Race, Ethnicity, and War

by

Christy Pichichero

• LAST MODIFIED: 24 October 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791279-0262

Introduction

Numerous forms of violence and armed conflict in human history have been pursued and justified by deploying the concepts of ethnic and racial difference. Race and ethnicity are social constructs, meaning that these ideas are created and shared by a group or society in order to establish patterns of identity, community, and power relations in human civilization. Ethnicity describes a group defined by a common sociocultural system including aspects such as language, religion, customs, history, and homeland. Race indicates the division of people and attribution of meaning to select physical traits, such as skin tone, and other qualities that are imputed to be inherent. In the twentieth century, the study of ethnic conflict burgeoned in the field of anthropology and expanded as an area of inquiry pursued across many other academic disciplines, from political science and religious studies to the “new military history.” Race and war is a newer historiographical development in New Military History and it elicits particular controversy as it exposes past and present systems of subjugation, exploitation, and elimination. The subject of this article is politically charged as well as chronologically and geographically expansive. It necessitates an interdisciplinary, decolonial, and global approach, drawing from sources in political science, anthropology, peace and conflict resolution studies, and varied subdisciplines of history while centering the study of war, culture, and society. Racial and ethnic war can and must be studied intersectionally across facets of identity (gender, sexuality, religion, economic or social class, nationality, and more) and in relation to civil wars, settler colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and fascism. Epistemic and cultural practices, war (regular and irregular), resistance, peacebuilding, and the experiences of military service people and civilians are key features of research on race, ethnicity, and war. The related topics of genocide and ethnic cleansing, gender issues, terrorism, and race in the US military are treated in separate articles of this Oxford Bibliography module. The first three sections of this article lay the conceptual groundwork for the study of race, ethnicity, and war. The first section focuses on formulations of race and ethnicity that serve as the foundation for thinking about these subjects in relation to war. The second section presents works examining race, militarism, and ethnic conflict. The third section treats terror, sexual violence, and gender, which is a central theme of global scholarly research on race, ethnicity, and war. Following this conceptual groundwork, the sections that follow are organized chronologically, surveying scholarly works that attend to racial and ethnic wars in different geographies or comparative frameworks: Race, Ethnicity, and War in Antiquity through the Middle Ages; Slavery, Colonialism, Revolution, and Imperial Warfare 1400–1899; Early Twentieth Century, World War I, and Interwar Period; World War II, Postwar Occupations, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and the Cold War; Post–World War II Anti-Colonialism, Wars of Independence, Postcolonialism, and Neocolonialism. The final section covers the Contemporary Era. This bibliography cannot be exhaustive due to the breadth of its subject matter, but it proffers key sources to ground further inquiry into this important global phenomenon.

Race and Ethnicity: General Works and Histories

It is critical that scholars and students gain a sound understanding of race and ethnicity as malleable social constructs as opposed to biological realities. What is more, the categories of race and ethnicity hold variable and changing meanings across space and place. General works and histories of racial and ethnic thinking provide useful conceptual foundations for the study of race, ethnicity, and war. Scholarship on race and ethnicity connects this subject to nationhood and the nation, including useful reference works (Dennis, et al. 2020) and surveys that treat ethnogenesis and ethnosymbolism around the world with attention to Indigenous peoples, linguistic and religious dynamics, music, myth, and history (Leoussi and Grosby 2007). Widely-cited, pioneering scholarship on race and racism emerged from critics of Nazi Germany (Arendt 1944) and from the United States (Davis 1981, Delgado and Stefancic 2023, Fields and Fields 2020, Omi and Winant 2015) due to the latter’s particular history of slavery, segregation, civil rights, and post–civil rights structural and cultural forms of racism. However, the concepts advanced by these scholars have become tools for scholars conducting intersectional analyses of race and racism throughout history and across the globe (Anievas, et al. 2015). Recent scholarship has expanded in geographical and chronological scope, pushing explicitly beyond the context of the nation-state and arguing for a reperiodization of the genesis of racial thinking. Bacchetta, et al. 2018 adopted a global framework of analysis while Bethencourt 2013 and Schaub 2019 contend that race and racism are not inherently modern developments whose origins are found in 19th-century scientific racism. Rather, they argue that from medieval times to the present, racial and ethnic prejudice served as causes or pretexts for myriad forms of discrimination and violence. Authors especially connect different variants of racism—based on religion, skin tone, or other factors—to questions of political purpose and economic expediency.

• Anievas, Alexander, Nivi Manchanda, and Robbie Shilliam, eds. Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line. Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge, 2015.

