Katharina Rietzler’s research while affiliated with University of Sussex and other places

This article recovers the musician, pedagogue, institution-builder, and intellectual Lucie Zimmern (1875–1963). Together with her husband Alfred, a canonical international thinker, Zimmern founded and ran the Geneva School of International Studies (1923–1939), where she outlined and taught the principles of what we term ‘polyphonic internationalism’ to hundreds of students from across the globe: the musical texture of polyphony was an ordering principle for a world which had yet come to terms with the reality of human diversity. Zimmern’s musical formation, her complex racial, religious, and national identity, combined with her experience as a private cultural diplomat of the Anglo-French Entente Cordiale, shaped her distinctive analysis of international politics which she disseminated in academic debates, written works, and public lectures. We analyse the genesis and claims of polyphonic internationalism, overtly a culturally relativist concept that sought to reconcile national and cultural self-determination with the hierarchies of empire. Lucie Zimmern’s trajectory as a thinker and her experience as a ‘wife of the canon’ reveals the gendered politics of intellectual production in the early academic field of international relations where the boundaries between the feminised domains of culture and internationalist pedagogy, and the soon-to-be masculinised academic, and ‘scientific’ study of international relations remained surprisingly permeable.

Throughout the 20 th century, women were leading intellectuals on International Relations (IR). They thought, wrote, and taught on this subject in numerous political, professional, intimate, and intellectual contexts. They wrote some of the earliest and most powerful theoretical statements of what would later become core approaches to contemporary international theory. Yet, historical women, those working before the late 20 th century, are almost completely missing in IR's intellectual and disciplinary histories, including histories of its main theoretical traditions. In this forum, leading historians and theorists of IR respond to the recent findings of the Leverhulme project on Women and the History of International Thought (WHIT), particularly its first two book-length publications on the centrality of women to early IR discourses and subsequent erasure from its history and conceptualization. The forum is introduced by members of the WHIT project. Collectively, the essays suggest the implications of the erasure and recovery of women's international thought are significant and wide-ranging.

This first anthology of women's international thought explores how women transformed the practice of international relations, from the early to middle twentieth century. Revealing a major distortion in current understandings of the history and theory of international relations, this anthology offers an alternative 'archive' of international thought. By including women as international thinkers it demonstrates their centrality to early international relations discourses in and on the Anglo-American world order and how they were excluded from its history and conceptualization. Encompassing 104 selections by 92 different thinkers, including Anna Julia Cooper, Margaret Sanger, Rosa Luxemburg, Judith Shklar, Hannah Arendt, Merze Tate, Susan Strange, Lucy P. Mair and Claudia Jones, it covers the widest possible range of subject matter, genres, ideological and political positions, and professional contexts. Organized into thirteen thematic sections, each with a substantial introductory essay, the anthology provides intellectual, political and biographical context, and original arguments, showing women's significance in international thought.

This first anthology of women's international thought explores how women transformed the practice of international relations, from the early to middle twentieth century. Revealing a major distortion in current understandings of the history and theory of international relations, this anthology offers an alternative 'archive' of international thought. By including women as international thinkers it demonstrates their centrality to early international relations discourses in and on the Anglo-American world order and how they were excluded from its history and conceptualization. Encompassing 104 selections by 92 different thinkers, including Anna Julia Cooper, Margaret Sanger, Rosa Luxemburg, Judith Shklar, Hannah Arendt, Merze Tate, Susan Strange, Lucy P. Mair and Claudia Jones, it covers the widest possible range of subject matter, genres, ideological and political positions, and professional contexts. Organized into thirteen thematic sections, each with a substantial introductory essay, the anthology provides intellectual, political and biographical context, and original arguments, showing women's significance in international thought.

This first anthology of women's international thought explores how women transformed the practice of international relations, from the early to middle twentieth century. Revealing a major distortion in current understandings of the history and theory of international relations, this anthology offers an alternative 'archive' of international thought. By including women as international thinkers it demonstrates their centrality to early international relations discourses in and on the Anglo-American world order and how they were excluded from its history and conceptualization. Encompassing 104 selections by 92 different thinkers, including Anna Julia Cooper, Margaret Sanger, Rosa Luxemburg, Judith Shklar, Hannah Arendt, Merze Tate, Susan Strange, Lucy P. Mair and Claudia Jones, it covers the widest possible range of subject matter, genres, ideological and political positions, and professional contexts. Organized into thirteen thematic sections, each with a substantial introductory essay, the anthology provides intellectual, political and biographical context, and original arguments, showing women's significance in international thought.

This first anthology of women's international thought explores how women transformed the practice of international relations, from the early to middle twentieth century. Revealing a major distortion in current understandings of the history and theory of international relations, this anthology offers an alternative 'archive' of international thought. By including women as international thinkers it demonstrates their centrality to early international relations discourses in and on the Anglo-American world order and how they were excluded from its history and conceptualization. Encompassing 104 selections by 92 different thinkers, including Anna Julia Cooper, Margaret Sanger, Rosa Luxemburg, Judith Shklar, Hannah Arendt, Merze Tate, Susan Strange, Lucy P. Mair and Claudia Jones, it covers the widest possible range of subject matter, genres, ideological and political positions, and professional contexts. Organized into thirteen thematic sections, each with a substantial introductory essay, the anthology provides intellectual, political and biographical context, and original arguments, showing women's significance in international thought.