In the past 20 years, critical scholars repeatedly argued that International Relations (IR) is a racist discipline, as its original raison d’être was not peace but colonial administration (Vitalis 2000; Anievas et al. 2014). The discipline, to many critical scholars (Henderson 2013; Barder 2017; Hobson 2022), was at best silent on race and at worst racist. Once at the margins, this critique in recent years filled special issues in major journals such as Security Dialogue (Salter et al. 2021), International Affairs (Acharya 2022), and Security Studies (Krebs 2023). Were the political thinkers that helped to establish IR as an academic discipline silent about race? Did they advance racist theories about world politics? Is IR, as a result, racist? Drawing on archival research on one of the discipline’s founding thinkers, Hans J. Morgenthau, we challenge the conventional wisdom among contemporary critical scholars. We argue that racial justice was important to Morgenthau’s realism and his conception of the national interest.
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The racism charge against classical realism draws on two premises. We challenge both premises. The first premise is that realism draws on Hobbesian thinking, which itself is racist. Henderson (2013) notes that the Hobbesian state of nature was never intended to describe the relations among ‘white’ people. Instead, it was reserved for ‘non-whites’, whose ‘state of nature’—i.e., reality of living in a lawless jungle—justified intervention and war. But Morgenthau rejected ‘Hobbesian thinking’. In a letter to International Affairs, Morgenthau explicitly rejected Hobbesian interpretations of his work. ‘I was trying to establish the point’, Morgenthau writes to Martin Wight, ‘in contrast to Hobbes’s, that moral principles are universal and, hence, are not created by the state (Morgenthau 1959, 52).
The second premise draws on classical realism’s silence on imperial aggression against former colonies, prioritising instead the ‘national interest’. Nicolas Guilhot (2014, 714) writes: ‘realist critique of imperial adventurism, which finds its model in Morgenthau’s 1965 denunciation of US policy in Vietnam, is not based on a principled opposition to imperialism, but on a clear discernment of what constitutes, at a given historical moment, the national interest of the United States’. In reality, however, as we argue elsewhere, ‘the Vietnam War had convinced [Morgenthau] that American foreign policy was involved in the enforcement of a paternalistic, even racist worldview’ (Karkour and Rösch 2024, 9). This can be seen in Morgenthau’s lectures on Aristotle, recently edited by Anthony Lang, where Morgenthau explains to his students American imperialism in Vietnam in the following terms:
The paternalistic conception of the justification of slavery was based upon the Aristotelian principle; that is, to take good care of the slave was regarded as a moral principle. The master took care of the slave because the slave couldn’t take care of himself. So you have here an assimilation of the relationship between a father and a child…. If you look at the justification for colonialism in Great Britain you find a very similar conception. If you read for instance the essay of John Stuart Mill on non-intervention, you’ll find it the most fantastic ideological justification of British policy…. Mill makes a point that Britain has never interfered in the affairs of other nations, and when it has as in the case of India, it was only for the good of the barbarians. Here were again people who could not take care of their own affairs and were in a semi-barbaric state. The British would bring the enlightened principles of human life to those disadvantaged barbarians (Morgenthau 2004, 34).
A lecture that may as well have been delivered by a critical IR scholar.
Our contention, however, is not simply that key assumptions in critical scholarship are wrong. The Morgenthau archives, rather, tell us a more interesting story about a political thinker who helped to institutionalise IR as an academic discipline after the Second World War. Morgenthau wrote about racial justice, and it was integral to his thinking about the national interest; a concept that today is mistakenly reduced to material power. The failure of the national interest in Vietnam, according to Morgenthau, was America’s failure to define its sense of purpose. This purpose was ‘equality in freedom’. ‘When we speak of equality in freedom in America’, Morgenthau (1960, 306) wrote, ‘we cannot ignore what has been a hindrance to its full achievement—that is, the denial of racial equality’. In failing to negotiate its sense of purpose, America failed both in Vietnam and as a democracy at home. The national interest became defined in terms of raw power. America itself was transformed into ‘a soulless giant, armed to the teeth and producing abundantly, but for no other end than to stay ahead of the Russians’ (Morgenthau 1960, 299). ‘Our national purpose’, Morgenthau objected, ‘is not to stay ahead of the Russians quantitatively... but to be different from, and superior to, them in those qualities which are peculiarly our own’ (Morgenthau 1960, 299).
