From the Everyday to IR: In Defence of the Strategic Use of the R-word

Rather than scrutinising who is a racist or not in John Hobson's seminal work on the scientific racism and Eurocentric institutionalism of a selection of canonical thinkers on world politics since 1760, this essay seeks to engage with its strategic reluctance to use racism as a lens to understand the post-1945 world. The aim is to draw attention to the fact that analytical categories, apart from imperfect attempts to render reality intelligible, are a deeply normative enterprise that implicitly or explicitly seek to render (parts of) reality for a certain purpose. Building on a vignette of the yearly racism-related debate around the figure of Zwarte Piet or Black Pete in contemporary Flanders, the text reflects on the extent to which R-word strategic reluctance, in public debates and IR alike, (dis)serves an anti-racist decolonial ethos and if and to what extent John Hobson's analytical choices unwillingly are a part of this.