Women Have Been Erased From International Relations

Any student of international relations worth their salt is familiar with the works of John J. Mearsheimer, Henry Kissinger, Kenneth Waltz, Charles Manning, Hans J. Morgenthau, and E.H. Carr. Cited as some of ‘the Greats’, their works on Realism, Constructivism, nuclear deterrence, and many more, dominate the syllabus of every introductory international relations course in the Western world. In fact, I’m almost certain I was quoting Mearsheimer’s The Tragedy of Great Power Politics in my sleep by the second week of class. 

Now that I’m older, (allegedly) wiser, and (definitely) in the trenches of graduate school, I’ve begun to grapple with the fact that the majority of assigned readings in my coursework are written by men. Not only men, but predominantly white men from Britain or the United States. Now, this is not a criticism of (or isolated to) my individual professors. The erasure and underrepresentation of women, let alone women of colour, is a systemic issue within the field of international relations (IR). It’s been present since the beginning of IR’s life as a field of study independent of traditional political science, law, or history in the late 19th through early 20th centuries. It is only recently that scholars are beginning to question the near-total exclusion of women from the development of the international relations field and theory. These discoveries bring to light not only instances of erasure, but the gendered lens through which women’s contributions are considered and analysed. 

Women in International Thought 

The first, and easiest, assumption as to why women have been historically excluded from the field of international relations is, ‘well, they just weren’t thinking about international politics’. Perhaps they were preoccupied with other, more domestic matters given the patriarchal structure of the time. I will concede that this is a fair assumption, but it is entirely incorrect and short-sighted. While women in the late 19th century did not necessarily have access to academic institutions, when IR was beginning to truly develop its independent standing, this does not mean they were not considering international affairs entirely. The very term, ‘international thought’, is credited to Florence M. Stawell, who coined it in her 1929 book The Growth of International Thought. 

To that end, women primarily thought about and wrote on international politics from outside mainstream academia. Often as social workers, members of women’s suffrage and anti-colonial movements, or as journalists. Lucie Zimmern hosted salons; Kathleen Courtney was primarily a suffragist; and Rosa Luxemburg doubled as a philosopher and socialist revolutionary. 

In the case of Zimmern, her work centered heavily on the intersection of international relations and polyphony – the combination of melodies in a manner which does not lend itself to a hierarchy, rather all have an equal importance in the final creation. Her distinct approach has now been dubbed ‘polyphonic internationalism’. It blends three fields: her own work in cultural diplomacy, multinational and multilingual internationalist education which she promoted at the Geneva School, and finally, her husband’s vision for a reshaped world order focused on a commonwealth of culture, emphasising the decentralisation of the state. Despite her unique approach in blending music with international relations, Zimmern has repeatedly been referenced only as a footnote. Where she is mentioned, Zimmern is quoted as being the cause of her husband’s inability to advance his career or a mere copycat of his work. 

Women’s contributions spanned across life trajectories and disciplines. Their erasure cannot be boiled down to a simple lack of interest but a systemic erasure.

Although women’s contributions to the early IR canon have been largely buried, I also want to make it clear that this does not necessarily equate to their theories or proposals being correct. As with many of their male counterparts, women scholars of the time held views distinctive of their own class, race, and colonial impressions. To recover these scholars is not to rehabilitate every idea they held. Their work was shaped, like that of their male contemporaries, by the racial, class and colonial assumptions of their time. The point is not to excuse those ideas, but to acknowledge that women were thinking about international politics even when the discipline failed to recognise them.

Women Don’t Have to Write About Women

A secondary assumption regarding women’s involvement in developing international relations theory lies in the thematic content of their work. The Teaching, Research, and International Policy Project (TRIP) found that, amongst men, Realism was the most popular theory of international relations. 23.4% of male respondents identified with the school of thought compared to only 10.1% of women. While there’s no clear reason for why men are more likely to identify with Realism, TRIP does point out that the theory is one which emphasises traditionally masculine characteristics including power, anarchy, and rationality. 

Within Realism, there is a deemphasis of the individual, leading to a thought process which does not consider power dynamics within social groups nor the consequences of the internal power distributions on the actions of states. This is directly in contrast to ‘nontraditional paradigms’ which are generally more appealing to women. These types of gendered divides are common across disciplines and just like most people, international relations historians don’t always question the underlying gender or sex biases of their work. They rarely take the time to analyse the assumptions they’ve made about their subject, especially when those assumptions are rooted in gender. After all, internalised misogyny is sometimes hard to spot, even amongst well-meaning individuals

Ultimately, this type of sub-conscious bias leads to the so-called ‘pseudoinclusion’ of female scholars. Pseudoinclusion occurs when a small number of mainly contemporary, feminist female scholars are understood to represent the entirety of women in the field. In layman’s terms, disciplinary historians have made  the generalisation that women’s contributions to international relations are singularly concerned with ‘women’s issues’: children’s rights, peace activism, gender inequality, etc. They fail to acknowledge the plethora of female scholars whose work is entirely independent of ‘gendered’ issues. 

