Editors past and present: Caroline Soper
This blogpost is part of a series of editorial retrospectives that discuss the impact of International Affairs’ (IA’s) former editors in the context of the journal’s centenary. Below Caroline Soper reflects on her time as Editor of International Affairs.
I owe my long and happy association with Chatham House to a chance meeting in early 1991 outside the gates of my son’s prep school. Lolli Duvivier, a fellow parent also waiting for the bell to announce school’s out, was then Assistant Editor of the World Today. I asked her a random question about Chatham House and if there were any jobs going. There was — Assistant Editor at International Affairs. I applied and was offered the post under Lucy Seton-Watson, the Editor who had originally started in the Library and graduated to Assistant Editor under the editorship of John Roper (later The Lord Roper and Lib Dem Chief Whip 2001–2005).
I was escorted around empty offices on the first working day in the then unreconstructed building in St James’s Square, put in a cupboard full of books needing reviewers and left to discover how everything worked. The journal was published quarterly by Cambridge University Press, so the timetable was fairly relaxed — rather like everything else at the institute then: librarians diligently ironed news cuttings for posterity, gestetners ground into action, and the broadsheets were on holding sticks in the Library ready for quiet reading in the elegant, sombre surroundings. This peaceful atmosphere only occasionally interrupted by the booming voice of the Director, Admiral Sir James Eberle, echoing through the corridors. A few weeks into my work on the morning 7 February 1991 Chatham House shook as one of the three IRA mortar shells aimed at John Major’s Gulf War Cabinet meeting exploded in the back garden of No 10. None of the Cabinet was hurt but the geographical closeness and significance of CH to government was apparent.
At the time of the Gulf crisis and the collapse of the Soviet Empire, International Affairs — with its small editorial board of four — had its work cut out to adapt and make sure it was addressing the key issues of the day. In the January 1991 issue of the journal Lawrence Freedman argued in his article on the use of force that ‘the responsibility for the higher conduct of war must be political rather than military; that from now on, realistic and unambiguous political objectives, consistent with national values, must be elaborated by the West before any possible military involvement’ — a standpoint that couldn’t be more prescient today.
I became the journal’s Editor in 1996, supported by a larger editorial board, with a commitment to scholarship and the importance of policy relevance. International theory was to have a key role in the analysis and understanding of world affairs and world order to help practitioners formulate sound policy. But, as Christopher Hill wrote in another key journal, the September 2005 issue of International Relations, ‘…The problems we address and the questions we pose should be judged on their relevance to the great dilemmas of world politics, not on whether they benefit one school or another’. Early on in my time as Editor International Affairs articles debated the nuclear weapons question between such thinkers as Michael MccGwire and Michael Quinlan, the perceived Realist/Idealist divide, and responded to the works of Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama. I wanted the journal to act as a forum for discussion around which policy-makers and academics could form a consensus. But when it comes to influencing government policy, compared with European think-tanks which are often government-sponsored, or US foreign policy journals that focus almost exclusively on US foreign affairs, International Affairs may be at a disadvantage.
Our response to the 9/11 attacks on the US was not immediate. We wanted time for potential authors to reflect on those dreadful events and their underlying causes. The April 2002 issue, ‘New orders? New norms?’ led with Joseph Nye’s article on ‘The American national interest and global public goods’.
In 2003 Blackwell was our new publisher and from 2006 the number of issues a year rose to six opening up an opportunity to cover a wider and more challenging range of fields. This included work on topics such as Corporate Social Responsibility, biodiversity, HIV/AIDS, Africa and Security, emerging powers, climate change, the Middle East, NATO, cyber security and the perennial questions of post-Cold War world order.
Some of my best and most memorable times at International Affairs were with the incomparable and vivacious IA team at international conferences: in Europe; annually in the US at the International Studies Association conferences; launching special issues with Alex Vines and his team in the Africa Programme further afield at our sister institutes in Nigeria and South Africa; and with Rosy Hollis’s Middle East Programme members in Egypt. It was a real privilege to have had such marvellous friends and colleagues and I can’t thank them enough.
I ended my editorship with two special issues: the first, the 90th volume of International Affairs (January 1914) featuring examples of the journal’s covers, began with a quote from the editorial statement of that first issue in 1922: ‘The journal of which this is the first issue, will, it is hoped… become a source of information and a guide to judgment in international affairs’. The eleven articles that followed including those by international historians David Stevenson, Margaret Macmillan and Harold James and IR analysts such as Barry Buzan, Paul Rogers and Ian Hall, were examples of scholarship that epitomized that hope.
The second was in March 2014, commemorating the centenary of the start of the First World War. These volumes were a rare opportunity to create compelling and lasting historical records, full of original insight. For the Great War centenary, I organized an exhibition at Chatham House of haunting photographs by Mike St Maur Shiel entitled Fields of Battle, Lands of Peace. Additionally, I arranged a concert in St James’s in collaboration with Kate Kennedy featuring the evocative songs and spoken excerpts of the poet and composer Ivor Gurney, who fought on the Western Front with the Gloucestershire Regiment. These editions of a great journal, and these memorable events, were a wonderful way to end my time with International Affairs.
Caroline Soper is Series Editor for Insights, a Chatham House book series in collaboration with the Brookings Institution Press and was Editor of International Affairs from 1996 to 2014.
All views expressed are individual not institutional.
