Much feminist work in International Relations has been inspired by the fairly straightforward question—as Cynthia Enloe puts it in her 1990 book, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics—“where are the women?” A number of feminist scholars have critiqued traditional research in the discipline for being scholarship about the international relations of men—where women are either marginalized and essentialized or omitted completely, and there is no room for the complexities of genders and sexualities that exist in the actual world. In Erased, Patricia Owens turns this lens on the field itself to ask about women’s role in the history of international thought generally and in the construction of disciplinary IR specifically.

Owens finds a field of IR that does indeed omit women from its disciplinary histories, where “the works and ideas of men appear as if from nowhere or emerge only in conversation with other white men in a game of intellectual influence” (p. 3). She finds that this is not because there were no women involved in the building of international thought or in the constitution of the discipline that has now come to be known as IR. On the contrary, Erased notes that “generations of feminist historians and theorists have shown that when women and people of colour are absent from intellectual histories it is not because they were missing, but because they were erased” (p. 4).

Erased is then a book that “focuses on a cohort of women and their ideas on international relations” as well as “how … they were written out of histories of international thought” (p. 2). As Owens notes, this historical project necessarily engages the gendered nature of knowledge production in the field and “reveals the gendered, racialised, and methodological roots of IR’s intellectual failures” (p. 3). Critiquing the “erasures of empire and race, the marginalization of women and people of color, and the evasion of the question of methods,” Owens sees a “white male IR that failed as an intellectual project” (p. 296). Looking forward, she argues that “its failures will not be remedied by doubling down on the roots of failure” but instead by committing to the “intellectual quality” and “epistemic justice” of training IR scholars in the methods of the fields that the discipline has since neglected—and with the tools that it has repudiated (pp. 296–297). Owens concludes that “the field will never look the same again” as “some of the best IR scholars will increasingly write under the name of critical history,” with a more serious and rigorous treatment of “empire, race, and gender.”

From its robust historical reconstruction to its sophisticated theoretical work to its prescriptions for the field of IR, Erased is a tour de force: an extraordinary, careful, comprehensive, and intellectually and methodologically strong monograph which is a singular contribution to the field. Moving beyond a biting indictment of erasure itself, Owens demonstrates that the very making of the field of IR as such relied on intentionally silencing many of its interlocutors on the basis of their race and gender, to the political, intellectual, and empirical detriment of the field. While those erasures cannot be undone as such, the field can be reimagined so as to value the principles, questions, and methods our predecessor (white, male) scholars discarded. The stakes could not be higher—“the history of IR matters because it is part of the intellectual and political struggle, the conflicts over what is taught about empire in schools, and about decolonising the institutions of British life” (p. 293). Erased thus links the mistakes of IR’s past to the failures of its present and provides an alternative vision of a field capable of overcoming those failures through different epistemological, ontological, and methodological commitments.

There are, of course, other silences, omissions, and exclusions in the field of IR’s construction that are worth attention. Owens herself notes that “the continuing neoliberalisation of the British academy, the explosion of casualized labour, the erosion of pay, pension, and working conditions, and the pressure to churn out publications mitigate against scholarly work of the highest standards in all fields” (p. 295). The neoliberal academy has been critiqued for having a (gendered) “leaky pipeline,” as Kathleen Hancock, Matthew Baum, and Marijke Breuning point out in their 2013 article for International Studies Perspectives; for relying on a (race- and nationality-based) system of research and pedagogical exclusions, as discussed out by Geeta Chowdry and Shirin Rai in their 2009 piece for the same journal; and for entrenching (intersectional) exclusion from influence on the field based on precarity, as Monika Thakur notes in her 2021 article for International Studies Review. Erased elucidates many of these gendered and intersectional dynamics from the 1930s to the 1970s in Britain. Future scholars might pursue these questions outside of those boundaries—asking if and how these exclusionary dynamics work beyond women, beyond the UK, and beyond the 1970s.

Further research might also explore the embeddedness and path-dependence of some of the mechanisms of exclusion which Owens uncovers. For example, Owens notes that Charles Manning—the holder of the Montague Burton Chair in International Relations at the London School of Economics from 1930 to 1962 and a key disciplinary gatekeeper in Owens’ account—“was racist and misogynist” and a “white supremacist,” such that his work excluding women from the field was “no coincidence” (pp. 282, 12). Certainly, looking at the field today, it is important to understand both the places in IR where racism and misogyny continue to exist and directly influence both who is in the field and how it functions substantively as well as to look at the inheritances of the racism and misogyny of people like Manning which often appear as benign judgments about scholars’ chosen subject matter, their methodological practice, and their productivity in the field. Erased is an amazing piece of work, and an equally amazing inspiration to continue that work of critically reflecting on the discipline’s silences and exclusions.