This article contributes to disciplinary histories of International Relations (IR) by revealing a little-known history: how a Nazi diplomat, Curt Max Prüfer, occupied the first chair in IR in India. While the paper documents how Prüfer, a discredited diplomat, landed in Delhi through his connections with peripatetic Indian anti-colonial networks and spent slightly over two years as the first IR chair at Delhi University, it also makes broader claims about how we narrate disciplinary histories. Intellectual genealogies, the predominant way in which disciplinary histories are written, often miss the contingent factors that play a considerable role in the fashioning of the discipline. Contingency-filled narratives also point towards the fact that International Relations/Affairs, at least in its early period of formation, operated as a term of mythical heft – a placeholder to fit anyone with academic or practical expertise in varied fields such as international law, colonial administration, anthropology, diplomacy, history, political economy, and military strategy.

This article analyses photographic portraits of three international thinkers – Merze Tate, Margery Perham, and Susan Strange – to shed new light on the intellectual and disciplinary history of Internationa Relations (IR). Photographic portraits are ubiquitous, and feminist intellectual recovery projects lend themselves to photographic representation. But IR’s historians have neglected portraits. Drawing together two thriving IR subfields for the first time, visual studies and international intellectual history, this article demonstrates the theoretical and historical gains from analysing portraits of international thinkers. When read alongside other primary and secondary sources, portraits can enable new ways of seeing IR’s history and specific thinkers, offering a distinctive and powerful resource for new narratives about the professional, gendered, and racialised contexts of international thought.

Advocates of global international relations (IR) present IR as a Eurocentric discipline that should now diversify its theoretical and empirical focus to the non-west. This paper turns this argument on its head, arguing that IR was ‘global at birth’. Concentrating in particular on the implications that global IR debate has for our understanding of the historical development of disciplinary knowledge, the article argues that both conventional and critical stances within this debate tend to express a substantialist conception of knowledge formations, one which encourages diffusionist ideas of the spread of knowledge from an origin to a destination, and essentialist representations of specific geographies of knowledge. In order to address this, the paper proposes a relational sociology of disciplinary knowledge that offers a more historically grounded understanding of the ongoing, provisional, connected, and configurational nature of knowledge construction, without losing sight of the hierarchies that inflect this. The article applies this framework to archival work on the intellectual history of international thought in India, offering an approach that allows a global account of the development of disciplinary IR that operates within and beyond imperial frames, encompassing the entangled histories of colonial, anti-colonial, and postcolonial lineages of what became known as ‘International Relations’ in the 20th century.

What, this essay asks, is the relation between contemporary IR scholarship and the existentialist intellectual and cultural tradition? How is our discipline informed and animated by existentialist thinking? Is existentialism a heritage to be recovered, claimed, and embraced by IR scholars, or a shadow to be escaped? And what resources does it furnish us for thinking through the kind of issues that IR scholars are called upon to grapple with today? These questions are not purely theoretical. There are practical and political reasons, not only for considering them, but for considering them now. Living through what has been termed an unfolding ‘Age of Anxiety’, we find ourselves confronted by existential questions and existentialist ideas at almost every turn. It is, however, unclear how substantive or meaningful this apparently existentialist moment truly is. Does existentialism have something to say to contemporary IR, or does it flatter to deceive? We think the time is ripe to take stock of existentialism as it relates to IR and global politics. This is the purpose of this article and of the collection of essays it introduces.

This article asks whether there is a discrepancy between the field of International Political Economy (IPE) as we know it from recent debates about its role, distinctiveness, and contribution compared to the experience of its practitioners on the ground? Intellectually IPE is needed more than ever to engage real world events but faces constraining institutional imperatives. We have two interrelated objectives related to this: (1) to assess the extent to which the patterns in recent interventions are replicated when you ask those who self-identify as IPE scholars in the UK (2) to appraise survey data on the reproduction of a particular community of practice within the field as it evolves intellectually and institutionally. Rather than imposing our interpretation of IPE through publications, citation practices, conference attendance, or textbook content we offer two distinct contributions. First, to report new empirical data on IPE as a ‘field of inquiry’ in UK universities; and, second, to develop a critical intervention on the indisciplined nature of IPE as a field of inquiry in the UK. We conclude that the widely acknowledged and long-standing fertile intellectual advantages of IPE's ‘open range’, unlimited intellectual borders and transgressive enquiry bring institutional disadvantages with them.

