The author makes several arguments, which in my opinion he frequently cannot hold together.

One is that IR stems from the study of race relations, that is, the relations of the white races to
the other, and of imperialism (and in particular, of colonial administration, which budding IR
scholars claimed to know how to improve). Another claim is that a large part of this concern
was the study of Africa (which immediately connects the discipline with area studies,
although Vitalis does not explicitly raise this claim). A third claim is that black scholars
pioneered the study of Africa and were also the first scholars in the US to denounce racism
and imperialism; they were, however, ignored and still are today (they are not part of any IR
canon, syllabus etc. as a consequence thereof, important topics that Black scholars studied,
but not white ones, like decolonization are equally absent, 120).
If action should be taken in terms of disciplinary history and political responsibility,
the first and broader claim would require that author shows strong continuities, which he is
capable to do in the case of individuals and to some extent personnel. However, he is unable
to demonstrate continuity in the ideas, that is, how pre-1919 and pre-1945 openly racist ideas
were carried over to Cold War IR. An important flaw is nowhere are disciplinary boundaries
explicitly discussed, resorting to concepts and to literature in the sociology of science.
The consequence of these omission is that the Whiggish disciplinary advocates can
always claim that the racist work of those alleged precursors is not part of the discipline, that
Du Bois and others’ work on race and on Africa do not belong in IR literature etc. The point,
which the author misses, is that those boundaries have been redrawn (p. 57; this could be
expressed with Melchior Palyi’s as “the question arises whether the author did not “prove”
just a little more than is good for his own argument”) and in other to exclude Black scholars
and content that had become politically unpalatable. Possibly Vitalis would have made a
larger contribution to IR and to scholarship generally if he had left aside the part of this book
that deal with Black studies and focused more on IR’s exclusionary history and demonstrated
that decisions were taken to exclude the concept race, which Nazis had made indefensible,
from IR mainstream scholarship (rightist scholars like Possony continued using it).

The author tries to show the commonalities and continuities like the Institute for Pacific
Relations, a certain Institute of Politics at Williamstown, which organized the first IR summer
school, later reproduced by Alfred Zimmern in Geneva, 74;

Interwar IR institutions fell prays to the great depression, but it is resuscitated by WWII and
then by the Cold War, 82-3; 93.

The author claims that Lothrop Stoddard introduced the concept of realism to American IR,
83.

IR scholars have projected Cold War realism back into the past by wrongly arguing that RF
and Carnegie were supporting realism as early as 1940, 90. Princeton’s IR institute as the
place where founding myths were invented, 118.

Some claims are extremely broad and unspecific and appear unwarranted, “to gauge the
persistence of the belief in the biological basis of hierarchy through the last half of the
twentieth century” 176.