What Black Panther can teach us about international relations

Black Panther, Marvel’s newest movie, is chiefly a metaphor.

Director Ryan Coogler uses an imaginary African country — Wakanda — that secretly possesses highly advanced technology as a vehicle for exploring issues surrounding racism, the ethical response to oppression, and the global African diaspora.

Smart commentators like the New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb and the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer have unpacked these metaphors at length, in the process showing how much thematic subtlety Coogler managed to pack into a film that has to adhere to Marvel’s house style.

But it’s also worthwhile, and honestly pretty fun, to ask a more literal question of Black Panther’s story: What if Wakanda were real?

How would we think through Wakanda’s history and politics if it were a real East African country? What does the emergence of Erik Killmonger, political radical and the film’s putative villain, mean for world politics? What would it mean for the United States if the strongest country in the world was an African country whose leaders use “colonizer” as an insulting term for white Americans? What would that world be like?

To try to answer these questions, I looked to science — political science, specifically.

The subfield of international relations has spent decades accumulating knowledge about how countries decide on policies of isolationism versus interventionism, why revolutionaries like Killmonger succeed and fail, and how racism shapes the way international politics operate. A lot of this work applies just as well to a world where Wakanda is real as to our own, more mundane reality.

What follows is an attempt to do just that: apply insights from international relations to understand the story of Black Panther, and what it might mean for the world.

The Wakandan throne is, as far as we can tell from the film, a classic hereditary monarchy with a few comic book twists: Certain citizens can challenge the king to single combat and potentially win the throne. When King T’Chaka was killed in a United Nations bombing (in Captain America: Civil War, but shown in a flashback in Black Panther), his son T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) took up the dual mantle of king and Black Panther. The latter position grants the leader superhuman speed and strength, acquired via ritual ingestion of a quasi-magical plant, as well as the use of an awesome vibranium catsuit.

This monarchy, in power for centuries, seems to have adopted a consistent foreign policy — T’Challa calls it “our way” at various points throughout the film. Wakanda’s sole and overriding national interest, according to the Panther monarchs, is to avoid being conquered or otherwise interfered with.

Wakanda’s stance is to wage no aggressive wars but defend itself in the event of an invasion. Per the comics, this happened a few times — the Romans, Crusaders, and Nazis all attacked Wakanda — but each invasion was decisively repulsed. In the film, arms dealer Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis) claims to be the “only” outsider ever to have seen the real Wakanda and live; that might be an exaggeration, but it’s close enough to the truth in terms of Wakanda’s impenetrability to outsiders.

Wakandan isolationism goes beyond mere military restraint. The Wakandan government seems to have cut off any economic contact with foreigners, like foreign aid or immigration. The country takes advantage of its isolated geography — it’s patterned after real-life Lesotho, which is bordered by mountains — to block unwanted trespassers, and uses fancy technological illusions to make it seem like there’s nothing there. Wakanda even dresses up a fraction of its citizens as the kind of impoverished individuals the West expects to see in African nations; near the end of the movie, a Western diplomat at the UN calls Wakanda a “nation of farmers” with nothing to offer the rest of the world.

Wakanda’s “way” will sound very familiar to IR scholars: It dovetails nicely with insights from a school of international relations theory called defensive realism.

Defensive realists believe one of the root causes of international conflict is insecurity. Because countries cannot be sure that other nations have peaceful intentions, they have to arm themselves to ensure survival. The problem, though, is that countries can’t tell if another country’s army is for defensive purposes or offensive ones — forcing them to react to by strengthening their own military, freaking out their neighbor and raising the risk of conflict. This problem, called the security dilemma, is how countries that only want to secure themselves can end up in conflict with their neighbors who want the same. (World War I is a classic example of this in real life.)

One prominent defensive realist, Harvard University’s Stephen Walt, argues that the security dilemma can be mitigated by making yourself seem less threatening. In his classic book The Origins of Alliances, Walt suggests that if countries don’t invest in offensive military technologies, and use diplomatic outreach and economic policy to build peaceful ties with foreign states, they’re less likely to be feared — and thus, potentially, less likely to get dragged into war.

“States that are viewed as aggressive are likely to provoke others to balance against them,” Walt writes. “Nazi Germany faced an overwhelming countervailing coalition because it combined substantial power with extremely dangerous ambitions.”

The Wakandan monarchy represents a deep internalization of Walt’s insight; arguably, its kings have adopted the most realist grand strategy of any country on earth.

The country’s incredible vibranium deposits have made Wakanda immensely wealthier and more technologically advanced than any other nation, and if these advancements became public, it would turn Wakanda into a major military power. If other countries knew how strong Wakanda truly was, they would fear it — potentially kicking off a very scary security dilemma.

