Patriarchy is the structuring condition on which to recast the disciplinary history of International Relations. Through the deliberate cultivation of mainly white-male canons, curricula, and institutional bodies that retain an aversion to women and their intellectual labor, these gendered relations of power have led to a methodologically weak and intellectually febrile discipline, ill-equipped to address the complexities of contemporary world affairs. These are the major takeaways from Erased, the extraordinary book by Patricia Owens,

Owens’ third monograph traces a diverse cohort of eighteen women intellectuals from the 1930s to the 1970s, ranging from world-renowned scholars like Susan Strange to lesser-known figures such as Rachel Wall, Lucy Philip Mair, and Lilian Friedländer. Those with institutional prominence—Margaret Cleeve of Chatham House, Margery Perham of the Colonial Office, and the first female professors at Oxford and Edinburgh, Agnes Headlan-Morley and Elizabeth Wiskemann, are also documented. Her inclusion of controversial figures like Lucie Zimmern (“IR’s most vilified woman”) and Claudia Jones, who was jailed and deported from the U.S. to England during the McCarthyist purges of the 1940s and 1950s, gives a clear sense of the politically charged landscapes these women navigated. Yet what unites this diverse cohort is not their politics, but rather their shared subjection to disciplinary erasure in service of cultivating a supposedly scientific approach to the study of world politics.

This work joins a recent turn in IR toward the critical recovery of undervalued thought: African American in Robert Vitalis’ White World Order, Black Power Politics (Cornell 2017), transatlantic in Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking After Empire (Princeton 2019), and anticolonial in Musab Younis’ On the Scale of the World (University of California Press 2022). These works are informed by and seek to exceed the effacing effects of Western historiography, in the hope of enlarging the realm of intellectual contributions to include those who were erased—and whose knowledges offered an alternative vantage point from which to conceive of the “international”. These works drew their analytical significance by grappling with settler colonialism, Atlantic slavery, and racism as intersectional logics in the making and remaking of the global order. Erased follows a similar path to redress what Owens sees as disciplinary failures and epistemic injustices, with a “determination to write (women) back into histories of international thought” (p. 2). In doing so, Owens offers us yet another excoriating view of IR as an impoverished discipline marred by its active attempts to evade empire, and with it, the necessary methodological and conceptual tools to avoid distortions of a deeply pluralist world.

However, Owens’ contribution is particularly significant in its empirical precision. Her book details seemingly ephemeral moments: the insignia on a motorbike, heavy teaching loads, failed relationships, illness, and childcare arrangements. These observations work to consolidate intimate life as a particularly revelatory mode of knowledge retrieval. The reader is brought into the personal worlds of each interlocutor in a way that challenges the Cartesian presumption of distance and objectivity that has long suppressed alternative ways of capturing political thought. Owens demonstrates IR’s impulse to craft a scientific and distinct discipline yielded a “triple exclusion,” exemplified in the case of Lucy Philip Mair, whose gender, interest in colonial administration, and anthropological method disqualified her from IR’s annals. This impoverishment of the field made it susceptible to what Owens characterizes as the “racialised notion of a ‘society of states’” (p. 104) associated with the English School, instead of embracing Mair’s more sophisticated proposition of relational “communities” built on varying degrees of coercion. The latter approach is vindicated in the contemporary work of Gurminder Bhambra outlined in her 2018 Bloomsbury book, Connected Sociologies.

Despite its brilliance and the insightfulness of the embodied, relational and situated knowledges it explores, Erased also reveals an important tension in feminist recovery projects that remain attached to a deeply elite and scholastic episteme. The cohort of women Owens examines retains a close proximity to power—academic, bureaucratic, and institutional—as partners to or participants in elite knowledge production, whether as academics, journalists or civil servants. Apart from Claudia Jones, these women emerged from privileged educational backgrounds and operated within rigid “epistemic communities” (a concept which Peter Haas first elaborated in a 1992 article for International Organization). Their positioning raises crucial questions about whose intellectual labor we seek to recover and why. The contrasting chapters on Margery Perham and Claudia Jones are particularly illuminating. Both were towering figures acutely aware of rising Black consciousness and resistance to British imperialism, yet they occupied radically different positions and politics. Perham emerges as a white liberal interloper wedged between white settler interests and African anticolonial activists, but she ultimately remained tethered to Empire and viewed Black peoples as “the foster-children of our civilisation” (p. 55) who should do their best not to speak. Jones, by contrast, was an exiled black radical and public intellectual who sought to cultivate Black pride amongst disenfranchised communities and went on to develop some of the most prescient theoretical contributions on multiculturalism, migration, and the declining welfare state. What is clear: one “erased” woman reaffirms a narrative of global imperial domination, the other seeks modes of cultural reparative and intellectual labor to displace it.

Decolonial feminist scholars have long tended to the ethical implications of knowledge production and explored how patriarchy, advanced through heteropatriarchal norms of knowing, functions in Western colonial projects as a means of indigenous erasure. Both Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí in her 1997 book, The Invention of Women, and Maria Lugones in her 2010 Hypatia article, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” have paid special attention to the instrumentalization of knowledge to collectively author a global political imaginary that sought to disregard non-Western ontologies and cosmologies. Social hierarchies, these decolonial feminists remind us, hold an epistemological character that uses collective authority within knowledge production to extend “racialised patriarchal control”—removing indigenous peoples from the realm of the human and foreclosing much of the world’s population from cultivating legitimate knowledge. In seeking epistemic justice, decolonial scholars suggest we turn our gaze to those that the Western modern episteme has relegated to the permanent position of the Other, insofar as this repositioning may offer an alternative political and ethical horizon, one that is not constrained by the logics of colonial, imperial, capitalist nor racial norms of knowing. It may require that we look elsewhere, to encounters which are observed but denied, as exemplified in Robbie Shilliam’s The Black Pacific (Bloomsbury 2015) or Siba Grovogui’s 2024 article in South Atlantic Quarterly on the Quilombos, where expressions of political agency were rendered irrational and thus illegible to an IR audience on republicanism. In other words, this reconstituted gaze moves us to consider how those positioned at the margins of history—and by extension, those knowledge traditions subordinated and silenced by the modern episteme—are uniquely positioned to denaturalize hegemonic systems and reveal their constructed nature. This decolonial and postcolonial work cautions feminist and other intellectual recovery projects to first grapple with the frames of reference for conceiving what history is and the degree to which it retains a definitively Eurocentric character.

The book is published at a moment where IR and the social sciences, more broadly, are confronted with a resurgence of positivism as attempts are once again being made to remodel the field on the natural sciences. This continues despite the fact that such an approach is marred by a colonial history of biological determinism and works to erase what Bentley Allan calls in his 2018 monograph, Scientific Cosmology and International Order (Cambridge), a pluralist or even emancipatory view of science. A book of this kind therefore prompts us to consider how scholars today might fall victim to a reductive approach to social science, which might perform further acts of erasure and epistemic violence, reversing the progressive gains derived from decolonial feminism, the black radical traditions, and other critical interventions. The reticence with which IR confronts these silences can in part be attributed to its angst in acknowledging the central place of empire, race, and patriarchy to our understanding of world politics. Owens’ book, therefore, calls for more, not less, engagement with methodological pluralism, for a discipline that embraces the sort of radical interdisciplinarity exercised by the protagonists in Erased. Decolonial scholars, in turn, may demand that we extend this exercise further still to displace the exclusions built into the scholastic episteme.