Review of International Studies (2001), 27, 465–466 Copyright © British International Studies Association

Forum on the English School

Over the course of its twenty-five year history, the Review of International Studies
has been an important outlet for articles that sought to define an English School.1
At the time of the first volume of the British Journal of International Relations—as
it was then called—in 1975, there was a growing sense of a divided discipline.
Alienation from the agenda being put forward in the US was compounded by
greater introspection about what, if anything, unified the International Relations
community in Britain. Early attempts to advance a different agenda were published
in the BJIR by (among others) writers such as Hedley Bull, Alan James and R.J.
Vincent.
The Review has not only published works sympathetic to the English School, it
has also been a venue for articles highly critical of the School in general as well as
individual thinkers within it. Roy E. Jones’s famous ‘case for closure’, published in
1981,2 triggered various debates and issues, some of which continue to intrude into
contemporary discussions. Whatever the merits of Jones’s argument, it is apparent
that the English School has not been ‘closed’. Indeed, Barry Buzan chose the 1999
BISA conference in Manchester as a platform for a ‘re-launch’. Given the interest
that Buzan’s initiative has attracted we thought it worthy of a Forum debate. Our
aim was to gather together a number of scholars who have written on, or about, the
English School. We think they have met the objectives we set out, namely, to engage
critically with the research programme outlined by Buzan in his article ‘The English
School: An Underexploited Resource’. ‘The time is ripe’, Buzan exhorts, ‘to develop
and apply its historicist, constructivist, and methodologically pluralist approach to
IR’.
In his foreword, Adam Watson provides valuable insights into how the classical
English School developed while pointing to a number of issues that remained
marginal in this early phase of the School’s development. Andrew Hurrell is the first
to respond directly to Buzan’s article. His contribution raises five clusters of issues
about methods, scope, norms, law and the history of political thought. The identity
of the other discussants reflects the fact that the English School has become a
transnational network. Stefano Guzzini warns against defining American Inter-
national Relations as the ‘target’, and also suggests structural difficulties that might
result in the proposed encounter with international political economy. A different
version of this point is taken up by Iver B. Neumann. He worries that the

1
As have other European-based journals, particularly Millennium, Cooperation and Conflict, and more
recently the European Journal of International Relations.
2
Roy E. Jones, ‘The English School of International Relations: A Case for Closure’, Review of
International Studies, 7:1, pp. 1–13.

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466 Forum: Editors’ Introduction

relationship between the society of states and the wider world society remains
unclear decades after Bull and Vincent first postulated the dynamic. Neumann also
calls for greater emphasis upon theory-led empirical inquiry. Perhaps appropriately,
the final word in the Forum is given to a theorist working in the US. Martha
Finnemore poses some concerns about the likely impact of the English School upon
what remains a largely American social science. Significant hurdles remain, and to
clear them, the English School will need to think more carefully about methodo-
logical orientation and the basis of their substantive theoretical claims. These
arguments are so penetrating that we can say with some confidence that Finnemore
will not, in the end, be allowed to have the final word.
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