The Westphalian tradition of just war thinking rooted itself in a different understanding of natural law. Instead of understanding natural law as part of the divine law and reflecting humanity’s moral aspirations, the Westphalians’ natural law was rooted in the “state of nature” and reflected what reason and custom told us about humanity’s actual conduct. Justice, in this view, did not include liberality or charity; it involved the protection of the rights of sovereigns. International justice became equated with the rights of sovereign autonomy and reciprocal non-interference associated with the Treaties of Westphalia. The just war thinkers of this era are thus more hesitant to endorse a right of rebellion, intervention to support rebels, humanitarian intervention, war as punishment, war to defend the innocent, or war against those who commit crimes against nature. War is an instrument to defend international borders, not to enforce an abstract ideal of justice. This leads to the signature contribution from the Westphalian tradition: that the preservation of the balance of power is a just cause because it preserves the independence and territorial integrity of every state.

When is war just? What does justice require? The just war framework is an attempt to answer those questions. But there is no singular tradition and no consensus on the answers. Just war inquiry is best understood as three traditions: the Augustinian, the Westphalian, and the Liberal. Augustinians understood war to be a just response and an act of love to defend the tranquility of order when that order was violently disrupted, including exceptional cases of a disruption in other states. Justice required the restoration of a just peace. Westphalians reinterpreted sovereignty so that it was no longer understood as responsibility for the common good but as defense of international borders and the sanctity of national autonomy and independence. War was just when it was waged to defend the state from external attack and, sometimes, to preserve a balance of power and prevent any one state from amassing enough power to threaten others’ independence. Justice required the maintenance of international order and stability.

Women wrote on the myriad problems of international relations, generating a multiplicity of forms of international thought. The introductory chapter to this edited volume, the first book-length attempt to recover and analyze the intellectual work of a range of historical women thinkers, asks how we might think systematically about this intellectual history. What assumptions about these categories – women, international, and thought – should we make? The contrast between the presence of historical women in the multiple forms and sites of international thought and their absence in the relevant intellectual and disciplinary histories suggests that it is high time to begin confronting these questions. This book retrieves as well as analyzes women’s international thinking, and broadens and deepens what are currently taken to be the accepted practices and locations of international thought in both History and International Relations.

This chapter returns to the foundational questions of what it means to produce international thought. What are the markers of recognition, in terms of location and genre? Amy Ashwood Garvey was a race woman, a ‘street-strolling’ Pan-Africanist and leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. For this gifted conversationalist, public orator and rhetorician, political praxis and organizing were a way of theorizing. Although her political activism spanned the black Atlantic, it was partly due to her commitment to localized ‘women’s work’ that she understood the limits of a patriarchal Pan-Africanism. Rather than positing a unitary blackness, Garvey analyzed the intersections of race, class, sex, gender and nation in community-level struggles for self-determination. Viewed through such a lens, black patriarchy did not suppress but politicize black women. Understanding Garvey’s theorizing as fractal, accommodating struggle within struggle, resolves some of the seeming contradictions in her thought.

This essay discusses Anna Julia Cooper’s analysis of slavery, imperialism, and the Age of Revolution: it also raises questions about the politics and practices of recovery. Cooper’s writings offer a rich resource for countering the erasure of Black women’s contributions to international thought: readers are invited to theorize alongside Cooper's anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-imperialist work as a scholar-educator. Navigating several absences, she encountered when working in French colonial archives in the 1920s, Cooper unpacked dominant frameworks, exposed gaps, and pivoted attention to the histories, ideas, and actions of people of color. Cooper’s identity, as a Black American woman in interwar France, a former slave who argued with white supremacist exponents of the ‘Nordic vogue,’ was central to her writing. While structurally marginalized by gender, race, class, age and nationality, Cooper refused to be silenced and dared to criticize the greats of French sociology while completing her doctoral work in Paris.

