This article examines the relationship between the International Studies Conference (ISC), the question of peaceful change, and the study of international relations (IR) in the United States. It argues that the prewar and wartime years constituted a pivotal moment in the disciplinary history of American International Relations, particularly in terms of the transformation of the field from prewar international studies into postwar IR; and that the ISC and its American committee offer a valuable vantage point for observing the dynamics and stakes involved in this transformation. The growing urgency of peaceful change during the 1930s imbued the ISC and its American committee with unprecedented significance for U.S. scholars in the field, promoting in the process a framework for international studies that favoured international and interdisciplinary collaboration as well as multi-conceptual perspectives. Disappointment with the results of ISC deliberations on peaceful change, however, undermined the ISC-associated framework, boosting in the process another framework centred in and on the United States as well as on ‘power politics’. The growing ascendency of this second framework would mark IR in the United States, providing fertile terrain for the postwar emergence of realism.

This article contributes to the critical historical research that has demythologised the ‘noble origins’ of the International Relations discipline (IR) by exposing its imperial, colonial, and racist legacies. Where most critical historiographies have unveiled the centrality of racialised and imperialist ontologies in individual thinkers and theories, this article traces imperialist origins of international thought by reconstructing its impact on administrative-institutional infrastructures. Specifically, it interrogates the most systematic and institutionalised attempt to define the ‘subject matter’ of IR under the International Studies Conference (ISC) organised by the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC) of the League of Nations. Through a parallel reading of the archives from ISC's ‘administrative meetings’ and ‘study meetings’, the article contends that the seemingly academic discussions on the subject matter of IR in the ‘administrative meetings’ were in fact intertwined with the imperialist-colonial politics central to ‘study meetings’. The article thus not only challenges IR's conventional history, but its historical ontologies by revealing how race and empire were central to the constitution of its very subject matter and its early institutionalisation.