Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>How does race shape international law? This volume orbits this question, exploring what many of the authors describe as international law’s complicity with racial hierarchy, systemic oppression, and global white supremacy. While mainstream international legal scholarship has long treated race as a peripheral concern—or a historic injustice to be remembered but not redressed—this volume argues that racialization is foundational to the discipline, shaping its doctrines, epistemes, and interlocutors. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars, the collection moves beyond a query about whether international law is racist to explore how racial hierarchies are embedded in its structures and how they continue to evolve through legal and institutional practice. Divided into five sections, the book begins by situating international law’s racialized boundaries within its colonial, capitalist, and chauvinist afterlives, exposing how white ignorance and race-thinking underpin legal norms, from sovereignty to jus cogens. It then examines racial stratification across legal institutions, including investment law, refugee law, and the Genocide Convention. The third section extends this critique to human rights, revealing the ways in which even an emancipatory paradigm can bolster racial injustices. The penultimate section unpacks racial hierarchies in disparate societies, including Brazil, India, Japan, China, and the frontiers of nation-states. The volume concludes with an exploration of the role of alternative epistemologies in racial justice struggles, and the limits of international law’s capacity for anti-racist transformation. This book seeks to contribute to the anti-racist struggle by advancing an understanding of international law aimed at dismantling its racialized structures.</jats:p>