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 moral commitments were cautious, conservative, and closely tied to the preservation of order. For Bull, the challenge of IR was not to imagine utopia but to prevent catastrophe. It was this seriousness of purpose— this insistence that moral ambition must coexist with prudential restraint—that shaped his intellectual constitution. Bull did not say this explicitly, but it was clear that he also felt at home with, or perhaps even liked, Mazrui’s “methodology,” which was akin to what Bull (1966, 361) himself had earlier labeled the classical tradition:
…the approach to theorizing that derives from philosophy, history, and law, and that is characterized above all by explicit reliance upon the exercise of judgment and by the assumptions that if we confine ourselves to strict standards of verification and proof there is very little of significance that can be said about international relations, that general propositions about this subject must therefore derive from a scientifically imperfect process of perception or intuition.
Bull’s academic life was divided between Oxford, Canberra, and ultimately Oxford again. In Australia, he served as Research Director at the Australian Institute of International Affairs, where he cultivated an interest in the politics of what is today called the Global South far earlier than many of his British colleagues. Partly because Australia itself occupied an ambiguous geographic and civilizational position, Bull was drawn to perspectives from beyond Europe. It was during this period that he first began reading and then admiring the work of Ali Mazrui (Miller 1990, 65).
The most visible moment of convergence between Hedley Bull and Ali Mazrui occurred when Bull recommended Mazrui for the Dyason Lectures—Australia’s most prestigious political science lecture series. The invitation reached Mazrui at Makerere in 1970 and effectively placed him on the same platform once occupied by Bertrand Russell and Arnold Toynbee. The 1972 lecture tour was a sensation. Mazrui’s eloquence, his dramatic pacing, and his ease in moving between poetry, geopolitics, and moral philosophy captivated audiences. Newspapers across Australia reacted with a mix of curiosity and admiration. For Australians, Mazrui embodied a cosmopolitan Africa not yet familiar in global discourse; for Mazrui, Australia represented a society interrogating its own identity in the shadows of empire. (Mazrui Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Accessed on 13 August 2019.)
Parallel to these engagements was the shared connection of the two scholars to the World Order Models Project. WOMP—led by Richard Falk, Johan Galtung, Saul Mendlovitz, and others—sought to imagine more humane futures for world politics. Mazrui was one of its global members; Bull was not formally part of the network but read its materials with fascination. Bull admired Mazrui’s ambition even when he questioned his prescriptions, as Bull (1977, 74) acknowledged in his The Anarchical Society:
Professor Mazrui [was] one of the few contemporary writers on international relations to have thought deeply about [the question of justice and order in the world community].
Mazrui, by contrast, found in WOMP a community of global intellectuals grappling with questions that IR was systematically avoiding: the structural violence of global inequality, the moral foundations of world order, and the possibilities of alternative modernities. Their mutual engagement with WOMP highlighted a shared genealogy—Oxford pluralism and a respect for normative reasoning. But the seeds of divergence were also germinating. By the late 1970s, Mazrui had become one of the most influential African voices in global scholarship. His work did not fit neatly into IR, comparative politics, or political philosophy—it blended all three. This very hybridity made him indispensable at a moment when the Global South was demanding intellectual recognition.
Bull (1978) described Mazrui as:
…Not only the most distinguished writer to have emerged from independent Black Africa, and the most penetrating and discriminating expositor of the ideology of the Third World, but he is also a most illuminating interpreter of the drift of world politics.
Such praise was more than generosity. It reflected the fact that Mazrui, more than almost any scholar of his generation, was articulating the emotional temperature of North–South relations. With the publication of his A World Federation of Cultures (1976), Mazrui attempted nothing less than a moral architecture for global coexistence. The book argued that cultures were not static containers but dynamic reservoirs of ethical imagination. Where many saw culture as a source of conflict, Mazrui (1976: 497) saw the possibility of cultural interdependence; he viewed culture as a means of rebalancing global power through what he called cultural ecumenicalism, which combines a pool of shared values globally and pools of distinctive traditions. This was a strikingly early contribution to the Global IR, which is so prominent today, but was only embryonic in the 1970s. The discipline’s temporary receptivity to Mazrui was partly structural. The oil shocks of 1973–74, the New International Economic Order debates, and the assertiveness of the Non-Aligned Movement created a brief moment in which IR’s Western core could not avoid the political demands of the Global South.
