Description
Martin Wight’s seminal article ‘Why is there no International Theory?’ (1960) can be seen as one of the founding texts of what has become known as the English School approach to International Relations theory (IR). Eric Blanchard’s more recent, and less well known, ‘Why is there no gender in the English School?’ (2010) continued this tradition of asking difficult questions about the prevailing assumptions within the wider field of IR. This article takes this questioning narrative further by asking why the only female member of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, widely regarded as the key forum that gave birth to much of what has become the English School, has been left out of the history of the English School. It argues that the key texts that have framed this history of the English School have overlooked the importance of the thinking of Coral Bell in shaping the ideas of the British Committee and the leading early figures in the English School. Bell was both a student and colleague of Martin Wight, as well as a contemporary colleague of Hedley Bull, Adam Watson, and Michael Howard. Coral Bell’s work on alliances, Great Power politics, and diplomacy, which has largely been overlooked by British and European IR, has held an influential position in both American and Australian foreign policy circles for decades. This paper argues that there is a gap in the history of the English School that is gender specific which has led the English School to overlook key thinking on some of its core tenets, such as Great Power politics. By re-centering the role and thinking of Coral Bell within the English School we can open new avenues of interdisciplinary research between the fields of IR and foreign policy.
