifically because those subjects are central to an educated citizenry that is able to work towards and to sustain democracy that we can and that we should. And I think it's one of those at such a time as this, right? So I am not a critical IR scholar. I study human rights with a focus on the role of non-governmental organizations and advancing a lot of outcomes that we care about, including transitional justice. But when the moment called for it, it was, you know what? I've read this work, I've engaged this work. I have the opportunity of a platform to speak more on this important work that has been neglected. Let me go ahead and do that. But even before doing that, and this was really important to Meredith and I, and it's something that I continue to do is before taking opportunity, suggesting other people, right? So with foreign policy, you said, actually you should ask these scholars what they think because they've been doing this work a lot longer than we have and being able to connect people in our network with others who might be less familiar with their work. And so into their credit, foreign policy and other places actually solicited essays from folks like Robbie Shilliam and others. And so, those were all part of the same series and then our intervention then got to be, not only about theory, but also about practice inside and outside the classroom. And so just creating space for people with critical perspectives, affirming their ability to provide these perspectives, to give these perspectives. And if they're junior scholars or people in positions of precarious employment, in your department with in your sphere of influence, doing what you can to protect them if you are a senior scholar and perhaps are more insulated from how power might negatively influence them in the academic profession. Great. We have one more question from the audience that's just come in. So I'll ask this one for our last question. This audience member is excited by your talk and just would like to hear a few minutes about your current research projects. What are some of the key questions that you're asking and what's animating your scholarship? Mm-hmm. So one thing that I really enjoyed working on recently with my students in the International Justice Lab is work on transitional justice in the United States. Now transitional justice is in brief a set of judicial and non-judicial measures that states can take to address historical and contemporary political violence. And so its main pillars are truth, justice, reparations and guarantees of non-repetition, which we've interpreted in the field or operationalized as institutional reforms. Now typically transitional justice tools in the majority of cases are implemented after the fall of authoritarian regimes or the end of armed conflicts. And so that's been how transitional justice has defined itself. But it can also be used outside of transitional political context or these traditional or paradigmatic contexts like South Africa after the end of apartheid or Guatemala after the internal armed conflict or Timor last day after the Indonesian occupation. And so, but scholars speaking about blindness or amnesia, willful or inadvertent, scholars have not taken seriously the United States as a case either where transitional justice is needed and very importantly where it's happening and has happened. So earlier in the conversation, you might have heard me mention that the US has had a truth commission, the commission on wartime relocation and internment of civilians. We often don't talk about that case as a truth commission, even though it is. And very importantly, it influenced what we consider one of the most famous truth commissions, which is the Argentine National Commission on Enforced Disappearances. Institutional designers of that truth commission in Argentina, they look to the US as one model. For how to organize this type of commission into historical political violence. And so, the erasure of the US from let's say the global transitional justice landscape doesn't really make sense. And I think speaks to this favoring of the West, right? And even American exceptionalism, that transitional justice is something you do to correct problems and issues over there and not over here. But most importantly, it's already been happening. Even before this commission, there was the Kerner commission or the commission on civil disorders that was created by President Johnson. And throughout history, so basically from that commission to the present day, there have been, we estimate about 20 past, present and proposed commissions with about, which are about evenly split in terms of past, present and proposed. And so, I have a recent article with one of my students in the International Journal of Transitional Justice that basically gives a snapshot of different truth commission efforts across the country. Interestingly, all US truth commissions are intended to address racial violence and injustice. So that just speaks to, I think, how racial violence is our flavor of political violence in this country that needs to be addressed using these measures that we're used to seeing there, that are importantly happening here. And we talk about their powers, their designs, what parties and politicians were critical to their creation, what issues they address and just create an intellectual framework for thinking about transitional justice in the US and counting where it's happening, describing where it's happening and leveraging insights from abroad, from the global to the local. Thank you, Kelly. And as you're speaking, I'm thinking of things like the Greensboro Truth Commission here in North Carolina. I think what you just outlined is actually a wonderful illustration of how we don't just sort of partition or segregate critical approaches in our syllabi. It's also about our research. And it's nice to see that the ideas that you've put forward in foreign policy and elsewhere about racist centrality and IR is also infusing your research in domains where it's received too little attention, transitional justice, which I share your interest in is certainly one of those. So really appreciate your insights, Kelly, and admire the research that you're doing on this topic and your voice in this important conversation in the discipline. So I wish we could hear the applause that people are probably sharing in their homes, but we're really happy to have had you here at the Ford School. Those of you who are viewing, come back for more. In early March, we have another session on a theme that Kelly brought up earlier, the role of race in development or governance interventions, looking specifically at Haiti. And then later in March, we'll have our final session in the series on transnational advocacy networks and the global BLM movement. So thank you all very much for coming. Thanks again to Dr. Droggo for her great insight, and we look forward to seeing you again soon. Thank you.