Within the international relations canon, only one woman is consistently recognised independent of subjects related to gender: Susan Strange. A true wonderwoman, Strange held the Montague Burton Chair in International Relations from 1978-88 at the London School of Economics (LSE), raised six children, founded the British International Studies Association (BISA), became a leading thinker on international political economy through her book publications, alongside winning numerous international awards. 

In 1999, Griffiths published its first edition of Fifty Key Thinkers of International Relations, where Strange was the only woman not listed under ‘Gender and International Relations’. Rather, she was given credit under the section title ‘Realism’, a milestone for female scholars in the field given their traditional categorisation as gender-based scholars. Nonetheless, this faux-progress lasted only a short season.

By the second edition, she was cut out and replaced with her contemporary Christine Sylvester, now listed under ‘Feminism’ (along with the only three other women included in the book as a whole). This drastic change not only erases Strange’s importance to the field, but it perpetuates a bare-minimum standard of inclusion for women. Inclusion cannot be understood to mean the categorisation of all women into the box of ‘Feminism’ while simultaneously only including three token representatives. Pseudoinclusion inevitably leads to the tokenisation of few women, which presents itself as ‘inclusion’ of the whole female population.

When attempting to dig through the rubble and trace women’s contributions to international relations theory, it is imperative to challenge the assumption that their primary work must somehow relate to feminism or gender-based issues. Ultimately, it is not a female scholar’s duty to impart a gendered, feminist lens onto the field simply because of her gender. Susan Strange was a woman who dealt with global economic theory. Margery Perham dealt with the decolonisation and geopolitics of Africa, while Merze Tate broke gender and racial barriers to advise General Eisenhower on disarmament following the second World War. Theirs, along with all other scholar’s contributions to the field, must be considered in a manner which does not impart conclusions based on sex or gender. We must stop seeing women as an ‘Other’ in the field of international relations.

International Relations in the 21st Century

The failure of the international relations field to recognise women’s contributions is not isolated to history. The same tokenisation and erasure continues into the 21st century. Today, international relations is well-established as an academic field in its own right with numerous universities around the globe hosting their own IR departments. With notable exceptions, most universities also now admit women to their ranks on a seemingly equal basis to men. On paper, women can hold full professorships, publish in academic journals, participate in conferences, and even have children without fear of losing their careers. Yet, the reality for women in IR is a lot more complicated.

Despite progress, 70% of international relations faculty remains male, and women who do make it into faculty tend to receive more junior roles than their male counterparts. To some, this seems trivial, but who gets to teach international relations determines, in part, which scholarship is assigned, cited, and remembered. According to the Carnegie Endowment, the discrepancies start as early as graduate school admissions, continuing to snowball until women are systemically left behind. One such snowball effect is the citation gap between male and female IR scholars. 

Historically, men have dominated the field’s scholarship. Although women are beginning to outnumber men, it doesn’t erase the fact that men, in a male-dominated field, suffer from gender biases. Thus, female-authored articles in the top international relations journals are cited less often than those written by men. Due to the nature of academia, this has devastating consequences for female IR scholars. Tenure, professorships, opportunities, and career-building promotions are often in part based on one’s past academic citations. For women, this means less opportunity to climb the academic ranks because statistically, their work is less likely to be cited when compared to a male colleague’s. Moreover, by consistently reproducing the same ideas proposed primarily by men, future scholarship is hindered in that women’s original ideas get lost within the citation gap.

Rather similar to the citation gap, the epidemic of ‘manels’––all-male foreign policy panels––is exacerbating the devaluation of women’s credibility. When the Carnegie Endowment looked at panels within the Washington D.C. think tank community, they found that 27% were manels. Even when women were included, they were more likely to serve as hosts or moderators than as participants. This projects the idea that women are not senior enough or expert enough in the topics of discussion to warrant a place on the panel. Representation, therefore, does not necessarily translate into recognition as an expert. 

These institutional bottlenecks and glass ceilings continue to disadvantage and undermine women’s voices in scholarly international relations by playing into both systemic and individual internalised misogyny. Discovery, recognition, and understanding of historical women’s contributions at the founding of the field is a necessary stepping stone to acknowledging the work of contemporaries, as well as giving them a larger seat at the table. 

When we’re told to read the work of ‘the Greats’ including Kissinger and Mearsheimer, we’re rarely reminded that who counts as a ‘Great’ is often institutionalised and heavily based on race, gender, and class biases. The IR community must re-consider the syllabus we base our lives off of. It is time we remembered those that have been ignored – the ‘lost Greats’.

Other Zoom Out Articles written by Cutting Takes Writers: 

Great Powers Are Rotting From Within

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Diplomacy Is Dead. Can We Preserve It?

Recognising Palestine, Arming Israel: Britain’s Orwellian Foreign Policy

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