Susan Strange

Susan Strange (9 June 1923 – 25 October 1998) was a British scholar who was "almost single-handedly responsible for creating international political economy."

Susan Strange was born on 9 June 1923 in Langton Matravers (County Dorset).

She was the daughter of English aviator Louis Strange.

She went to the Royal High School, Bath, and to the University of Caen in France, and graduated with a bachelor's degree in economics from the London School of Economics (LSE) during the Second World War.

Like Robert W. Cox, the other founder of British International Political Economy, she never obtained a PhD.

Susan Strange earned a first in economics at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1943.

She began lecturing on International Politics at the University College London in 1949.

She raised six children and worked as a financial journalist for The Economist, then The Observer until 1957.

At The Observer, she became the youngest White House correspondent of her time.

In 1964, she became a full-time researcher at Chatham House (formally The Royal Institute of International Affairs).

Her 1970 article, "International Economics and International Relations: A Case of Mutual Neglect", laid out her arguments for the need of a discipline of IPE.

She argued that power was central to international political economy.

She claimed that in general, "economists simply do not understand how the global economy works" due to a poor understanding of power and an over-reliance on abstract economic models.

However, she noted that political scientists also have a woeful understanding of international economics due to their emphasis on institutions and power.

Thus she became one of the earliest campaigners advocating the necessity of studying both politics and economics for international relations scholars.

She influenced scholars such as Robert Gilpin.

She was a critic of regime theory, arguing that the scholarship on regimes was too state-centric and carried a hidden bias in favor of maintaining U.S. hegemony.

Notable publications include Sterling and British Policy (1971), Casino Capitalism (1986), States and Markets (1988), The Retreat of the State (1996), and Mad Money (1998).

She helped create the British International Studies Association.

She was the first woman to hold the Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and was the first female academic to have a professorship named after her at the LSE.

At the Chatham House, she authored Sterling and British Policy (1971).

She set up an influential research group on IPE at the Chatham House in 1971.

She played a role in the establishing of the journal Review of International Political Economy, which is the leading journal dedicated to IPE.

From 1978 to 1988, she served as the Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at LSE, and was the first woman at LSE to hold this chair and professorship.

At the LSE, she built Britain's first graduate program in IPE.

While at LSE she held Visiting Professorships at the Brookings Institution, University of Minnesota, University of California, Columbia University, and the Bologna Center of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

In the 1980s, she disagreed with claims by other International Studies scholars that U.S. hegemony was on the decline.

Strange was skeptical of static indicators of power, arguing that it was structural power that mattered.

In particular, interactions between states and markets mattered.

She pointed to the superiority of the American technology sector, dominance in services, and the position of the U.S. dollar as the top international currency as real indicators of lasting power.

Strange's key contribution to IPE was on the issue of power, which she considered essential to the character and dynamics of the global economy.

She distinguished between relational power (the power to compel A to get B to do something B does not want to do) and structural power (the power to shape and determine the structure of the global political economy).

States and Markets (1988) delineates four key forms of power—security, production, finance, and knowledge; power is the ability to "provide protection, make things, obtain access to credit, and develop and control authoritative modes of interpreting the world".

She served as professor of international political economy at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, from 1989 to 1993.

Strange's final academic post, which she held from 1993 until her death in 1998, was as chair of international relations and professor of international political economy at the University of Warwick, where she built up the graduate programme in International Political Economy.

She also taught in Japan, where between 1993 and 1996 she was several times guest lecturer at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo.

She was a major figure in the professional associations in both Britain and the United States.

She was an instrumental founding member and the first treasurer of the British International Studies Association, and served as the third female president of the International Studies Association in 1995.

Strange was an influential thinker on global affairs.

She played a central role in developing international political economy (IPE) as a field of study, and is a key figure in political economy approaches to security studies.