To Morgenthau, America’s support of a colonial war in Vietnam was the mirror image of its denial of racial justice to minorities at home. ‘The racial minorities of America’, Morgenthau wrote, ‘are in the process of merging into that vast movement of non-white peoples, comprising four fifths of mankind who demand equality’ (Morgenthau 1960, 307). ‘These peoples’, Morgenthau added, ‘have undertaken to achieve for themselves and in relation to the white man what America has offered to the world as its purpose: equality in freedom’ (Morgenthau 1960, 307). In a letter to the Democratic Senator Joseph S. Clark from January 7, 1967 that has been archived in the Library of Congress (Morgenthau 1967, HJM Papers, Box 9), Morgenthau complained that a Defence Department propaganda movie distributed to American schools omitted Vietnamese anti-colonial struggles from its narrative. Morgenthau wrote: ‘I don’t need to point to the ominous meaning that such a development [the ideological interference of the Department of Defense in public opinion-making] could have for the future of American democracy’.
What does this reading of Morgenthau’s realism mean for the discipline of IR? From our standpoint, it means that, at best, the picture is more complex than the blanket racism charge. Morgenthau, a Jew who escaped Nazi Germany and a defender of liberal democracy, including the rights of racial minorities in America, was certainly not a racist. But there is more to our argument: we invite IR scholars to a ‘fifth debate’ on race. Why stop with Morgenthau? Do other thinkers and theories hold racial assumptions? What do the archives say? What do these assumptions mean for IR and the world? To many critical scholars the answers seem settled. To us, less so: we call for more interrogation, more research, and more debate.
References
Acharya, Amitav. 2022. “Race and Racism in the Founding of the Modern World Order.’’ International Affairs 98 (1): 23–43.
Anievas, Alexander, Manchanda, Nivi. and Shilliam, Robbie (eds.) 2015. Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line. Abingdon: Routledge.
Barder, Alexander. 2017. “Race and International Relations.” International Studies Review 19 (3): 509–16.
Guilhot, Nicholas. 2014. “Imperial Realism: Post-War IR Theory and Decolonisation.” International History Review 36 (4): 698–720.
Henderson, Errol. 2013. “Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism in International Relations Theory.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26 (1): 71–92.
Hobson, John. 2022. “Unmasking the Racism of Orthodox International Relations/International Political Economy Theory.” Security Dialogue 53 (1): 3–20.
Karkour, Haro. and Rösch, Felix. 2024. “Toward IR’s ‘Fifth Debate’: Racial Justice and the National Interest in Classical Realism.” International Studies Review 26 (2): 1-20.
Krebs, Ronald R. 2023. “Introducing the Special Issue on ‘Race and Security’.’’ Security Studies 32 (4-5):589–592.
Morgenthau, Hans. 1959. “Correspondence. Dilemmas of Politics. To the Editor.” International Affairs 35 (4): 52.
Morgenthau, Hans. 1960. The Purpose of American Politics. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Morgenthau, Hans. 1967. “Letter to Senator Joseph S. Clark.” Hans J. Morgenthau Papers, Manuscript Division. Washington, DC, Box 9: Library of Congress.
Morgenthau, Hans. 2004. Political Theory and International Affairs: Hans J. Morgenthau on Aristotle’s the Politics, edited by Anthony F. Lang, Jr. Westport: Praeger.
Salter, Mark B., Emily Gilbert, Jairus Grove, Jana Hönke, Doerthe Rosenow, Anna Stavrianakis, and Maria Stern. 2021. “Race and Racism in Critical Security Studies.’’ Security Dialogue 52 (1): 3–7.
Vitalis, Robert. 2000. “The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture: Making Racism Invisible in American International Relations.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 29 (2): 331–56.
Haro Karkour is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Cardiff University (UK). With Felix Rösch, he is the 2026 recipient of the Merze Tate Prize for Best Article in Historical International Relations of the International Studies Association (ISA).
Felix Rösch is Associate Professor in International Relations at the University of Sussex (UK). He is also the Director of the Centre for Advanced International Theory (CAIT). With Haro Karkour, he is the 2026 recipient of the Merze Tate Prize for Best Article in Historical International Relations of the International Studies Association (ISA). He is also the 2026 recipient of the Distinguished Excellence in Teaching International Studies Prize of the British International Studies Association (BISA).