Diversity in foreign policy requires new histories of international thought

Of the thousands of references to historical figures across sixty disciplinary and intellectual histories of International Relations (IR) published since 1929, Patricia Owens (2018) found only 2.94 percent referred to women—79 individuals across the entire trajectory of international thought. Women’s International Thought: A New History, edited by Owens and Katharina Rietzler, is a first corrective to this disciplinary exclusion, pulling back a strip of lacklustre wallpaper to reveal a far more interesting pattern beneath. The book’s promise is two-fold: to begin to remedy the erasure of women from the disciplinary history of IR, and to expand the scope of what constitutes international thinking. Its contributions reveal a diverse array of thinkers, whose restitution enriches the discipline, and could have ripple effects in the world of contemporary IR practice. The volume’s fifteen chapters profile women from academia, policy, advocacy, and journalism, but point beyond these individual thinkers to new themes and paths other researchers will inevitably take up. As an inter-disciplinary project, the book has much to offer to a wide range of scholars. Beyond its obvious contributions to history and IR, the thinkers profiled bring lost perspectives to international law, security studies, political science, economics, and gender and race studies. Importantly, this volume and its broader project of rewriting women into the IR canon has implications for IR practitioners at a time when the field is grappling with urgent questions of diversity and relevance. The exclusion of women—especially women of colour—from IR theory and history is mirrored in IR practice. Recently, renewed efforts to address these disparities have called attention to the risks of homogenous groupthink. In the United States, the context with which I am most familiar, the latest National Security Strategy even recognises a diverse security workforce as a strategic asset. Calls for change have manifested in related demands to diversify representation in traditional IR spaces—especially leading think tanks and formal government institutions—and to build a more expansive pipeline through updated curricula and foreign affairs education. Women’s International Thought speaks directly to these challenges, offering a new array of diverse role models, an expanded vision of what kind of work can be considered international thinking, and a strong case for the centrality of gender and race analysis to a comprehensive understanding of international affairs.