R. B. J. Walker (*) Colonialism without a civilizational mission is no colonialism at all. Ashis Nandy Race is a complex and multiply contested concept, pulled this way and that by opposing demands of culture and biology, knowledge and power. It animates antagonisms in academy, in homes, and on streets. Few conversations about race manage to avoid either engaged anger of conversationalists or sense that conversation has to move in many directions at once--not least toward claims about gender and class, toward overlapping frames of otherness, alterity, or orientalism through which we seek to comprehend contemporary exclusions and legitimation of oppressive powers. The theory of international relations has shown a famous aversion to complex and multiply contested concepts. It has been especially silent about race, as about many other practices that cannot be quickly reduced to claims about necessities of states in a modern states-system. Like culture, economy, or gender, it does not fit into prevailing division of world into levels above (the international) and below (the individual) state. Unlike culture, economy, and gender, there has been very little attempt to insist that claims about race do indeed deserve serious discussion in context of a changing international or global order. From time to time, of course, discipline does open to problems hitherto deemed outside its epistemological boundaries. Opening up has historically resulted from sustained wars of position between forces that represent a broadening of proper subjects of discipline and those who insist that international relations (IR) is about war and peace among states. It may be time for one more apertura; namely, for race to be systematically incorporated into analysis of global politics. Consider following: The first global attempt to speak of equality focused upon race. The first human rights provisions in United Nations Charter were placed there because of race. The first international challenge to a country's claim of domestic jurisdiction and exclusive treatment of its own citizens centered upon race. The international convention with greatest number of signatories is that on race. Within United Nations, more resolutions deal with race than any other subject. And certainly one of most long-standing and frustrating problems in United Nations is that of race. Nearly one hundred eighty governments, for example, recently went as far as to conclude that racial discrimination and racism still represent most serious problems for world today. (1) Extensive as it is, above synopsis provided by Paul G. Lauren must be viewed as very limited indeed. The significance of race goes much beyond various multilateral and other diplomatic achievements. Race has been a fundamental force in very making of modern world system and in representations and explanations of how that system emerged and how it works. This can only be understood, however, if we look at race as an interrelated set of material, ideological, and epistemological practices. The articulation of these latter into full-fledged racialized discourses have produced, over time, social formations and even world orders that were macrostructural systems of inclusion and exclusion. The primary problem that must be addressed is not that race has been ignored in IR (there is, in fact, a fairly significant literature on racial factors in world politics), but that race has been given epistemological status of silence. Silence, Michel-Ralph Trouillot tells us, has four moments; namely, the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); moment of retrieval (the making of narratives); and moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in final instance). …