Wakanda’s solution, then, is to not seem threatening at all: hide the vibranium deposits, lie about its wealth, and ban interactions with outsiders so nobody knows the truth.

This seems to have worked. Even the CIA was fooled: Agent Everett Ross tells Klaue that Wakanda’s defining features are “textiles, shepherds, [and] cool outfits.” But it comes with a distinct downside: Wakanda is incapable of doing anything to make the rest of the world a better place.

If Wakanda had used vibranium weapons to stop the trans-Atlantic slave trade, or played host to refugees as Nakia suggested, the jig would be up: The outside world would find out the truth. Its foreign policy had to be entirely amoral, prioritizing Wakandan security policy over concerns about human rights abroad.

Yet Wakandan realism, which seemingly worked for centuries, ultimately contained the seeds of its own destruction. And that’s what the central arc of the film is all about.

Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) is the physical incarnation of Wakanda’s failures. The son of an unnamed American woman and King T’Chaka’s brother N’Jobu, he grew up in Oakland, California, experiencing both the deep racism of American society and the knowledge that Wakanda was out there, doing nothing. When T’Chaka found out that N’Jobu had facilitated a massive vibranium heist, with the intent of spreading weapons to oppressed people around the world, T’Chaka killed him — and left the young Killmonger behind, to find his father with panther claw marks in his chest.

Killmonger came to see his own story as a proof of Wakanda’s failings. When he returns to the country and challenges T’Challa for the throne, he makes a very clear argument for why he deserves to rule: Wakanda’s realist foreign policy is a moral disgrace.

“Two billion people all over the world who look like us, whose lives are much harder, and Wakanda has the tools to liberate them all,” he says. “Where was Wakanda?”

On this point, it’s hard to argue with Killmonger. He’s also echoing a long tradition in black international relations thought, going back at least to the 1920s, that argues for a need to see race as a central mover in international politics and the need to confront racial inequality as a primary issue — perhaps the primary issue — in world politics.

These scholars, sometimes referred to as the “Howard School” of international relations, include a number of luminaries typically overlooked in white histories of world politics: philosopher Alain Locke, scholar-practitioner Ralph Bunche, and Merze Tate, the first black woman to receive a PhD in international relations. These thinkers clustered around Howard University in the 1930s and ’40s, hence the name. Howard School thinkers had a diverse and complex set of interests, but one core thing that united them was deep study on the role race and racism plays in global politics — which sheds light on some of the IR of Black Panther.

In 1943, Tate published an essay titled “The War Aims of World War I and World War II and Their Relation to the Darker Peoples of the World.” In it, she argued that Americans did not truly understand the implications of their sweeping rhetoric about defending democracy and freedom — that a war against Nazis, waged on the grounds of principle, calls into question global white supremacy (in the forms of both European colonialism abroad and Jim Crow at home).

“Those Englishmen and Americans who envision plans for and approach the problems of lasting peace have an egocentric view of the world and think primarily in terms of Europe, the Western World, the balance of power in Asia, and appear to take for granted a return to something akin to the pre-war African and Asiatic status quo,” Tate writes. “They think and write entirely too much in terms of saving European civilization, ignoring the fact that that civilization is a partial and secondary culture serving a minority of the peoples of the world.”

Indifference to the question of not just victory in the war, but what a peace settlement would look like for the world’s nonwhite peoples, would be more than immoral in Tate’s eyes — it would be impossible. Colonized and oppressed people everywhere, from Africa to East Asia to the United States, would not permanently agree to their own subjection. If they were not freed, they would fight.

“Will the white man and the colored man now find a basis for cooperation as equals? [The] alternative is an inter-continental war between the East and West, the greatest war the human race has ever seen, a war between whites and non-whites,” Tate writes. “That war will come as a result of the white man’s unwillingness to give up his superiority and the colored man’s unwillingness to endure his inferiority.”

Erik Killmonger is Tate’s warning brought to life. His plan, to distribute advanced vibranium weapons to members of oppressed groups around the world, is essentially to spark the kind of global race war Tate warned against.

“The world’s going to start over,” he declares. “I’mma burn it all.”

What makes Killmonger villainous — and what makes him different from the many African and Asian revolutionaries who, as Tate predicted, waged war against their colonial masters after World War II — is that he wants to replace white imperialism with his own. “The sun will never set on the Wakandan empire,” he says, ironically repurposing a phrase used to describe Great Britain at the height of its colonial powers.

But in some ways, his very existence is more of the point. Killmonger shows an inherent flaw in Wakandan isolationism: the idea that isolationism is possible in a world shaped by systemic hierarchy and injustice. Wakanda’s leaders assumed that an unjust world system would be stable — or, at least, stable enough that it wouldn’t end up troubling them.

