5 reflections on 100 years of International Affairs
Jo Hills outlines their key take-aways from working with the journal’s 100 year archive
During International Affairs’ (IA) centenary year the team produced Archive Collections of IA work across the past 100 years on key topics, such as migration, China and decolonization. As the journal’s Digital Content Editor I have had the opportunity to support our guest-editors in finding articles for their collections. In this capacity I’ve skimmed through almost every article published over the course of the journal’s 100-year history, from its founding in 1922 through to the present day.
Seeing Chatham House, IA and the wider discipline of International Relations (IR) undergo changes at such a granular level has been a unique and eye-opening experience that that was made all the more fascinating by the insightful analysis of our guest-editors Ben Horton, Andrew Dorman, Tracy German, Evelyn Goh, Emily Venturi, Meera Sabaratnam and Katharina Rietzler. In this blogpost, I look back and outline some of my reflections after a year of familiarizing myself with IA’s labyrinthine back catalogue. In doing this, I hope to provide a brief glimpse into the changing history of International Relations as an academic discipline, as well as the weird and wonderful world of archival research.
Reflection 1: Archives are full of surprises
For such a seemingly static and venerable collection of work, the archive’s ability to genuinely surprise even after multiple readthroughs remains astounding. While there are many different reasons for this, the most important by far has been the shifting language and landscape of international politics.
Across a century that has seen a bewildering array of state, non-state, imperial and intergovernmental actors come into being and fizzle out of existence, understanding political events through any kind of consistent vocabulary is near impossible. Early hopes of key word searches were quickly jettisoned in the favour of close engagement with terminologies that remain deeply tied to the political contexts in which they were written. Even after multiple passes the capacity for a cryptic title to hide a contribution to a surprising area of study frustrated and intrigued in equal measure. In particular, confusingly short titles like ‘world order’ or ‘disarmament’ hid eye-opening contributions, with the former exemplifying British imperialist responses to the rise of Nazi Germany and the latter containing a detailed account of the collapse of the interwar disarmament regime in the 1930s.
Reflection 2: What it means to be an international relations journal has changed
Almost as dramatic as changes in the vocabularies used to understand international politics, the format of the journal itself has changed radically along with the wider discipline. IA began as a record of speeches made at Chatham House and many of the earlier articles capture attendees’ responses to some of the key public events of the day.
As the academic discipline increasingly formalized in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s these speeches gave way to more conventional academic articles we now recognize. This standardization of format in many ways mirrored the homogenization of the discipline of IR, with the early array of contributors including imperial policy-makers, women’s suffrage campaigners, journalists and philosophers gradually crystalizing into the journal’s current more academic and IR-focused author base. In light of persistent anxieties around the status of IR as a discipline it is important to remember just how recent and historically particular attempts to consolidate International Relations as a separate field of study area really are.
Reflection 3: Colonialism has had a persistent impact on the discipline
Being founded in the metropole of the British empire it was unsurprising to learn the ways in which International Affairs, along with the wider institute, were deeply implicated in the British colonial project. The way imperial and white supremacist modes of thinking permeated much of the work published in the journal’s early decades, even beyond topics directly related to imperial governance, serves as a sobering reminder of the need to question the foundations of contemporary International Relations.
While it is impossible to do justice in this blogpost to the numerous ways in which colonial modes of thinking impacted and still impact on our understanding of international politics, Meera Sabaratnam’s archive collection on empire and decolonization and the January 2022 special issue on race and imperialism in IR both provide useful analysis for understanding this complex relationship.
Reflection 4: Women’s changing contribution to the discipline needs to be recognized
One of the most significant changes across the journal’s history is the increased participation of women that is explored in Katharina Rietzler’s excellent archive collection. While women did essential work on International Relations at Chatham House from the organization’s beginning, early trailblazers nonetheless worked in a highly patriarchal context. For example Alice Salomon, the first woman published in IA, had her name hidden in a footnote to her article.
As editors, Margaret Cleeve and Muriel Grindrod played a crucial role in expanding women’s presence in the pages of the journal from the 1930s to the 1960s. With the formalization of IR as an academic discipline, ground-breaking contributions by the likes of Susan Strange and Marysia Zalewski still resonate to this day. As such, recognizing the many contributions of these women and the challenges they faced is vital both in terms of their impact on the discipline and in order to understand the changing gendered dynamics of academia and policy-making.
Reflection 5: There is so much more to analyse
While the six archive collections completed so far provide fascinating insights into how the respective topics have been covered over the past 100 years, the sheer number of articles and the range of events discussed leave much scope for further inquiry.
As the journal was positioned at the heart of British politics, responses to key one-off historical events such as the Falklands war were often central to the journal’s output. Similarly, in her collection on decolonization and independence Meera Sabaratnam acknowledges the need for further engagement with research on India, as well as the writing of post-colonial leaders published in the journal. Overall, the potential for further engagement and new collections on different topics is genuinely exciting.
Jo Hills is the Digital Content Editor at International Affairs.
You can read all 6 archive collections here.
You can find a full timeline of the history of International Affairs here.
All views expressed are individual not institutional.
