What the English School Gets Right About the World

Power and justice. Robert Schuett argues that English School thinking isn’t nostalgia - It's probably the most essential toolkit for making international society work (again).

When I moved from the seminar rooms to the policy rooms, and returned from the secure conference calls of foreign and security policy back to the university lecture hall, I carried with me a persistent disquiet. Something about the way international relations is still being taught, and the way foreign policy is actually made, feels profoundly disconnected. Offensive realism, at best, offers a partial view.

For more than a decade, I worked in the analytical core of military intelligence, with a focus on great power politics. In that world, one is trained to see the world through a realist lens: capabilities, interests, force postures, deterrence dynamics. And rightly so. Power matters, and the language of strategic analysis demands clarity, not sentiment.

But the more time I spent in that realm, the more I came to feel that something was missing. It wasn’t that realism was entirely wrong—it simply wasn’t complete.

Even at the heart of national security and global policy, one is constantly confronted with concepts that realism can’t quite explain: legitimacy, norms, responsibility, reputation, prestige, restraint. These are not rhetorical flourishes; they are operational considerations. That has led me, slowly but surely, back to the depths of international relations (IR) theory. And that journey has eventually brought me—back—to the English School.

Today, in an era of geopolitical competition, fractured institutions, and contested norms and values, I believe the English School is not just a useful scholarly IR framework—it is the most realistic theory we have. It tells the truth about power, but also about the rules, institutions, and shared understandings that shape how power is exercised, justified, and restrained.

My experience in intelligence gave me a deep respect for realism. No serious practitioner can afford to ignore the material realities of force and coercion. But realism alone does not account for how states interpret those realities, or why they often act in ways that defy narrow cost-benefit logic. Why do some states honor treaties even when it’s inconvenient? Why do others seek multilateral cover for unilateral moves? Why do norms shape behaviour even when they cannot be enforced?

These and other questions led me toward the English School’s central insight: that the global order is not merely an anarchy of power, but a society of states—a society that is often fragile, frequently contested, but no less real for that. In this view, power and norms are not opposites. They are interdependent. The international order is held together not only by deterrence, but by shared institutions: sovereignty, diplomacy, law, markets, and the balance of power itself. These institutions endure not because they are ideal, but because they are necessary.

Legitimacy is a form of power, and one that practitioners understand instinctively, even if they rarely theorize it. The English School provides that theory. It treats institutions not merely as formal mechanisms, but as normative structures that enable states to coexist. Sovereignty is not a legal relic; it is a shared understanding of political authority. Diplomacy is not ceremony; it is an institution for managing conflict without war. International law may not be enforceable in the conventional sense, but it shapes expectations, legitimates claims, and—at times—restrains action.

These aren’t liberal hopes. They are hard-nosed facts of international society. And the English School is unique in its ability to explain them without sentimentality.

In today’s world, the global order is neither collapsing nor stable; it is being renegotiated. The war in Ukraine, the rise of China, the assertiveness of regional powers, and the demands of the Global South: these developments are not just shifts in material power; they are challenges to the normative architecture of the very system—that is, international society.

And yet, that architecture endures. States still appeal to international law. They still invoke norms of non-intervention, even as they bend them. They still pursue recognition, legitimacy, and moral authority—at least some do. And that’s based on strategic choice, not because they are compelled by some invisible hand or ahistorical structure.

The English School equips us to make sense of this. It understands that order and justice are in tension, that pluralism and solidarism compete, and that global society is always evolving, but not disappearing.

From my position straddling two worlds, I’ve come to see that theory and practice are not opposites; they are mirrors. In the field, I observed how states signal, justify, and restrain. As a scholar, I try to make sense of how those patterns emerge and persist.

Too much IR scholarship either reduces the world to models or loses it in abstraction. Too much policy work either dismisses theory or misuses it. The English School offers a bridge: it connects power and principle, fact and norm, practice and theory.

It is not naïve. It does not deny war or power politics. But it reminds us that states do not only act. They perform. They justify. They appeal. They seek recognition. Even in war, at least most states invoke norms. Even when violating them, they tend to explain why.

This, to me, is not idealism. It is strategic realism of the most sophisticated kind.

If international relations were only about hard power, then perhaps a narrow realism would suffice. But they are not. Power is real, but so are the shared understandings that govern its use. Norms evolve, institutions shift, and international society fractures and reforms. But it remains.

That is why the English School is the most realistic theory available. Not because it denies conflict, but because it sees both the violence and the structure, both the anarchy and the order, both the interest and the idea.

States sometimes agree. Oftentimes they don’t. And then there is tension, friction—and sometimes war. The English School does not flinch from this. But it also helps us see how we get back from the brink, how societies of states rebuild norms after they collapse, and how international life continues—even in disorder.

My academic path reinforced what my professional experience had begun to suggest. I did my MA and PhD at Durham University, supervised by English School theorist John C. Williams, and examined by Professor Emeritus Richard Little of Bristol University, who, two decades ago, wrote a fine piece on the potential meeting ground between the English School and classical realism. That intersection—between power and legitimacy, interests and ethics, force and understanding—is, I believe, where the most important thinking is needed today.

We live in a world of competing power centres, competing value systems, and competing visions of order. In such a world, we do not need a theory of utopia, nor a theory of despair. We need a theory that helps us navigate the grey (or colourful) space in between—where diplomacy, legitimacy, coercion, and persuasion coexist in uneasy tension (as they always have).

That is what the English School provides. It is not the theory of yesterday. It is the theory for today, and quite possibly for the stormy years ahead. We neglect its insights at our peril.

Robert Schuett is co-founder and managing partner at STK Powerhouse, a global risk advisory firm. A former Defence civil servant, he also serves as Chairman of the Austrian Political Science Association and is a long-standing Honorary Fellow at Durham University.

Photo by Mike Bird