Challenging the politics of knowledge: a new history of international thought

Abstract

Redressing the dearth of women’s voices in the historiography of international thought is a process now well underway. This worthy recipient of the Joseph Fletcher Prize for Best Edited Book in Historical International Relations in 2021 is the most recent, and one of the most powerful contributions to this enterprise. It furnishes the discipline of International Relations (IR) with accounts of eighteen women who contributed to the history of the international. Moreover, in incorporating these voices into the history of international thought, the volume necessarily introduces contentious methodological claims about what ‘international thought’ is, and how the discipline of IR carves out its intellectual terrain. Owens’ and Rietzler’s volume then, delivers twice—not only by providing a rich historical account of women’s international thinking, but also by showcasing the wide array of practices, locations, forms and modes through which the international has been constructed and contested, thereby challenging long held disciplinary assumptions and intellectual traditions. On the first count, Owens’ and Rietzler’s volume provides a range of women’s international thought during the late nineteenth and mid twentieth century, a period that was foundational for the discipline of IR. The volume includes some familiar or ‘canonical’ names, including Simone Weil and F. Melian Stawell, as well as introducing thinkers less familiar to disciplinary accounts. These include the ‘street-scholar’ Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, journalist Elizabeth Wiskemann, and Pan-Africanist Amy Ashwood Garvey. Importantly, the volume does not cast its subjects as necessarily feminist in their ambitions where they themselves did not see their intellectual labours as such, nor does it suggest that each of these thinkers took the category of gender as essential to their conceptions of the international. Rather, it aims to take women’s contributions as they were—sometimes feminist, black Atlantic, imperialist, socialist, Pan-African or colonial—and (re)introduce them into the history of the international. Building on their own and others’ earlier contributions, Owens and Rietzler show that women have not been absent from thinking internationally throughout history, but rather systemically and historiographically excluded by practices of erasure (see Owens 2018; Hutchings and Owens 2021; Sluga 2015; Foxley 2006; Bay et al. 2015; Huber, Pietsch, and Rietzler 2021). It is here, on this second count, that the book’s ambition to investigate the history of women’s international thought necessarily acts as a challenge to disciplinary practices which have effectively excluded these thinkers. As the book