In this post, Kimberly Hutching and Patricia Owens reference their APSR article “Women Thinkers and the Canon of International Thought: Recovery, Rejection, and Reconstitution“.

Economic and cultural globalisation, a global pandemic, global racial and class hierarchies, cross-border movements of people, attacks in one state controlled from another, thousands of miles away. All of these suggest that the world is more thoroughly international than it has ever been, and that it is more important than ever to understand and explain what drives these phenomena. However, more than a century ago, at the high point of European imperialism, people observed similar phenomena and sought to generate authoritative knowledge about relations between peoples, states, and empires in order to work out how to manage or redirect the conflicting currents of international politics. International Relations (IR) first emerged as a distinct interdisciplinary field of inquiry in the late nineteenth century. Theoretical frameworks and concepts developed over the following half century remain foundational to contemporary claims to knowledge about international relations.

After the Second World War, IR was institutionalized in university departments in the United States, with its own journals, conferences, and established links with the policy world. IR, like any other field of academic inquiry, has its own set of approaches to addressing questions about why world politics works in the way that it does and the implications of this for citizens, politicians, and policymakers. From the 1950s, these approaches were identified with particular  “traditions” for thinking about international relations, most famously perhaps a so-called realist tradition, which was associated with texts and thinkers, such as Thucydides and Machiavelli, and was broadly pessimistic about possibilities of international cooperation. Other IR textbooks and anthologies also drew on a range of late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century thinkers, such as Angell, Mackinder, Lenin, Carr, Morgenthau, and Waltz to represent particular theoretical traditions or ‘isms’.

IR knowledge, then, is authorized and reproduced through a “canon” of thinkers and texts  purporting to provide a starting point for understanding and addressing pressing issues of international politics.

The most striking aspect of the IR canon is that it is overwhelmingly male and white. We examined 22 surveys of IR’s canonical thinkers, with 572 cumulative references to all historical figures working before the late twentieth-century. Of these, there are nine selections of work by women: 1.57 percent. And no women of color. Although international politics is pervasive in its effects on the lives of all people across the world, the only sources of wisdom about international politics are, apparently, those of white men. One could assume, as many have, that women and people of color inherently lack the capacity to think about the workings of world politics. One could also assume that women were denied the opportunity to develop their ideas, or they were unable to do so in particular at the times and in the places where IR was established as an interdisciplinary field of study, from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

Our research shows that these assumptions are wrong. Women, including many women of color, were formative in the early field of IR, producing a rich body of work during the period when IR took shape, and were often heavily involved in its debates. The absence of women from the canon of international thought is not due to the absence of women in the early interdisciplinary field of IR. It is due to their retrospective exclusion by those seeking to establish a disciplinary canon for IR from the 1950s and those writing IR textbooks in the 1960s and 1970s.   

So how were women excluded from the IR canon? In our article, we identify a range of mechanisms that reflect the sexist and racist assumptions that underpin IR’s canon. For example, women’s writing is much more likely to be dismissed as derivative than that of men. We show how Ellen Churchill Semple’s work was crucial to the development of geopolitical thinking in the United States. But later IR scholars falsely read her work as merely an interpreter of her teacher’s, effectively dismissing Semple, while her own students were counted as scholars in their own right. Austrian Bertha von Suttner, the world’s most influential pacifist thinker from the 1880s to her death in 1914, was dismissed because the literary genres through which she expressed her ideas were identified as insufficiently “serious.” She was also dismissed as irrational and too “feminine” to be taken seriously as part of IR’s canon because she drew attention to society’s emotional investment in war. African American feminist thinker Anna Julia Cooper’s work on the role of class, gender, and race in the formation of the modern international system was ignored because later IR scholars did not read it. They had already decided that the realm of international relations was one of high politics, driven only by the rational self-interest of states, and that global race and gender hierarchies were irrelevant.

In many ways, of course, none of this is very surprising. We can identify similar phenomena in the canons of other academic disciplines. Does it actually matter that gendered and racialized preconceptions shaped the accepted canon of international thought? We suggest that it matters for at least two reasons. First, the standard story that only white men shaped the frameworks for IR thinking is wrong as disciplinary and intellectual history. Second, and more importantly, this false story narrows the range of sources for thinking about the pressing international issues that shape all of our lives today. Recovering women’s international thought allows us to draw on a fuller range of insights and arguments in our efforts to understand and explain international politics today, and this may or may not overturn existing frameworks and concepts for the study of international relations. Cooper’s analysis of the international political economy of slavery tells us something that Norman Angell’s analysis of economic globalisation does not. Von Suttner’s phenomenology of militarism tells us something that we do not find in the work of Carr or Morgenthau. Semple’s geopolitics complicates as well as complements the insights of Ratzel. This is not to say that Cooper, Suttner, or Semple are either right of wrong in their (very different) analyses of world politics. Rather, it is to make sure that they are part of IR debates to understand and explain international politics.

– Kimberly Hutching, Queen Mary University of London.

– Patricia Owens, University of Oxford.

– You can access the authors’ APSR article free of charge until July 10, 2021.