In the last few fateful months of 2001, we published a Special Issue of Alternatives (Volume
26:4) on ‘‘Race and International Relations,’’ which seems to have received a warm reception
in many quarters. Since then, political life has been subject to profound disruptions and transformations
on many dimensions. As a consequence, and among many other dynamics, it has become
more difficult to ignore the role of racialized practices in contemporary political life but also
more obvious that race cannot be treated as a monolithic category set apart from all those other
apparently discrete categories—class, gender, culture, economy, society, and so on—that necessarily
bleed into each other in complex and ever-changing relations of coloniality. In this present
Special Issue, we revisit the interplay of race and international relations with a collection of
essays that are especially attuned to both relationalities and unpredictable possibilities in both
existential and intellectual contexts.