BISA at thirty: Reflections on three decades of British International Relations scholarship

Review of International Studies

Volumn 32, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 665-676

  Kennedy Pipe, Caroline ^a   Rengger, Nicholas ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33750316265     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: 14699044     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210506007212     Document Type: Review

References (71)

1. As the website of the association states, 'We are the leading organisation in the UK linking academics in political science and current affairs, theorists and practitioners, policy-makers, journalists, researchers and students in higher education'. See 〈http://www.psa.ac.uk/about/ abt_home.htm〉.
2. See Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy (New York: New York University Press, 1975).
3. Aron made profound contributions to both general IR theory in Peace and War (New York: Transaction 2003[1963])
4. and Strategic thought in The Great Debate: Theories of Nuclear Strategy (London: Greenwood, 1981).
5. For its current website see 〈http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/peace/ 〉.
6. Feminist scholarship has been increasingly prominent in this Journal, for example, from the early 1990s onwards and by the late 1990's it was not uncommon to find debates around various aspects of feminist theorising in IR. See, for example, the debate between Adam Jones, Terrell Carver, Judith Squires and Molly Cochrane, in The Review of International Studies, 24:1 (1998), pp. 405-29
7. Adam Jones, Terrell Carver, Judith Squires and Molly Cochrane, in The Review of International Studies, and 24:2 (1998), pp. 283-303.
8. See especially his Formal Theory in International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
9. For an example of this and a well-crafted defence of formal theory and critique of its opponents, see Nicholson's BISA Plenary delivered at the Sussex BISA and published in the Review of International Studies, 26:2 (2000).
10. See Hedley Bull, The Control of the Arms Race and Bull, The Anarchical Society (London: Macmillan, 1977).
11. The most celebrated version of this argument was, of course, Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London: Fontana, 1988).
12. A thoughtful discussion of the ins and outs of this thesis can be found in some of the essays, in Michael Hogan (ed.), The End of the Cold War: Its Meaning and Implications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
13. See for example, John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983)
14. and We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998);
15. Melvyn P. Leffer A Preponderance of Power: National Security, The Truman Administration and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994);
16. Anne Deighton, The Impossible Peace: Britain, The Division of Germany and the Origin of the Cold War (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1993);
17. John Young, Cold War Europe, 1945-1989: A Political History (London: Hodder Arnold, 1991).
18. See, for example, Colin Gray, Another Bloody Century (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2005)
19. and Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Deterrence, 3rd edn. (London: Palgrave, 2003).
20. Among the best examples would be Paul Schroeder's magisterial The Transformation of European Politics 1763-1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
21. Howard's first major book was a brilliant study of the Franco-Prussian war. See Michael Howard, The Franco Prussian War: The German Invasion of France 1870-1871 (London: Routledge, 2001 [1961]). But he has published many influential books combining historical and contemporary aspects.
22. See, for example, The Invention of Peace and the Reinvention of War (London: Profile Books, 2002). He has also written part of the official history of British intelligence in the Second World War;
23. see Howard, British Intelligence in the Second World War, vol. 5 (London: HMSO, 1990).
24. And also a continuing sense of the interplay between historical scholarship and IR. See, for example, the reception of D. C. Watt's, How War Came (London: Heinemann, 1989)
25. and the impact of the work of historians such as Avi Schlaim in The Politics of Partition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Schlaim, interestingly enough is an example of the crossover that we are talking about, in that he is an historian who holds a chair of International Relations.
26. It is also worth pointing out that the relationship between 'history' as a field and 'political science' as a field in focusing on international relations has also become an area of study in the US. See for example, Colin and Elman and Miriam Elman (eds.), Bridges and Boundaries: Historians, Political Scientists and the Study of International Relations (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001).
27. Though of course parallel developments were occurring in the US where, in 1973, two young scholars Robert Keohane and Jospeh Nye published a path-breaking edited book, Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973).
28. See Susan Strange, Sterling and British Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971);
29. Casino Capitalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986)
30. and Mad Money (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998).
31. See, for example, Rival States, Rival Firms with John Stoppford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
32. and The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
33. Susan Strange, States and Markets (London: Continuum, 1994).
34. The Political Economy Research Centre at Sheffield
35. and The Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation at Warwick.
36. World Politics, 1966.
37. See Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996 [1962]).
38. See, for example, Galtung Essays in Peace Research (New York: Humanities Press, 1975).
