Susan Strange

Susan Strange (June 9, 1923 - October 25, 1998) was a British academic who was influential in the field of international political economy. Her most important publications include "Casino Capitalism", "Mad Money", "States and Markets" and "Rival States, Rival Firms" (with John M. Stopford and John S. Henley).

For a quarter of a century, Susan Strange was the most influential figure in British international studies. She held a number of key academic posts in Britain, Italy and Japan. From 1978 to 1988, she was Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), the first woman to hold this chair and a professorial position in international relations at the LSE. She was a major figure in the professional associations of both Britain and the US: she was an instrumental founding member and first Treasurer of the British International Studies Association (BISA) [http://www.bisa.ac.uk] and the first female President of the International Studies Association (ISA) in 1995.

It was predominantly as a creative scholar and a forceful personality that she exercised her 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. She was one of the earliest and most influential campaigners for the closer integration of the study of international politics and international economics in the English language scholarship.

In the later period of her career, alongside the financial analyses offered in "Casino Capitalism" (the analysis in which she felt was vindicated by the South-East Asian financial crisis) and "Mad Money", Strange's contributions to the field include her characterisation of the four different areas (production, security, finance and knowledge) through which power might be exercised in International Relations. This understanding of what she termed "structural power", formed the basis of her argument against the theory of American Hegemonic Decline in the early eighties.

Her analysis particularly in "States and Markets" focused on what she called the ‘market-authority nexus’, the see-saw of power between the market and political authority. The overall argument of her work suggested that the global market had gained significant power relative to states since the 1970s. This led her to dub the Westphalia system Westfailure. She argued that a ‘dangerous gap’ was emerging between territorially-bound nation states and weak or partial intergovernmental cooperation in which markets had a free hand which could be constructive or destructive.

References

* Chris Brown (1999) "Susan Strange - a critical appreciation", in: "Review of International Studies", Vol 25, P 531-535, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=33749] .
* Harry Bauer & Elisabetta Brighi (Eds) (2003) "International Relations at LSE: A History of 75 Years", London: Millennium Publishing Group, ISBN 978-0954439705.

External Links

* [http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=33749 Critical Biography]
* [http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/csgr/newsletters/nl2.pdf Obituary]
* [http://www.bisa.ac.uk/groups/ipeg/papers/ChrisMay.pdf Bibliography]