When did the study of International Relations (IR) in the Anglo-American academy become understood as primarily a theoretical enterprise, where advancing debate among grand theories or isms was the ‘lodestone’?Footnote ¹ American-style IR theory may have been ‘invented’ at a Rockefeller Foundation conference in 1954, with its all-male, all white canon of isms and traditions.Footnote ² But the academic study of IR originated much earlier in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Whose intellectual work, and which intellectual fields, were marginalized – and at what intellectual price – when IR was refigured as a certain kind of theoretical enterprise in the 1950s that was further reified in the 1980s when discussion of ‘international theory’ dramatically increased?

Scholars of interwar liberal and socialist internationalisms have long pointed to the caricature of ‘idealism’ necessary to establish both the hegemony of ‘realist’ theory from the 1950s and the political-scientific credentials of ‘liberal international theory’ from the 1980s.Footnote ³ Postcolonial critics and scholars of anticolonialism point to the diverse array of intellectual and political work on IR from around the world, both before and after the heyday of decolonization during the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote ⁴ Robert Vitalis has shown how African American scholarship on empire and race was marginalized in the postwar invention of ‘international theory’.Footnote ⁵ And scholars have begun to recover an earlier genealogy of feminist writing on IR, long before feminist IR's reemergence in the 1980s.Footnote ⁶ Even IR's intellectual and disciplinary history is now a thriving subfield, often inspired by important cross-disciplinary work on global and international intellectual history.Footnote ⁷

This forum discusses the first two books of a collaborative and interdisciplinary project, the Leverhulme project on Women and the History of International Thought (WHIT) that, among other contributions, raises new questions about the belated privileging of a narrow form of ‘international theory’ in Anglo-American academe.Footnote ⁸ The historiographical impetus of this work is women's near total erasure from IR's histories of international thinking. Across 60 histories of international thought there are fewer than 3% of references to historical women, those working before the late 20^th century, including only four women of colour: 0.09%.Footnote ⁹ Is this an accurate reflection of the breadth and depth of women's international thought?

Decades of feminist history and theory and comparable studies in other fields show that the production and reception of intellectual work is shaped by gender and sexuality, race and empire, class, and nation, genre, and audience.Footnote ¹⁰ There are numerous conscious and unconscious processes and mechanisms through which women were excluded from IR's canon, including falsely identifying women's work as derivative of men's, feminizing particular modes and genres of thought, and defining IR itself from the standpoint of elite white men.Footnote ¹¹ Building on earlier forays,Footnote ¹² the WHIT project shows that, far from being absent, women were formative in the development of the study of IR from the beginning of the 20^th century, both inside and outside academe. They undertook significant, original, and wide-ranging intellectual work on IR across the widest possible range of empirical subject matter, genres, ideological, theoretical, political, and racial positions, and professional and intimate contexts. They carried out this work as area specialists, diplomatic historians, comparativists, scholars interested in the workings of international organizations and law, of empire and race. They produced an extensive body of work on core IR questions, writing books that sold in their thousands, sometimes in their hundreds of thousands. They wrote on IR in non- or semi-academic locations, such as think tanks, or parallel professional contexts like education and journalism.Footnote ¹³ They founded or co-founded some of the most important research and educationalist projects in the interwar years. Except for Susan Strange, who founded her own IR subfield, they were all written out of IR's intellectual and disciplinary history.

The implications of the erasure and recovery of women's international thought are significant and wide-ranging. Consider just one example, the 1950s invention of IR theory and its relation to the more recent diagnosis that IR has failed as an intellectual project.Footnote ¹⁴ Women's international thought should not be reduced to the terms of contemporary international theory. Yet, women engaged with and contributed to all – and sometimes defined – the major theoretical approaches in the field today. Ellen Churchill Semple was one of the most influential proponents of geopolitical thought in the United States in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. In the 1910s, Rosa Luxemburg was at the forefront of thinking the intersection between capitalism and IR and Bertha von Suttner was one of the most important liberal ‘idealist’ thinkers. Anna Julia Cooper's Slavery and the Haitian Revolutions, completed in 1925, and Jeanne Nardal's ‘Internationalisme noir’, published in 1928, are among the most important early works of Black international thought. The very use of the English term ‘international thought’ can be traced to F. Melian Stawell's historical survey, The Growth of International Thought, published in 1929.

Women international thinkers wrote some of the earliest and most powerful theoretical statements of what would later become core approaches to contemporary international theory. But few mid-20^th-century women in academe were interested in the disciplinary ‘boundary-work’ that accelerated in the 1950s or in developing abstract theories of the international system. Even after IR became primarily a theoretical enterprise of a very certain kind, women generally did not, by and large, join those white men seeking to bestow intellectual legitimacy on IR through inventing a canon of intellectual greats and positioning themselves as its true heirs.Footnote ¹⁵ If contemporary ‘international theory’ is in terminal decline in favour of data collection and hypothesis testing, at least among some political scientists, then this is a threat to one very particular – and failed – mode of theoretical debate.Footnote ¹⁶ If IR has failed as an intellectual project, culminating in recent talk of the end of ‘IR theory’,Footnote ¹⁷ this failure is inextricably linked to the marginalization of styles and approaches to international thinking at which women and people of colour excelled.

