Seminars Series: Abstract

3.30pm
September 11 2009
Seminar Room 1.03, Ground Floor, Hedley Bull Centre, Bldg # 130, Garran Road

Hedley Bull and the Accommodation of Power
Dr Robert Ayson, Senior Fellow and Director of the Graduate Studies in Strategy and Defence (Masters) Program in the SDSC

The work of Hedley Bull (1932-85) remains pivotal in contemporary thinking about international politics and strategic problems. After university studies at Sydney and Oxford, Bull gained his first academic position in 1955 with the London School of Economics. After two years with the Foreign Office in the mid-1960s he returned to Australia to take up a new chair established by The Australian National University (ANU) in the Department of International Relations. In 1977 he was appointed Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford University. Bull is best known for his seminal text The Anarchical Society, and his influential writings cover an array of issues from nuclear arms control to the Asian strategic balance and Australian defence policy to questions of international justice. ANU has created a position and scholarships in his honour, and recently named a new building after him.

In this seminar, Dr Ayson will argue that the abiding issue in Bull’s work is the need for major changes in the distribution of world power to be intelligently accommodated. He will suggest that the approach Bull develops here appears to be most complete where one might least expect it. Bull’s work on strategic questions in the 1960s and early 1970s, for example, deserves rather more attention than it often receives, not least because the questions raised there have genuine salience for how we might approach the changing distribution of world power which is taking place today in the Asian century