Race, Merit, and the Moral Economy of International Relations

International Relations (IR) as a discipline explains the fact of global inequality through a discourse of meritocracy. In the early decades of the discipline, such explanations were explicitly racial, and justified empire and Western dominance on the basis of their innate superiority over the rest of the world. In later and in contemporary times, such racialized explanations for inequality have been replaced by ostensibly merit-based explanations that turn out, on closer examination, to replicate the inner logic and exclusionary claims of earlier ones. The notion of meritocracy has been a key element in the ideological appeal of IR as a discourse to elites and aspiring middle classes central to nation-building efforts in the global South. This latter fact complicates efforts that equate decolonizing the discipline with the promotion of diversity in its membership and the widening of its empirical and theoretical concerns. Central to any notion of a genuinely decolonial IR must be an attack on the very idea of merit as explaining and justifying international and domestic inequality.