Susan Strange—a critical appreciation

For a quarter of a century, Susan Strange—who died in October 1998—was the most influential figure in British international studies. While she held a number of key academic posts in Britain, Italy and Japan (including a ten-year stint as Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at LSE from 1978–88) and although she was a major figure in the professional associations of both Britain and the US (founder member and first Treasurer of BISA, President of ISA in 1995), it was predominantly as a creative scholar and a forceful personality that she exercised this influence. She was almost single-handedly responsible for creating ‘international political economy’ and turning it into one of the two or three central fields within international studies in Britain, and she defended her creation with such robustness, and made such strong claims on its behalf, that her influence was felt—albeit not always welcomed—in most other areas of the discipline.