Global movements for racial justice and events like the murder of George Floyd are profound reminders that the law itself is often biased by racism. Many countries—advanced democracies included—have long hidden racism behind the principle of equality before the law in domestic politics. Despite conventional assumptions about formal equality between sovereign states, I suggest that international law cloaks race in similar fashion.

How does racism shape the application and enforcement of international law? Principally, I argue that international laws are exercised unevenly along the lines of constructed racial difference. Race positions actors in relation to each other, privileging a Western-centric, and thus, white-dominant order. It is within this racial regime that beliefs about capacity for self-governance are comprehensively formed and contested in a society—domestic and international. Countries below the ‘color line’ are essentialized as “deficient” and in need of assistance or corrective action by North American or European states. When state capacity is racialized, international rules and norms are exercised disparately by race even while espousing formal equality between states.

After taking stock of the literature in Part I, I examine three legal outcomes of racial hierarchy in world politics. In Part II, I code the jurisdiction clauses of 254 U.S. Status of Forces Agreements to estimate its determinants. I find that the United States imposes concurrent jurisdiction to govern its interactions with predominantly white host states, allowing these peer countries to try U.S. personnel, while withholding this same right from most non-white host partners, ceteris paribus. These results are complimented by qualitative evidence. In Part III, I use original data on mass atrocity events and a statistical matching strategy to examine the Responsibility to Protect cross-nationally. I find that the United Nations is more likely to associate a failure to protect with countries racialized as black, controlling for atrocity and state capacity. A final project in Part IV merges existing geo-referenced, cross-national data on social identity of local populations and the country of origin and deployment patterns of UN peacekeepers to measure a relationship between peacekeeper race and local violence reduction.