Women’s international thought: toward a counter-archival transformation of global power–knowledge

Abstract

Conversations with sympathetic but slightly skeptical colleagues about the near total absence of women and people of color from the canonical literature associated with international relations (IR) often follow a certain, familiar pattern. Yes, these colleagues acknowledge, the important, foundational texts were written largely by white men. Yes, this unfortunate. Yes, gender, race, and class should be taken seriously when analyzing international politics. But, they say, the problem with faddish pedagogical movements that ask us to expand or "decolonize" the curriculum is this: when it comes to history, you can't change the past. Women and people of color just weren't there when the crucial ideas were forged. Adding them to survey courses thus requires amplifying the voices of people who were only marginally relevant while watering down the truly crucial concepts with which students must be familiar. From this perspective, expanding the IR canon is curricular violation, a revisionist act of historical wish fulfillment.The problem with this historical/conceptual/political framing is that it isn't true. As Patricia Owens, Sarah C. Dunstan, Kimberly Hutchings, and Katharina Rietzler argue in the Introduction to this truly astonishing collection, women were not just present for some of the earliest discussions about what constituted the intellectual substance and political practice of international relations; they "helped to produce the very notion of international relations" in the first place. (p.2) Circumstances conspired to make this so. As a "relatively novel field," Owens notes in her Introduction to the first section, "research and teaching in IR allowed large numbers of middle-and upper-class women to break new ground within the institutionally racist and patriarchal setting of the university." It is not an accident, she continues, that both "the first African American woman to earn a graduate degree from Oxford and Harvard as well as Oxford's and Edinburgh's first women professors were IR scholars."(p.24). Women played crucial roles in setting up the institutional infrastructure of IR, founding and co-founding some of its earliest research centers and think tanks. And while a goodly number of women worked within these academic and institutional settings, others wrote about international politics from the adjacent worlds of "journalism, activism, social work, and teaching." (p.2) Wherever their location, however, throughout the early twentieth century and the long midcentury, women were engaged with major themes of the day; nationalism, colonial administration, war and peace, imperialism, international institutions and law, and global economic issues. They helped define and transform the discourse of international relations in Britain and North America and their contribution was "well known and influential in its time." (p.1) And yet, despite these contributions and this public influence, the international thought of both historical women and people of color has been largely erased from surveys of the field. ...

Looking for Utopia: Experts and Global Governance

“…Both aspects merit further attention, with important consequences for how we understand and further conceptualise technocratic global governance. One way of continuing this line of inquiry would be to establish dialogue between work of the kind reviewed here and recent scholarship on women’s international thought (Morefield, 2021; Owens and Rietzler, 2021; Owens et al, 2022), as well as proliferating work on empire, race and racism (Acharya, 2022; Anievas et al, 2015; Getachew, 2019).…”