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Race, Racism, and International Law
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19 August 2025

What would it look like to place race at the center of international legal scholarship?
From its inception in the 70s and 80s, critical race theory's target was the field of law, revealing it to be a repository for racial power. This particular critique of law was explosive because of law's putatively apolitical status, making it a unique site for an intellectual sit-in that has forever changed the way that race and racism are understood in American society.
Several decades later, as indicators of populism and white nationalism spread across North America and Europe, critical race theory remains markedly absent from discourses in global affairs and international law. This volume opens the door for CRT to enter the international sphere. Featuring contributions from 30 of today's leading scholars from around the world, Race, Racism, and International Law explains how the concept of racial difference sits at the foundation of the legal, political, and social structures of hierarchy that shape the contemporary global order. Helmed by four pioneering experts, two in CRT and two in international law, the volume's approach targets regimes of power and violence that implicate racism, capitalism, and colonialism. This volume lays the groundwork for urgent and provocative new modes of critique and analysis.
"This volume is significant and makes a notable contribution to the literature on international law and racism. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States and its resonance globally, a volume of this kind is of particular interest both in the USA and abroad. The editors and contributors are leaders in critical race theory or international law." —Penelope Andrews, New York Law School
"This volume is long overdue in the field. International lawyers have been complacent about their ethnocentric critical attitude for too long. If there is a chance to salvage international law as a tool to resist the current sinister turns in global governance, colorblindness and the so-called 'perpetrator perspective' must be, as this book invites us to do, fought at all costs." —Jean d'Aspremont, Sciences Po Law School and University of Manchester
"Carbado, Crenshaw, DeSautels-Stein, and Thomas have undertaken an extraordinarily valuable exercise in using this volume not only to map the pressure points where racial justice principles may better inform the international legal order, but also to expose the ways in which conventional justifications and practices are vulnerable to their piercing and incisive criticisms. As international law struggles as part of the battle ground between violent, racist, fascist territorial expansion on the one hand and those opposed to it on the other, Carbado, Crenshaw, DeSautels-Stein, and Thomas's volume, and along with it their contributors, will be a go-to resource for those assessing how to move forward both inside and outside the academy." —Sam F. Halabi, Jotwell
—Devon W. Carbado, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Justin Desautels-Stein, and Chantal Thomas
I. Histories and Structures
1. Race and Empire in International Law
—E. Tendayi Achiume and Aslı Bâli
2. A Racist International Law: Domination and Resistance in the Americas of the Nineteenth Century
—Arnulf Becker Lorca
3. Racial Panics and the Making of (White) International Law
—Frédéric Mégret
4. A "World Problem": Apartheid, International Law, and the Domestication of Race
—Christopher Gevers
5. From Metaphor to Memory:Remembering Dantès Bellegarde and W.E.B. Du Bois in the Legal Definition of Slavery and Forced Labor at the League of Nations and the International Labor Organization
—Adelle Blackett
6. Transforming the Racialized International System: Intellectual and Political Challenges
—Rogers M. Smith
II. Peoples, Places, Perimeters, and Powers
7. Human Rights, COVID-19, and Global Critical Race Feminism
—Adrien K. Wing
8. Law and Epidemiology in the Making of Guantanamo
—Aziza Ahmed
9. White Health and International Law
—Matiangai Sirleaf
10. Race and Politics in International Criminal Law: Case Studies from the Arab World
—Wadie Said
11. Ukranian Racial Contracting and the Geopolitics of Welcome in International Refugee Law
—Marissa Jackson Sow
12. Unsettling the Border
—Sherally Munshi
13. Race as a Technology of Global Political Economy
—Chantal Thomas
14. Barbarians at the Gate: The NIEO and the Stakes of Racial Capitalism
—Vasuki Nesiah
15. Race Consciousness and Contemporary International Law Scholarship: The Political Economy of a Blindspot
—Akbar Rasulov
16. An Unreliable Friend? Human Rights and the Struggle Against Racial Capitalism
—Ntina Tzouvala
III. Critical Race Theory and International Law
17. Postracial Xenophobia: An Abbreviated History of Racial Ideology in International Legal Thought
—Justin Desautels-Stein
18. Toward a Transnational Critical Race Theory: Black Radicalism across the Oceans
—Joel Modiri
19. Shades of Ignorance: A Critique of the Epistemic Whiteness of International Law
—Mohsen Al Attar and Claire Smith
20. A Critical Race Theory of Global Colorblindness: Racial Ideology and White Supremacy
—Michelle Christian
21. The Post-Racial Universalist Framework: Colonial Logic in International Law and Relations
—Kehinde Andrews
22. Critical Race Theory Meets Third World Approaches to International Law
—E. Tendayi Achiume and Devon Carbado