The recent ‘emotion turn’ in international theory is widely viewed as a cutting-edge development which pushes the field in fundamentally new directions. Challenging this narrative, this essay returns to the historical works of Walter Lippmann to show how thinking about emotions has been central to international theory for far longer than currently appreciated. Deeply troubled by his experience with propaganda during the First World War, Lippmann spent the next several decades thinking about the relationship between emotion, mass politics, and the challenges of foreign policy in the modern world. The result was a sophisticated account of the role of emotional stereotypes and symbols in mobilizing democratic publics to international action. I argue that a return to Lippmann's ideas offers two advantages. First, it shows his thinking on emotion and mass politics formed an important influence for key disciplinary figures like Angell, Morgenthau, Niebuhr, and Waltz. Second, it shows why the relationship between emotion and democracy should be understood as a vital concern for international theory. Vacillating between scepticism and hope, Lippmann's view of democracy highlights a series of challenges in modern mass politics – disinformation, the unintended consequences of emotional symbols, and responsibility for the public's emotional excesses – which bear directly on democracies' ability to engage the world.

Disciplinary debates within IPE often leave as an open question how contemporary scholars may build on and incorporate insights from its rich intellectual history. In this article I examine the work of three scholars who are rarely grouped together, but who should be recognised today as engaged in an IPE-inflected debate: Karl Polanyi, E. H. Carr, and David Mitrany. They advanced distinct IPE-centred ways of framing the central problems of the post-1945 world, which are remarkable for how they prefigure important themes in modern IPE scholarship. By assembling and considering their work collectively, I make two arguments: (1) we should recognise their contributions as a precursor to modern IPE; and (2) their work, with certain caveats, provides valuable intellectual resources for contemporary scholars. Their combined work should be considered as part of the common heritage of IPE.

The rise of the radical Right over the last decade has created a situation that demands engagement with the intellectual origins, achievements, and changing worldviews of radical conservative forces. Yet, conservative thought seems to have no distinct place in the theoretical field that has structured debates within the discipline of IR since 1945. This article seeks to explain some of the reasons for this absence. In the first part, we argue that there was in fact a clear strand of radical conservative thought in the early years of the field's development and recover some of these forgotten positions. In the second part, we argue that the near disappearance of those ideas can be traced in part to a process of ‘conceptual innovation’ through which postwar realist thinkers sought to craft a ‘conservative liberalism’ that defined the emerging field's theoretical alternatives in ways that excluded radical right-wing positions. Recovering this history challenges some of IR's most enduring narratives about its development, identity, and commitments – particularly the continuing tendency to find its origins in a defining battle between realism and liberalism. It also draws attention to overlooked resources to reflect upon the challenge of the radical Right in contemporary world politics.

Disciplinary histories of International Relations (IR) in Australia have tended to start with the foundation of an IR chair at the Australian National University (ANU) in 1949. In this article, I trace the discipline's institutional history and traditions of thought from the formation of the Round Table in Australia in 1911, led by Lionel Curtis, through the establishment of the Australian Institute of International Affairs (AIIA), and ending with the ANU story. I argue that Australian IR took as its starting assumption the idea of terra nullius (nobody's land), and the subsequent need to settle Australia. As a result, much of the discussion in the early study of ‘IR’ in Australia was framed around ‘domestic’ matters of settlement and colonisation. The focus of Australian IR radiated outwards from regional capitals, particularly to the tropical and desert regions of Australia with large Indigenous populations. At the margins of this were Australia's colonial possessions in the South Pacific. Finally, Australia's IR looked upon East Asia, motivated at least in part by fears of Asian peoples who might also seek to settle Australia. I conclude with a consideration of what Australian IR's historical entanglements with settler colonialism should mean for the discipline today.

As someone whose training is in political science and who writes about the history of my own discipline, I admit to some hesitation in recommending future avenues of research for historians of education. For that reason, the following thoughts are directed toward disciplinary history broadly and social science history specifically. Moreover, the three articles that contributors to this forum were asked to use as inspiration suggest that any future I would recommend has been under way in one form or another for a while. For those reasons, I want to reframe my contribution as a reflection on a particular mode of analysis all three authors employed and how it may be particularly useful for exploring the questions of power, exclusion, and race- and gender-making in the academy that are present in all three articles and that explicitly animate two of them.