{"id":11088,"date":"2021-03-16T08:00:57","date_gmt":"2021-03-16T06:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cogito\/home\/races-et-racisme-dans-le-concert-des-nations\/"},"modified":"2021-07-01T14:49:31","modified_gmt":"2021-07-01T12:49:31","slug":"race-and-racism-in-the-concert-of-nations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cogito\/home\/race-and-racism-in-the-concert-of-nations\/?lang=en","title":{"rendered":"Race and Racism in the Concert of Nations"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The UNESCO Courier, 1950<\/p><\/div>\n

Since their very creation, international organisations (IO) have made the fight against racism one of their key objectives. However, despite their proactive discourse, IOs have faced recurrent dilemmas on this issue, the first of which is the ambivalent and profoundly contested nature of the notion of race itself. Indeed, how can we fight against racial discrimination while avoiding the reproduction of essentialized conceptions of race? Many international organisations have adopted a pragmatic approach and refused to engage in theoretical debates on the definitions of \u201crace\u201d, limiting themselves to observing the real effects of this concept on the social world. This special issue on \u201cComing to terms with ace in International Organisations (1945-2019)<\/a>\u201d (Critique Internationale<\/i> n\u00b086) seeks to expose the whys and wherefores of this path. Interview with Juliette Galonnier, Assistant Professor at Sciences Po\u2019s Centre for International Studies and Patrick Simon, Director of Research at INED who coedited the issue.<\/p>\n

In the wake of the second world war, there was a fundamental need in the international community to condemn racism, which had reached a genocidal dimension. This is apparent in the 1945 Constitution of UNESCO and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet, while both these texts mention racial persecution and discrimination, the notion of race itself is never explicitly questioned. How can we explain such ambiguity between clear denunciation and tentative language?<\/h5>\n

At the time, although there was an opposition to the principle of racism, many European countries were colonial powers that extensively relied on racial policies in the territories under their control, and racial segregation was the norm in the United States. Condemnation of racial persecution was essentially limited to the genocide of European Jews. Moreover, a substantial revision of the concept of race had not yet occurred and it was still used as such in scientific research, particularly in physical anthropology, human biology, and human geography. The dominant idea was that racist doctrine and the idea of a hierarchy of races, rather than the notion of race itself, were responsible for persecution and discrimination. The radical de-racialisation of the way populations are classified and represented was not yet on the agenda. The scientific consensus on the inanity of the concept of race would take time to develop. This is visible in the virulent debates that surrounded the UNESCO\u2019s four \u201cDeclarations on Race\u201d (1950, 1951, 1964, 1967) and the significant indecision that has characterised that organisation\u2019s successive programs on race(1)<\/sup><\/a>\u00c9lisabeth Cunin – Is UNESCO at the origin of anti-racism? Historical ethnography of programs on race (1946-1952)<\/a>, Critique internationale<\/i>, vol. 86, no. 1, 2020, pp. 25-43.<\/span><\/span>