Merze Tate, a graduate of both Oxford and Harvard, was one of the few African-American women who secured a professorship at an American university in the 1940s. This chapter analyses Tate’s early intellectual formation in interwar Anglo-American academic internationalism, augmented by her global travels and her time teaching in the segregated south. At Howard University, she continued her analysis of American racism and imperialism and developed a distinctive ‘anti-racist geopolitics.’ She regarded herself first and foremost as a diplomatic historian, with a realist bent. This did not mean that Tate embraced a restrictive view on the public’s say in foreign policy formation, particularly when this public was African-American. But Tate insisted that to hold U.S. power to account, one had to understand what power was and how it was wielded internationally.

This essay’s re-reading of Rosa Luxemburg’s international thought reintroduces us to a canonical thinker whose contributions have not yet received the recognition they deserve. Instead, Luxemburg has been infantilized by both Marxist and liberal traditions, traditions that she challenged for their exalting of national self-determination. Her most important contribution, however, relates to capitalism’s reliance on tapping into non-capitalist modes of production and exchange. This was central to her sophisticated understanding of imperialism. As Hutchings explains, to Luxemburg it would have been unsurprising that the world economy today continues to rely on bonded labor. But Luxemburg’s positionality as an international thinker is also relevant to histories of international thought. Hers was a life steeped in political activism within the imperialist core, and her analysis of international politics contended with the religious, class, ethnic and racial hierarchies of the land-based empires of pre-World War I Eastern and Central Europe.

For Barbara Wootton, international thought was a medium to explore her concerns for social and economic justice, concerns which she argued had to be viewed through a lens attuned to both global and domestic forces. Writing briefing papers and pamphlets for both the British political group Federal Union and the think tank Chatham House, Wootton proposed practical solutions and policies for a wide, non-academic readership, and opposed ‘abstract thinking’ on principle. Her federalist proposals of the 1940s fused liberal and socialist analyses and form part of the intellectual history of European integration and welfarism. Implicitly, Wootton argued for Britain to sever relations with its imperial possessions in a ‘turn to Europe.’ However, she did so without analyzing how the injustices and inequalities of empire could be undone. This unresolved tension in her thought makes her newly relevant in an era of imperial nostalgia and profound disillusionment with the European project.

Simone Weil was an unsettled thinker intent on disturbing preconceived categories and thinking in opposites. Kinsella’s essay invites us to re-read this compulsive outsider both for her theoretical contributions and for the ways in which she challenged conventional notions of what it meant to be an intellectual. Her asceticism, androgyny and complex religious identity made her a ‘lonely’ figure and prefigured her erasure as an international thinker. Kinsella roots Weil’s political philosophy in a penetrating analysis of colonialism. The despoliation of human beings and their environment lay at its core. Colonialism’s end could not be brought about by political means but on grounds that transcended politics and comprised an empathetic understanding of the degradation of people and land, an understanding she sought to achieve through the attempt to obliterate any collective identities in her person. Reading Weil invites readers to re-think the connection between international relations, empire and the spiritual.

In the 20th century, some thinkers, like Paul Ramsey, tried to reestablish the older, explicitly religious foundations for just war thought. Others, like Michael Walzer, did the opposite, trying to found just war on felt the moral intuition of liberalism. Both sought to amend the Westphalian order to make greater room for human rights or the sanctity of human life, which marks the beginning of the Liberal tradition of just war thinking. Ramsey approached the subject from an explicitly theological perspective but still supported key Liberal tenets, like democracy, human rights, and the “international common good.” Ramsey’s emphasis on love as the cornerstone of just war meant human life was an absolute value, more important than Westphalian sovereignty. Walzer was more explicit about his liberalism, but he built it on weaker foundations. He sought to amend the Westphalian tradition to allow for intervention for humanitarian purposes, a position he strengthened in later work, but he also maintained a preference for national self-determination without concern for ideology or regime type that was in tension with his commitment to human rights.

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.