39. Perhaps most influentially by Andrew Linklater. See, for example, Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997).
40. Amongst the most influential treatments here has been R. B. J. Walker's, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
41. An important survey, by an influential feminist IR scholar, is Ann Tickner, Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the post Cold War Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
42. An important collection is Stephen Gill (ed.), Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
43. Many UK authors spoke of the various critical theories of IR (as well as a newly resurgent interest in normative theory) as 'post-positivist' theory. Robert Keohane, himself an advocate of it, referred to 'positivism' as 'rationalistic' (see his International Institutions and State Power (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1989), ch. 8.
44. The doyen of American Realists for example, Hans Morgenthau, had devoted his first English language book to a withering critique of positivism before its rise to dominance. See Morgenthau, Scientific Man Versus Power Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1946).
45. This School emphasised the philosophical and legal aspects of international relations and their historical context and was certainly connected to that historical element in British IR scholarship we have already mentioned. It was closely connected to the British Committee for the Theory of International Politics founded by Herbert Butterfield (a Cambridge Historian, of course) in the late 1950s, and which involved many of the most influential British-based International Relations Theorists of the period (including Martin Wight and Hedley Bull) and which had continued its work through the 1960s and the 1970s and into the 1980s. The most exhaustive study of the group and their concerns is Brunello Vigezzi, The British Committee for the Theory of International Politics 1954-1985 (Milan: Edizioni Copli, 2005).
46. Vincent's two most influential works were Non-Intervention and International Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), originally his Ph.D thesis supervised by Bull at the ANU,
47. and then Human Rights and International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), a study carried out by Vincent at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House).
48. Complete with its own website - see 〈http://www.leeds.ac.uk/polis/ englishschool/〉.
49. See, for example, the early debate in the Review between Sheila Grader and Peter Wilson. Sheila Grader, 'The English School of International Relations: Evidence and Evaluation', in The Review of International Studies, 14 (1988), pp. 29-44
50. and Peter Wilson, 'The English School of International Relations: A Reply to Sheila Grader', The Review of International Studies, 15: January 1989.
51. Recent debates on the School and some of its members have become widespread. See, for just one example the section on The English School: Continuity and Change, in the Review of International Studies, 28:4 (2002).
52. Perhaps the most obvious signs of this was Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977)
53. and Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).
54. See R. J. Vincent, Human Rights and International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
55. For two good general discussions, see Ken Booth (ed.), Critical Security Studies and World Politics (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner, 2004),
56. and Keith Krause and Michael Williams (eds.), Critical Security Studies; Concepts and Strategies (London: Routledge 1997).
57. See, for example, his Rethinking the Pacific (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1991).
58. See, for example, Barry Buzan and Ole Waever, Regions and Powers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
59. See Philip Windsor (ed. by Spyros Econimedes and Mats Berdal), Strategic Studies: An Introduction and Farewell (New York: Lynne Reiner 2002).
60. To cite just three volumes (from many): The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 3rd edn. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003);
61. Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002),
62. and Deterrence: Themes for the Twenty First Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2004).
63. See Gray, Another Bloody Century.
64. See also the debate between Gray and his critics in the Review: Colin Gray 'Clausewitz Rules OK', in The Review of International Studies, 25, Special Issue (1999);
65. then see the forum on Gray in the Review of International Studies, 29:2 (2003).
66. In the UK, the pioneer was Paul Wilkinson, whose book Political Terrorism (London: Macmillan, 1974) really launched the serious study of terrorism as a political phenomenon.
67. There is now a veritable growth industry in discussing the rights and wrongs (and practicalities and impracticalities) of 'international administration'. This goes hand-in-hand with much of the institutional debate about the role of international agencies, of varying types, in managing or dealing with such situations.
68. Early and classic examples of the genre include Inis Claude, Swords Into Ploughshares: The Problems and Progress of International Organization (New York: Random House, 1971)
69. and Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1977).
70. Keohane has recently focused in much of his work on the twin processes of institutionalisation and legalisation in international relations. See, for example, the Special Issue of International Organization he coedited on the topic of 'Legalization in World Politics' in 2000.
71. This active engagement has many different manifestations. Scholars like Paul Rogers, Fred Halliday, and Mick Cox have been very active in a wide range of public activities as both educators and as public intellectuals, and as the knighthoods bestowed upon both Lawrence Freedman and Adam Roberts show, the policy world is aware of the how important good scholarship in IR can be.