One consistently understudied area of international relations is the role that racism plays in international politics. On one hand, IR scholars’ hesitancy about race makes sense — engaging with racial prejudice means engaging with the concept of race itself, and, much to the chagrin of racists throughout history, race means different things to different people in different places and times. The slipperiness of the concept and the difficulty of assigning motive to actions makes race and racism hard for students of international politics to measure.

On the other hand though, come on. Even someone with a passing familiarity with the American foreign policy world — much less with the relations of colonial European powers that have been historically the focus of IR scholarship — could tell you that racism plays a role in international relations. The challenge of studying racism on the international stage is hardly an excuse not to study it.

For the next two editions of Deep Dive, we’ll look at new work from political scientists taking on the study of racism in international relations. First up, Andrew Rosenberg has an article in the latest issue of International Studies Quarterly that seeks to measure a form of racism in international politics of particular interest in our current political moment: racism in international migration outcomes.

In order to measure the role racism plays in shaping how and when people can move between countries, Rosenberg started by creating a mathematical model of a world where racism played no role in migration. He used existing studies on migration to model all the non-racial variables political science has yet come up with to explain international migration — economics, conflict, natural disasters, political transition, etc. That model predicted what migration between every pair of countries would look like without racism entering into migration policy decisions.

Then he looked at the actual migration data from 1991 to 2010 — which is to say, the period after most migration policies that explicitly target certain races had been repealed. If those repeals had ushered in a post-racism utopia, the differentiation between the model’s predictions and the actual data would be random. Some country pairs might experience higher than predicted migration, some lower, but there wouldn’t be any clear bias one way or another.

Of course, that’s not what happened. The real migration data looks markedly different than the predicted data, and the differentiation has everything to do with race. States perceived to have majority black populations experienced a full standard deviation less emigration than what the model predicted. For rich countries perceived as having majority white populations, the differentiation from the model is miniscule. As Rosenberg writes, “racial bias [in migration] still exists even though racial discrimination is illegal.”

Cecilia Nowell chronicled the return of a classic form of political protest in Chile: depictions of injustice and struggle embroidered on burlap. The practice, known as the arpillera, originated under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship as a way to smuggle news of government crimes past the secret police and out of the country, all under the cover of “women’s work.” Today, Chile is gripped by protests in favor of political and economic reforms and the arpillera is making a comeback.

Emma Ashford made a late entry in the dunk contest with an indictment of Michael Bloomberg’s foreign policy record. Bloomberg had a rough outing at his first Democratic presidential debate last week, and his opponents didn’t even dig into his past as an Iraq War supporter, an Iran nuclear deal detractor, and a targeter of protesters for police investigations as mayor of New York. In a Democratic primary that has had precious little focus on foreign policy, Ashford argued, discussing the contrasts between Bloomberg and the other candidates would be a boon for undecided voters.

Theo Merz reported on Moscow’s first queer dance festival. The event, largely attended by young women, was designed to be a space for positive queer representation in Russia’s profoundly homophobic culture. In the same month as the festival, a Moscow jury acquitted a man of murdering a gay man in the face of overwhelming evidence and a journalist covering repression against gay men in Chechnya was attacked in the street in Grozny. The festival, however, went off without a hitch.

Good luck getting this out of your head.

Before people enter conflict zones on United Nations business, they have to take an online safety training offered by the UN Department of Safety and Security. Like any online training, the course includes a lot of cartoon depictions of various characters in the professional ouvre it’s describing. For a researcher studying gender issues for the UN, however, one caricature hit a bit close to home.

A new version of the endless quote-tweet meme appears every few months, but this is the first time it’s ever been appropriate. Bonus points to this perfect addition.

AI photo recognition wins again.