This was untrue. Tate’s core insight is about the psychology of political oppression: that an unjust system is inherently unstable because the oppressed recognize the injustice of it. Even well-meaning bystanders, like Wakanda, will be pulled in — because to do nothing is to side with the oppressors.

Wakanda’s monarchy missed this fundamental point. And it was nearly toppled because of it.

The person in Black Panther who understands all of this best is Nakia, T’Challa’s chief spy, played by Lupita Nyong’o. When the movie begins, Nakia is embedded with a group of women in Nigeria who have been kidnapped by a militant group, an unmistakable stand-in for the schoolgirls kidnapped by the Nigerian jihadist group Boko Haram.

Nakia is not merely there to help the girls, though she does. Rather, her goal is to understand what’s happening in the world outside Wakanda — to get a sense of what it’s like to live in an unstable and violent place, and what Wakanda could do to help. She understands both the importance of a safe Wakanda and the moral necessity of doing something about the suffering outside Wakanda’s borders.

This leads her to champion a middle ground between Wakanda’s traditional isolationism and Killmongerian imperialism. She urges T’Challa to open up to the outside world, to consider admitting refugees and sharing the country’s lifesaving technology. He is hostile, initially, but reconsiders after the shattering conflict with Killmonger — which he sees, correctly, as proof that Wakandan realism had failed.

So he comes forward, revealing Wakanda’s true nature at a United Nations meeting. He announces a program to facilitate cultural exchanges and technology transfers, with a focus on helping oppressed people, starting with an outpost in Killmonger’s old neighborhood in Oakland. He lays out his reasoning for this in a closing monologue:

Wakanda will no longer watch from the shadows. We can not. We must not. We will work to be an example of how we, as brothers and sisters on this earth, should treat each other. Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth: More connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis, the wise build bridges while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another, as if we were one single tribe.

Nakia and T’Challa’s ideal of Wakanda as a global power, leading through its ideas rather than imperial might or economic clout, is closely aligned with a school of international relations theory called “constructivists.”

The core constructivist insight is that world politics is driven, first and foremost, by identities and ideas. States aren’t just naturally aligned with certain states or hostile to others; they choose to partner with them or oppose them for complicated and often socially determined reasons. This means that countries and even non-state actors, like activist groups, have the power to change world politics by changing people’s beliefs and minds.

“‘Making history’... is a matter not merely of defending the national interest but of defining it, not merely nor merely enacting stable preferences but constructing them,” as Harvard’s John Ruggie puts it in one seminal constructivist article. This may sound fanciful, but there’s solid research — on everything ranging from military intervention to human rights trials in Latin America — to back it up.

Nakia and T’Challa’s project is an essentially constructivist one: They want to convince the world that the emergence of a new power essentially out of nowhere is not threatening. More than that, in fact: They want to use Wakandan technological advancements to build tighter connections between states, to develop a shared sense of international obligation. Taking in refugees and doing cultural outreach in poor neighborhoods isn’t about Wakandan security; it’s about breaking the “illusion of division” that T’Challa warns of in his closing speech. The goal is to use all the resources of Wakanda to build a new, more open and peaceful international order.

There are many reasons to believe this will fail.

First, there are the realist calculations that led to Wakandan isolationism in the first place. Military powers around the world, from the United States to Russia to China, all of a sudden have a new and powerful country, armed with weapons so advanced that the captain of their elite guard, Okoye, refers to guns as “primitive.” What’s more, this country was just convulsed by a revolution — one witnessed by a CIA officer — in which a significant portion of Wakandan military supported a ruler whose goal was to wage war on the rest of the world.

How could any responsible foreign leader not look at that series of events and at least start preparing for an eventual Wakandan attack? And how would T’Challa and the other Wakandan leaders take those preparations?

There’s also, of course, the issue of race. We’d like to think white supremacy no longer shapes the way Western powers think about foreign policy, as it did in Tate’s day, but that’s a fantasy. Backlash against racial progress and nonwhite immigration is one of the most powerful forces reshaping politics in both the United States and Europe today, leading to a surge in support for far-right populists on both sides of the Atlantic.

How would citizens and policymakers in the West react to news of a nonwhite country — no, a black country — quietly being the most powerful country on Earth? What would be the effect on America’s self-conception if it were so swiftly dethroned from the top of the international hierarchy, and what would be the effects of that on American foreign policy?

These are the kinds of barriers to Wakanda’s effort to transform the world. Nakia and T’Challa have faith in a better world, certainly much more than Killmonger did — but it’s not clear how realistic those hopes are.