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.

Racial Hierarchy and the Balance of Power: Race War in Merze Tate's International Thought (Revise & Resubmit at Journal of Race, Ethnicity, & Politics)

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.

Working paper available here. 

Direct Democracy and Political Awareness: How Identity Shapes Knowledge of Carceral and Anti-Immigrant Ballot Measures (Under Review)

Who knows what about American politics? Traditional measures of political knowledge demonstrate a persistent “racial gap” with whites demonstrating higher levels than people of color. Recent scholarship has shown that this gap narrows or disappears when people are asked questions that have greater relevance to their racial or ethnic group. I contribute to this scholarship by examining the relationship between identity, political awareness, and direct democracy. I argue that identity shapes political awareness when ballot measures are perceived to be threatening or directly impacting one’s group. Using 21 Field Poll surveys in California between 1994 and 1998, I demonstrate the presence of a political awareness racial gap for traditional ballot measures but show that it disappears for carceral and anti-immigrant initiatives. My findings have implications for how political behavior will be shaped by a political environment where immigration and mass incarceration are increasingly intertwined.

Working paper available here. 

The Myth of Nuclear Prestige

The Predictions of Proliferation Dataset

Race and Support for Nuclear Weapons Use (w/ David Ebner)

White Dominion: The Strange Case of German Intervention in the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895)