Mazrui’s writings became bridges across these geopolitical divides. He offered Western scholars a conceptual window into the grievances and aspirations of postcolonial states, and he provided Global South intellectuals with a language that connected their lived experiences to global debates. For Bull and others in the English School, Mazrui’s contributions filled a gap in their own frameworks. If “international society” were truly a global institution, its moral vocabulary had to be expanded beyond Europe. The first cracks in the Mazrui–IR relationship appeared not in theory but in temperament. Mazrui believed that IR could not be morally neutral—too much of the postcolonial world was still living the consequences of imperial power. The external manifestations of how Mazrui’s relationship with Bull eventually soured symbolized the emerging “paradigm shift” in the mainstream discipline and its consequences. Mazrui put it thus:
Hedley Bull thought that I carried my anti-imperialism too far at a conference in Britain which addressed international issues in connection with American hostages held in revolutionary Iran in the late 1970s. In my speech, I argued that it was a change that Americans were hostages. Most of the time, the United States held much of the world hostage to what Americans regarded as their national interest. I spoke with passion, and at one stage, I stopped speaking in a struggle to hold back my tears and prevent a breakdown. After questions and answers, Hedley Bull came to the front and said to me with a twinkle in his eye, ‘You are quite mad!’ (Author’s correspondence with Ali Mazrui, 29 January 2010).
The exchange captured a more profound truth: Mazrui’s refusal to suppress the emotional wounds of world politics increasingly clashed with IR’s aspiration toward methodological detachment. From the late 1970s onward, IR in the US began a decisive turn toward behavioralism, quantification, and positivist methodology. The classical approaches Bull defended were losing ground. IR was redefining rigor in terms of model-building and hypothesis testing, not philosophical reflection or cultural analysis. Mazrui’s work—rich in metaphor, historical analogy, and moral argument—was rendered “unscientific” by these new standards. What had once been a strength became a liability. Mazrui was disappointed that he was viewed as the methodological ‘Other’ by, in Mazrui’s (1974, 67-71) own words,
…The different shades of behavioralists in the Western world…who believe that political science ought not to include normative and value preoccupations.
As the Cold War intensified and later wound down, IR’s attention shifted back to great-power politics. The lived experiences of the postcolonial world became analytically invisible. IR re-centered itself around the concerns of the powerful. For Mazrui, who insisted that Africa and the Third World were not marginal but central to global morality, this disciplinary shift was devastating. The very questions he believed were essential—the moral costs of hierarchy, the cultural dimensions of governance, the politics of global inequality—fell outside the discipline’s new focus. Mazrui’s metaphor of the international system as a caste system—where upward mobility for poorer states was largely illusory—directly challenged IR’s optimistic narratives of modernization, development, and institutional progress. It was a critique too sharp, too unsettling, for a discipline seeking scientific neutrality. Mazrui’s intellectual dissent, combined with his interdisciplinarity, pushed him to the disciplinary margins (Waever 1997, 4; Waever 1998, 687-727). This was not because his ideas were exhausted, but it was because IR’s imagination had narrowed.
