“Look inside International Relations: she’s alright she’s alright”^[i]

Students are often told that to study International Relations (IR) is to investigate relations between rather than within states. This is perhaps most often heard when critics of IR construct a “straw-man” representation of the discipline which allows them to dismiss IR as too narrow. In other words, IR is said to be detached from the complexities of a 21^st century globalized world that demands students understand interconnected processes at the sub-national, national, and international level. The purpose of this piece, however, is to highlight that if one “looks inside IR” one finds a much more diverse and enriching discipline. To do this, I focus on the English School’s (ES) engagement with human rights to highlight that the ES has a strong tradition of concern regarding rights and responsibilities which stems from their world view that mass human rights violations within states are a matter of international concern.^[ii]

It is easy to understand why critics hold the view that state-centric approaches such as the ES do not accurately capture human relations from the local to the global level.^[iii] Indeed, one of the founding fathers of what came to be known as the ES,^[iv] Martin Wight, acknowledged that the study of international society concealed “the real society of men and women”.^[v] The statement clearly demonstrates that Wight was all too aware that the complex relations between citizens and states were an overlooked and under researched issue in IR. The ES “top down” focus was then seemingly cemented in Hedley Bull’s seminal study The Anarchical Society which offered an even more state-centric interpretation of international society than Wight had originally envisaged.^[vi] Published at the height of the Cold War, Bull’s analysis represents a well-documented trade-off between justice and order in which Bull prioritised the moral value of order over the moral pursuit of a just cause. From a contemporary perspective, this became the pluralist position in the ES with scholars such as James Mayall and Robert Jackson arguing upholding the norm of non-intervention.^[vii]

A counter-development emerged, however, in the 1980s. Bull’s pluralist position changed as he argued that the consensus against Apartheid in South Africa should be used to mobilize international action against the human rights violations taking place.^[viii] Expanding this understanding, RJ Vincent’s seminal study Human Rights in International Relations laid the foundation for what is currently referred to as the ES solidarist position as he argued that basic human rights should be understood as floor beneath states rather than a ceiling above them^[ix]. In other words, even without a world government, political elites should abide by a universal moral minimalism. As contemporary scholars both inside and outside the ES have acknowledged, Vincent’s work does not just stand as one of the first studies on human rights from an IR perspective but more importantly acted to rehabilitate “serious theoretical discussion on human rights in general.”^[x] In the post-Cold War era, Tim Dunne and Nicholas Wheeler expanded this solidarist doctrine and in so doing, stood at the forefront of humanitarian intervention debate.^[xi] More recently, the solidarist baton has been passed on to Alex Bellamy who works within an ES framework whilst producing cutting edge research on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P).^[xii] At the same time, Dunne now acts as Director of Research at the Asia Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. ^[xiii] Accordingly, this historical trajectory helps illustrate that ES has played a pivotal role in shaping contemporary understandings of human rights and continues to do so.

With much ink spilt elsewhere on the division between the pluralist-solidarist divide outlined in the two different ES strands above, this author would like to raise a final point on the ES’s potential contribution to a new research agenda. In William Bain’s analysis of Nicholas Wheeler’s decisive, Saving Strangers, he claims^: “[i]t seems as though Wheeler merely invokes humanity as a self-evident moral truth – the authority of which requires no further explanation – which in the end cannot tell us the reasons why we should act to save strangers.”^[xiv] The statement draws attention to a problem that the ES has an under-theorised understanding of humanity which in turn fails to explain why “we” should act to save “them”. One response is to forge a better understanding of the relationship between the society of states and humanity which addresses the relationship between the ES and cosmopolitanism. Andrew Linklater has stood at the forefront of this research for over two decades.^[xv] Alternatively, ES scholars could focus on the concept of order, rather than humanity, to investigate the impact that mass human rights violations have on the ordering principles of international society. It is this latter research agenda that I develop in Genocide and Its Threat to Contemporary International Order.^[xvi] This is not to say that this latter focus is mutually exclusive from the former, but that these are two timely and important research agendas which ES scholars can make a significant contribution toward in the future.^[xvii]

In summary, IR is often presented as somewhat of an ill, dying discipline that will fade away as it fails to explain and understand the complexities of the 21^st century. Yet when one looks at the most important issues in contemporary international politics, the crises in Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Mali to name just a few, it is evident that although the ES does not explain everything it does provide a fruitful framework for analysing the optimism and tragedy that lies at the heart of international society. After all, the ES view remains that “there is more to international relations than the realist suggests but less than the cosmopolitan desires.”^[xviii]

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Adrian Gallagher is a Lecturer in Security Studies and Research Methods in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds. This article is part of e-IR’s edited collection, System, Society & the World: Exploring the English School.

Further Reading on E-International Relations

• Assessing the International Community’s Obligation to Protect the Human Rights of Afghans
• The Challenges to Middle Eastern International Society: A Study in Disorder
• Humanitarian Intervention: Alive and Kicking
• Opinion – The Responsibility to Protect the Amazon
• Citizenship Revocation as a Human Rights Violation: The Case of Shamima Begum
• Troubling International Human Rights Advocacy