Bustamante, Kevin E. 2024. Waltz with Me: Structural Realism and Structural Racism in International Politics. Security Studies 33 (5): 742–767.

ABSTRACT: A chasm separates International Relations (IR) scholars interested in race and racism. Conventional scholars treat the topic in a reductionist manner, choosing to focus on unit-level factors such as racial attitudes and identities. Critical scholars are more structural in their approaches but reject traditional causal explanations. I argue that Waltzian theory is a bridge between these two approaches, offering structural causal arguments with wider policy relevance. The essay reckons with critical critiques of Waltzian theory and outlines structural realist approaches to structural racism.

Find the manuscript here or email me for a copy.

Bustamante, Kevin E. 2026. Racial Hierarchy and the Balance of Power: Race War in Merze Tate’s International Thought. The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. Online: 1-22.

This article recovers the international thought of Merze Tate, the first Black woman to earn a Ph.D. in government from Harvard’s Radcliffe College. I reconstruct Tate’s classical realist approach and show how she applies it to the causes of disarmament failure and views race war as a challenge to global racial hierarchy. Tate’s realist approach highlights an alternative approach to racism in international politics that centers the international distribution of power. I make my argument through a close reading of Tate’s early writings in the 1930s and 1940s and compare it to contemporary writings by W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and E.H. Carr. The article makes three contributions: it recovers Tate’s intellectual legacy and advances recognition of early twentieth-century black women thinkers; it develops the Howard School of International Relations’ contributions to IR theory; and it enriches our understanding of racism in the international system.

Find the manuscript here or email me for a copy.

Direct Democracy, Political Awareness, and Identity (Revise & Resubmit at Political Behavior)

This article examines how identity shapes political awareness of ballot propositions. I argue that political awareness is jointly structured by identity and proposition content which produce distinct incentive and opportunity structures and differential rates of awareness. I test this argument using over 120 surveys in California (1970-2014) capturing awareness of more than 220 propositions with over 350,000 observations. I find gender and racial awareness gaps in traditional propositions but no sexuality gap. These gaps disappear or reverse on identity-salient initiatives addressing immigration, carceral policy, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ issues. I probe a potential mechanism behind the White-Latino awareness gap by comparing proposition coverage in leading English and Spanish newspapers (1992-2006). I show how La Opinión covers immigration measures at nearly twice the rate as the Los Angeles Times. These findings advance our understanding of the kinds of politics that people of color, women, and the LGBTQ community are aware of.

Working paper available on request.

Estimating Proliferation Motives: Status, Security, and the Danger of Misattribution

Existing scholarship has examined why states pursue nuclear weapons and how thwarters practice nonproliferation. In this article, I focus on why thwarters believe other states pursue nuclear weapons. I provide a theoretical framework of how proliferation motive attributions are made. I argue that motive attribution is a context-contingent task grounded in how a thwarter understands the utility of nuclear weapons and how nuclear weapons might fulfill the potential aims of a target. Empirically, I introduce a dataset of 254 attributions made by the U.S. intelligence community between 1957 and 1974. I find that a third of the data consists of nonsecurity attributions like status and the maintenance of neutrality. I show how motive misattribution affected nonproliferation policy in two case studies of U.S. action towards West Germany and India. Drawing on primary archival research, I demonstrate how alliance politics and decolonization shaped beliefs about status motivations. This research advances our understanding of nonproliferation dynamics by revealing how beliefs about proliferation motives affect thwarter nonproliferation efforts.

Working paper available here.

Prejudice as Consequence: The First Sino-Japanese War and the Rise of the Yellow Peril

Why does geopolitical competition lead to racial prejudice? Existing scholarship has examined prejudice as a cause of state behavior but not the conditions under which prejudices emerge. Drawing on the sociology of race, I theorize racial prejudices as a reaction geared towards defending the racial status quo. This approach links the macro-aspects of racial stratification at the level of the international order with micro-level processes of racial prejudice. Empirically, I process-trace when and why German elites shifted from supporting Japan to espousing yellow peril rhetoric during the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) by leveraging month-to-month evidence of German views of Japan. I argue that this shift occurred because Germany perceived Japan’s peace terms as a racial order challenge. This research advances our understanding of the external causes of domestic racial prejudices and sheds light on the future of US-China competition at a time when anti-Asian hate crimes are on the rise. 

Working paper available here. 

The Question of Nuclear Prestige (Book Project)

The Myth of Nuclear Prestige

Competition and Racial Equality in Elite International Clubs