This collective marginalization also erased specific approaches to international theorizing, some of which have been rediscovered in more recent years, including focus on gender, race, genre, and emotions. In some cases, the frameworks and epistemic assumptions of recovered thinkers make a clear and novel contribution to understanding specific aspects of international politics. More generally, however, their recovery draws our attention to the importance of context and concrete engagement as opposed to high level abstraction for the analysis of international institutions and events, to the falsity of the idea that there is a clear-cut distinction between domestic and international, and to the significance of activist knowledge in generating IR categories and concepts. Pedagogically, it matters whether students are presented with texts and ideas that are not only generated by white men. But even in those cases when this recovered work is similar to that generated by this narrow caste, respecting other forms of epistemic authority and rectifying epistemic injustice enhances students’ engagement with and understanding of IR and the context and politics of IR knowledge production. In other words, recovering earlier thought helps us to think through the implications of ‘reinvented’ themes, but it also speaks to ongoing projects of epistemic justice and the pluralization of IR.

The essays in this forum not only engage with the strengths, limits, and emergent themes of the WHIT project's first two book-length publications. They extend and deepen our understanding of women's international thinking and illuminate what international theorists might gain from taking historical women seriously as international thinkers and co-founders of this intellectual field.

Adom Getachew discusses the methodological choice of curating women's international thought in anthology form. IR's existing canon privileges major treatise as the primary form for theoretical analysis, marginalizing genres in which many women worked. Getachew rightly suggests that anthology disrupts any effort to privilege one form, location, genre, or practice of intellectual production and even the attempt at canon formation itself, which she illustrates by discussing the essays in Women's International Thought: A New History on Anna Julia Cooper, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Eslanda Robseson, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, and Merze Tate.Footnote ¹⁸ Genre is taken up in Duncan Bell's turn to speculative fiction as international thought with discussion of Charlotte Perkins Gilmore, Ursula Le Guin, and Octavia Butler. Bell also draws attention to the importance of collaboration, institutional support, and interdisciplinarity given the magnitude of women's erasure and the scale of the recovery task.

Cynthia Enloe and Vineet Thakur offer extended discussions of two figures, academic and policy advisor Louise Holborn and the public intellectual Olive Schreiner, respectively. For Thakur, Schreiner illustrates one of IR's ‘roads not taken’; ‘perhaps alone among her contemporaries… [Schreiner] analyzed South Africa's race conflicts in terms of a global struggle between capital and labour’. Indeed, the immediate precursor to The Round Table, one of the earliest IR journals, ‘was invested in countering the force’ of Schreiner's arguments. In autobiographical mode, Enloe reflects on her 19-year-old self, first encountering Holborn (and her partner Gwendoline Carter) as ‘an unfashionable, unmarried woman’, the reality of Holborn's intellectual achievements and contexts, and the ‘patriarchal formula’ ‘that seemed to have ensured that all but the rarest woman… would be shut out of the alleged IR canon’.

It was the primary task of IR's disciplinary and intellectual historians to account for the gendered history of their main object of study, and for women's foundational role in IR's disciplinary and intellectual history. This is also true for those recovering IR's multiple national and transnational histories.Footnote ¹⁹ Given the scale of erasure, and the size of the task of recovery, there will necessarily be omissions in early work of this kind, especially given the methodological necessity to assemble the empirical record from scratch. The recovery and analysis in A New History and Toward a New Canon only scratches the surface, even in its limited focus on early to mid-20^th-century Anglo-American contexts. We have not attempted the monumental task of recovering women's international thought from around the world. Nor have we even recovered the full diversity of women's international thinking in the metropole beyond ‘white women's IR’ and, drawing on and contributing to recent work on Black women's intellectual history, Black diasporic women's international thought, including African American, Caribbean, and central African women.Footnote ²⁰

The recovery of women's international thought from around the world, including other differently racialized women in Anglo-American contexts, is important work that others are doing with language and area/regional/national expertise, and we hope to support and contribute to in due course. We are excited to begin to meet the intellectual, methodological, and political challenges of broadening the WHIT project to include that which still needs to be recovered, a challenge for all scholars of international thought. We have made a start, rather than given comprehensive answers. As Cynthia Enloe asks in her contribution, ‘Which Indigenous Australian, Brazilian, Turkish, Cameroonian, or Burmese… women thinkers’ insights into international politics am I missing today?’