The Hedley Bull – Ali Mazrui Dialogue as a Metaphor for IR |
When the Kenyan-born academic Ali A. Mazrui stepped onto the global stage of scholarship in the 1960s, the study of international relations was undergoing one of its most intense periods of transformation. Postcolonial Africa was being delivered into the family of nations with all the pains of birth and all the hopes of renewal. Across the developing world, the dismantling of the empire had not brought an immediate moral settlement; it brought contestation. The Third World was emerging as an arena for superpower rivalry. As a nascent academic discipline, IR was being tugged in different directions. Long secured within the North Atlantic imagination, IR was being pushed—sometimes reluctantly—toward questions it had ignored for decades: structural inequality, historical redress, cultural pluralism, and the limits of Western experience as the default template for theorizing global politics. At the same time, the discipline was inching toward an intellectual transformation of its own—the behavioralist turn in the United States, the “English School” debates in Britain, and a growing tension between normative reasoning and scientific aspiration. Into this moment of turbulence and possibility came Ali Mazrui. His very presence unsettled the epistemic boundaries of IR. At a time when the discipline was becoming comfortable speaking about Africa, Mazrui arrived to speak from it—offering a vantage point and a moral vocabulary.
On the other side of the global academy stood Hedley Bull: a theorist of order, a custodian of the classical approach, and one of the most influential voices to emerge from the Anglo-Australian traditions of IR. Bull’s writings fused a stern realism with a reflective ethic. His was not a prudence emptied of moral aspiration. Bull embodied the discipline’s occasional struggle to reconcile the necessities of power with the demands of justice. The relationship between Mazrui and Bull—sometimes mutually admiring, sometimes quietly wary—offers an illuminating vantage point from which to read the global history of IR. “Although our views about the world differed widely, and sometimes we disagreed publicly,” Ali Mazrui (1985, 4) noted, “there was an unmistakable affection between us which we both felt.” Through this relationship, one can trace the waxing and waning of IR’s disciplinary moral compass, its periodic openness to voices from the Global South, and its unresolved tensions between Eurocentrism and universalism. This article explores the intellectual trajectories of Hedley Bull and Ali Mazrui not merely as parallel lives but as divergent horizons whose intersection reveals the shifting borders of IR itself.
Mazrui’s global emergence was inseparable from the moment of Africa’s decolonization. After Ghana’s independence in 1957 and the rapid cascade of African liberation that followed, Africa was no longer a silent periphery. The Bandung Conference of 1955 had already articulated an alternative grammar of world politics. What was once framed as the “periphery” was repositioning itself as a co-author of global norms. Mazrui understood this intuitively. Unlike many of his contemporaries in IR who studied international politics as an abstract system, Mazrui approached it as a lived experience. Mazrui would later remark that Mazrui (1989, 469-487): “I experienced international relations as a person before I studied it professionally.” He was contrasting himself with the detached ethos then taking root in the North American IR departments. By the time Mazrui joined Makerere University in Uganda in the early 1960s, he had already formed the outlines of a dual intellectual identity: African in moral experience, global in articulation. His early works—such as Mazrui (1963a, 1963b, 1963c, 1967a, 1967b, 1967c)—signaled an emerging voice that refused to be provincial or deferential. What is more, Mazrui wrote with the ease of someone equally at home drawing on Islamic theology, Victorian political thought, Swahili history, and Western liberalism. This capaciousness made Mazrui difficult to classify. He was neither a Marxist nor a liberal, neither a realist nor a utopian. Instead, Mazrui occupied a liminal space at a time when IR was increasingly preoccupied with disciplinary boundaries. It was as if his arrival in IR was designed to introduce a restlessness into its intellectual enterprise. Here was a scholar who insisted that Africa was not simply an object of analysis but a subject capable of theorizing global order.
Hedley Bull entered IR through a different door. A student of John Plamenatz and colleague to Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight, Bull belonged to the intellectual formation later known as the English School. His central commitment—to the idea of an “international society” that mediated between anarchy and order—set him apart from the structural realists emerging in the United States at the time. Bull believed that world politics was structured by both normative and material forces. Yet his........