The English School on Diplomacy: Scholarly Promise Unfulfilled

As pointed out by earlier theorists associated with the English School, if one views world politics as an historically emerging and social phenomenon, then diplomacy plays a key role in it. For the last 15 years, however, diplomacy has been at the margin of the School's interests. The article aims to rectify this by: a) introducing English School thought on diplomacy as it evolved through an original series of books; b) reviewing the work of the next generation of scholars with a view to seeing how and why the interest in diplomacy stalled; and c) arguing that the English School has indeed made an impressive contribution, but one which we can only follow up by wedding it to more wide-reaching projects of social theory.