9 - Elizabeth Wiskemann, Scholar-Journalist, and the Study of International Relations

Summary

Elizabeth Wiskemann’s international thought spans the worlds of anti-fascist activism, diplomacy and academe. She produced specialist studies on Central Europe and historical syntheses for academics and general readers. She was the lead Berlin correspondent for the The New Statesman, a think tank researcher, an intelligence officer in World War II, and the Montagu Burton Chair in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. Wiskemann’s writing was often empiricist and focused on power politics and diplomacy. She deplored British IR’s tilt towards the social sciences in the 1960s and, towards the end of her career, came to describe herself as a contemporary historian. Her trajectory underlines the importance of incorporating history and public education into disciplinary histories of IR, as well as a consistent practice orientation that sprung from a reluctance to engage in purely abstract thinking.