2013/10/01 by Zoltán Búzás · 3 citations
Social Sciences · #Japanese History and Culture
paper · doi:10.1080/09636412.2013.844514
openalex publication_date 2013/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Race is understudied in International Relations generally and International Security specifically. To mitigate this omission, this article provides a racial theory of threat perception. It argues that, under certain conditions, racial prejudices embedded in racial identities shape threat perceptions and generate behavioral dispositions. In the first step, racial similarity deflates threat perceptions, while racial difference inflates them. In the second step, deflated threat perceptions facilitate cooperation among racially similar agents, while inflated threat perceptions facilitate discord among racially different agents. Using extensive archival and secondary sources, the article illustrates the explanatory value of the theory in the case of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902-23).