10 ISSUE IX
NOVEMBER 2025
NOVEMBER 2025
Accidental Theorist: BOB MARLEY
What would a theory of international affairs of Jamaica, and the Third World’s greatest musician ever, look like?
By Sean Jacobs
In 1963, Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia, stood before the United Nations and delivered a powerful antiwar address. He spoke in Amharic, and even though I don’t understand the language, the surviving recording – even in translation – still conveys the emotional force of his words. Selassie warned that “until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior” is destroyed—until skin color matters no more than “the color of his eyes,” and Africans everywhere are free—the dream of peace will remain “a fleeting illusion.” Until then, he vowed, “We shall win.”
Image via David Burnett.
At the time, Selassie held wide admiration across the Black world, both on the African continent and in the diaspora. In the latter case, Ethiopia’s prestige dated back to the late nineteenth century and was reinforced during World War II, when the country resisted and ultimately defeated a second European occupation. Among those deeply influenced by Selassie and Ethiopia’s struggle against white domination globally were Jamaicans—especially Rastafarians, including the musician Bob Marley.
In 1976, Marley, by now an established pop star, released the song “War” on his album RASTAMAN VIBRATION. In Marley’s hands, Selassie’s speech becomes a distilled, radical, spiritual, and globally resonant manifesto against racism and oppression.
And this was the cultural and political import of Bob Marley. In his very short life – when Marley died in May 1981 of cancer, he was only 36 years old – Marley had not just through his music, mainstreamed Rastafari to which he had converted in his teens (a black religion originating in Jamaica’s slave resistance history and Christian millennialism), but also popularized Pan-Africanism (“Africa Unite” and “Redemption Song,” for example), anti-colonialism (“Could you be loved”), liberation politics (“I shot the sherif,” “Get up, stand up,” and “Zimbabwe,” among others), and inspired global social justice movements long after his death. Nearly fifty years later, his music takes on new meanings and inspires not just musicians, but oppressed people worldwide, in places as varied as apartheid South Africa, New Zealand (where it helped galvanize Māori and Pasifika activism and shaped a musical tradition grounded in equality and human rights), and Australia, Eastern Europ,e or South America.
So, in line with the focus of this series, what would a Bob Marley theory of international affairs look like?
If “War” doesn’t convince you yet, a Marleyian framework of international affairs would center representation and dignity. As THE NEW YORK TIMES’ correspondent reported on the day of his funeral in Jamaica, Marley transformed how people saw themselves, reminding the marginalized that they were worthy of visibility and voice. Transformation, in this view, begins with self-recognition, language, and identity: people must see themselves before they can change the world around them: “Africa unite / 'Cause we're moving right out of Babylon / And we're going to our Father's land.”
For Marley, music and culture are treated as diplomatic and political tools, elevated to the same level as military or economic power. “One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain,” he sang on “Trenchtown Rock.”
Marley awakened a generation to Africa and the Global South’s global centrality. His music consistently re-centered Jamaica, the Caribbean, and Africa as sites of political insight and meaning. So, a Marley theory of international affairs would insist that world politics be understood from the perspective of those historically marginalized by colonialism, empire, and racial capitalism—and that their struggles form the central organizing principle for why we study IR in the first place.
For world peace to be effective, Marley’s perspective would require confronting the structural forces that reproduce violence: poverty, inequality, and political exclusion. Finally, a Bob Marley theory of international affairs would foreground spirituality, particularly Rastafari, which articulates a clear understanding of who bears responsibility for global suffering and how liberation is pursued. As Marley sang on “Crazy Baldhead” (1976), “Build your penitentiary… we build your schools” in a critique of systems designed to contain the poor, and later, as he sang on the eve of Zimbabwean independence in Harare: “Every man gotta right to decide his own destiny.”
Sean Jacobs is a professor and director of the Graduate Program in International affairs at The New School.