Hedley Bull died prematurely in 1985 at the age of 53. Bull’s death closed a chapter in the intellectual relations between Africa and the English School—a relationship that might have evolved differently had he lived longer. Bull had served as a bridge between Mazrui and the discipline’s mainstream; with Bull gone, IR’s movement toward positivism accelerated, with little meaningful internal resistance. Mazrui lived almost three more decades, writing prolifically and influencing debates across literature, cultural studies, African politics, and comparative civilizational analysis. But his presence in the mainstream IR discipline gradually faded. The story of Mazrui and Bull sheds light on the discipline’s unresolved struggle with epistemic inclusion. IR has long oscillated between moments of global openness and periods of parochialism. Mazrui’s rise coincided with a rare moment of disciplinary receptivity. His decline mirrored the discipline’s retreat from its global experiment. Bull’s insistence that order and justice must be analyzed together resonated deeply with Mazrui’s view that global order is incomplete without cultural recognition and historical redress. Their dialogue, even when incomplete, warns against IR’s periodic temptation to privilege stability over justice and continuity over change. Mazrui’s marginalization now appears less a reflection of intellectual weakness than of disciplinary blind spots.
In the 21st century, many of Mazrui’s disquieting questions have returned to the center of global politics:
- How do civilizational identities shape global order?
- Can global governance be legitimate without cultural pluralism?
- What moral vocabulary is adequate for confronting global inequality?
- Can IR escape its Eurocentric foundations?
The intellectual relationship between Ali Mazrui and Hedley Bull remains one of the most instructive cross-civilizational dialogues in the history of IR. Their convergence in the 1970s signaled a rare moment when the discipline opened itself to global perspectives. Their divergence in the 1980s reflected IR’s return to its insularity. If Mazrui declined, it was because the discipline turned inward—shielding itself from the questions he believed were central to the human condition. If he rose, it was because he spoke to the universal—even when speaking from the margins. The story of Mazrui in IR is not merely the biography of a scholar. It is the story of the discipline’s shifting conscience: its flirtations with cosmopolitanism, its recurrent temptation to retreat into methodological narrowness, and its unresolved debate over whose experiences count as the foundation of world politics. The parallel lives of Hedley Bull and Ali Mazrui illuminate a larger truth: that IR’s intellectual geography expands only when it is willing to listen to the voices it once relegated to the periphery.
References
Bull, Hedley. 1966. “International Theory: The Case for a Classical Approach.” World Politics 18: 361–77.
1977. The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press.
1978 “Review in Times Literary Supplement, December 1.” Quoted in Ali A. Mazrui (undated), Extracts from Reviews of Writings. Unpublished Manuscript, Institute of Global Cultural Studies, Binghamton University, New York.
Mazrui, Ali A. 1963a. “On the Concept of ‘We Are All Africans’.” American Political Science Review 57: 88–97.
1963b. The United Nations and Some African Political Attitudes. International Organization 18 (3): 499–520.
1963c. “African Attitudes to the European Economic Community.” International Affairs 39 (1): 24–36.
1967a. Toward a Pax Africana: A Study of Ideology and Ambition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1967b. The Anglo-African Commonwealth: Political Friction and Cultural Fusion. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
1967c. “Numerical Strength and Nuclear Status in the Politics of the Third World.” The Journal of Politics 29: 791–820.
1974. “Africa, My Conscience and I.” Transition 46: 67–71.
1976. A World Federation of Cultures. New York: The Free Press.. Ali Mazrui Newsletter. University of Jos, Nigeria.. “Growing Up in a Shrinking World: A Private Vantage Point.” In Journeys Through
World Politics: Autobiographical Reflections of Thirty-four Academic Travelers, edited by Joseph Kruzel and James N. Rosenau. Lexington, MA and Toronto: Lexington Books.
Miller, J. D. B. 1990. “The Third World.” In Order and Violence: Hedley Bull and International Relations, edited by J. D. B. Miller and R. J. Vincent. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wæver, Ole. 1997. “Figures of International Thought: Introducing Persons Instead of Paradigms.” In The Future of International Relations: Masters in the Making, edited by Iver B. Neumann and Ole Wæver. London and New York: Routledge.
1998. “The Sociology of a Not So International Discipline: American and European Developments in International Relations.” International Organization 52: 687–727.
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