  This volume uncovers the imperial-racial roots of international relations as a discipline dating from W.E.B. DuBois’s early analyses of the “color line” in questions of global politics and labor. The twelve essays contest the erasure of race and racism as critical metrics in international relations (IR) as a discipline and trace an alternative genealogy within IR theory to show how race and racism continue to shape world politics ideologically and materially.

• Arendt, Hannah. “Race-Thinking before Racism.” The Review of Politics 6.1 (1944): 36–73.

  DOI: 10.1017/S0034670500002783

  This important essay was published during World War II and was written by one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century. Arendt traces the rise and evolution of race-thinking from the eighteenth century and through Nazi Germany. She tracks the transformation of race-thinking from its origins as one among many “free opinions” possible in liberalism to becoming a horrifically effective ideological weapon of nationalistic and imperialistic politics.

• Bacchetta, Paola, Sunaina Maira, and Howard Winant, eds. Global Raciality: Empire, Postcoloniality, Decoloniality. Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge, 2018.

  This collection of essays examines racialization and anti-racist resistance. Subjects studied include the Haitian Revolution, Indigenous peoples of North America, British Burma, queer people of color in Europe, Asian- and Afro-Mexicans, Indian women, Dalit people, and the US Black Panther movement. The authors pursue intersectional analyses of race, gender, social class, sexuality, and religion in conjunction with themes including settler colonialism, immigrant rights, Islamophobia, homonationalism, and solidarities across resistance movements.

• Bethencourt, Francisco. Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.

  Bethencourt offers a longue durée history of racism, taking the latter to mean prejudicial thinking accompanied by discriminatory action. He claims that the latter was lacking during Greek and Roman antiquity, so his study begins with the Middle Ages. War and imperialism feature large in his analyses.

• Davis, Angela, Women, Race, and Class. New York: Random House, 1981.

  In this celebrated analysis, activist and intellectual Angela Davis demonstrates how questions of race, class, and gender are inextricably linked and that the nexus of these three forces must be illuminated in order to make headway in the battle for women’s rights.

• Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. 4th ed. New York: New York University Press, 2023.

  Co-written by expert Stefancic and a founder of Critical Race Theory (CRT) Richard Delgado, this short volume is an excellent introduction to CRT. It offers a clear definition of CRT, its development, and basic tenets as well as methodologies and terminology. This volume is created for students and a general public. Each chapter contains questions and comments plus suggested readings. Six of the eight chapters also contain classroom exercises.

• Dennis, Rutledge M., Xiaoshuo Hou, Polly Rizova, and John Stone, eds. The Wiley Blackwell companion to race, ethnicity, and nationalism. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020.

  This companion volume contains thirty-one chapters organized into five parts: the first on race, ethnicity, and nationalism in the twenty-first century, the second is on regional reactions to global change, the third is on transnational migration, and the fifth is on politics, economy, and society. The fourth section on violence, genocide, terrorism and war offers chapters on genocide, the radicalization of social movements, multinational states, and globalization, nationalism, and war.

• Fields, Karen E., and Barbara J. Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. London and New York: Verso, 2020.

  This work offers a penetrating discussion of race, racism, and the neologism “racecraft.” Racecraft, which they coin in relation to witchcraft, refers “to mental terrain and to pervasive belief” imagined and reimagined by people regarding human difference (p. 18). Fields and Fields argue that racecraft participates in transforming “racism, something an aggressor does, into race, something the target is, in a sleight of hand that is easy to miss” (p. 17).

• Leoussi, Athena, and Steven Grosby, eds. Nationalism and Ethnosymbolism: History, Culture and Ethnicity in the Formation of Nations. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

  This volume examines theories of nationalism and ethnosymbolism, racism and globalisation, and the role of war, music, myth, history, and other forms of remembrance. Essays treat Indigenous peoples of Latin America, Muslims in the Middle East, women in the American Civil War, Jews in Poland, Bengali-speaking people of South Asia, and communities in the ancient Mediterranean, Nigeria, Israel, Soviet Russia, South Africa, England and the British Isles, China, and Taiwan.

• Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States. 3d ed. Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge, 2015.

  Omi and Winant’s work is a pillar of the scholarly study of race. It is divided into three parts. The first part elaborates three paradigms of race: ethnicity, class, and nation. In the second part, treats their theory of racial formation, racial politics, and the racial state. The third section discusses racial politics since World War II and examines themes including colorblindness, neoliberalism, and the US presidency of Barak Obama.

• Schaub, Jean-Frédéric. Race Is about Politics: Lessons from History. Translated by Laura Vergnaud. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019.

  DOI: 10.2307/j.ctvs32s0f

  Schaub analyzes the political roots of race and racism with particular attention to World War II, the rise of European slaving empires, and the forced conversion of Jewish people during the Spanish Inquisition of the fifteenth century and following.