Republicanism and Imperialism at the Frontier: A Post-Black Lives Matter Archeology of International Relations

Abstract

In the summer of 2020, International Relations (IR) scholars rushed to respond to the national and global irruptions of support for Black Lives Matter. But the relationship of ‘domestic’ racism in the United States to foreign policy and IR is long standing in the field, and non-marginal at that: in 1960, Hans Morgenthau provided a clear analysis of such connections in light of Brown vs. Board of Education. The ‘post’ in postcolonial acts as an intellectual provocation: in the aftermath of an event, how might we rethink received traditions of inquiry that prove ill equipped to explain and evaluate the event itself? The explanatory value of the ‘post’ lies in both exposing the disciplinary conventions of absence and retrieving obfuscated presences that provide alternative modes of inquiry. Picking up on Morgenthau’s lost intervention, I provide a contribution to what might be called post-Black Lives Matter (BLM) IR. I weave an intellectual archeology of the long-standing intimacy of republicanism and imperialism via the racialized concept of the ‘frontier’. I bring together the arguments and narratives of four authors who are progenitors of and/or mainstream scholars in the field: William Francis Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner, Morgenthau, and Merze Tate. I claim that this archeology of the ‘frontier’ might help us to grapple responsibly and incisively with IR post-BLM.